what I meant to say was...

I had a big post done about CEII but it turned into something else I didn't want to get into right now.

So...here we go again.
CEII was amazing. It was, in fact, probably one of the best experiences of my life. I rode a 5 day high of delight and excitement that I swear I have not experienced since I was a whole lot younger than my current jaded old self. Trying to figure out why this was exactly I go off on all sorts of tangents and really it's like trying to explain the meaning of life to a rock...or something.

I think the combination of meeting extraordinary people who all share the common love of Star Wars and geeky stuff along with the fact that it was a HUGE event plus some rather extraordinarily unexpected wonders that happened which made it special. I'm going to leave it at that.

packed and ready to go!

Day 1 Thursday:

Having spent the day before packing and sewing I wanted to get on the go early. This did not happen as we had last minute shopping stuff to do and Himself needed a hair cut. We left the house around 1 ish and off we went to Essen. I grumbled a bit because I wanted to be there a bit earlier but no matter. The trip down was easy. We missed all the staus and the bad weather. It was fun getting Facebook pms as updates from our friend Claus and before we knew it we were at our hotel. The Ruhr Hotel Essen.

almost there...not quite...

 
This is a smallish ( around 40 rooms) family run hotel around 15 minutes walk from the convention centre. Checking in was funny because the first thing that was commented on was that we were the people who couldn't decide how long we wanted to stay for. Ha ha. 1st we'd only booked  Friday Saturday, the weekend, then we added Sunday night then realized on Wednesday that we'd forgotten about staying on Thursday, luckily for us they had room still open for Thursday night. They made sure we got the same room all the way through in spite of the 3 x we booked. Super friendly doesn't begin to cover it. The room we had was spacious and in the back of the hotel. #23. All the while this is going on people we know are also showing up. It was a huge reunion in the hotel lobby much to the amusement of the staff.

After all the back and forth, the walking to find the convention centre we headed out, wearing the appropriate t-shirts ( a must) to the brauerei pub where the meet and greet was to take place. This pub, as a nice as it was, needed serious lessons from a Munich beer garden. The service was pretty abysmal, they were totally under staffed and they, even though they had been warned,  had no idea how to cope with the mass of people that showed up. Dudes, the 501st and the Rebel Legion + friends are huge. But this was the case, it turned out, for pretty well the whole area around the Messe. No one expected the 501st, the RL the droid builders etc... we are legion and far too many for all the local eateries.

The meet and greet was great. So many familiar faces and a lot of new ones. I stepped way out of my shy zone and bounced about like Tigger on uppers. I was so hyper and excited. It was fun and silly and I got to talk to new people, meet new people and probably scared new people who were wondering who was the crazy red head and why is she talking to me....But really it was cool to actually get up the nerve to openly say Hi I'm Fiona who are you... and start from there. I saw people who really didn't know many people and they looked a bit lost. I know and remember what that feels like. For me, at least, this was a great way to meet new friends. You can usually tell after a few seconds if people don't want to engage and then you say nice to meet you and move along.

the meet and greet!

The pub just couldn't handle people standing around and not sitting at the table. They stopped giving bar service because ..well I don't know why actually.... and would only serve you if you were attached to a table.  We managed to get 1 beer order in and then given the state of the service added a second one which much to Marcus' chagrin came fairly quickly so he was left holding two beers as I still had not finished my first one. This was okay tho because it meant when our friend Jasmine arrived and was sad-panda-face because she wanted a cold drink and it was impossible I could gladly give her the beer meant for me. We rescued her with beer...this is a good German tradition I think. Anything for a squad mate! After a few hours of non-existent service and only1 beer we skipped across the street to a very nice Italian place and ate with our Swiss Garrison Friends. This was one of the only places ( also the sushi place) that did not run out of food and still managed to serve it in a decent time frame.) After food we went back to the pub and just mingled.

All 4 of my Tusken husbands were there so we took a silly picture.

Tusken husbands #1,#2,#3,and #4

Cards were traded, patches were swapped, stories were told and the excitement ramped up a notch for the big day tomorrow.  I think we wandered off at around midnight-ish, because it was very warm and we were kind of tired and tomorrow was going to be pretty busy.

Back at the hotel we settled in to sleep but not before I set up the fan we'd brought with us...a trick we had stolen from the people sleeping in the room across from us at DW20 and boy were we glad I had done this. Essen was in full on heat wave and the lovely hotel did not have A/C.

Aaahhhhhhhhhhh!

Day 2: TBC....

The Gender game.

For a little while now there has been a growing push of people, mainly women who are discussing on twitter and through blogs the issue of gender in science fiction / fantasy mainly focused on Star Wars.
 It started here The GFFA Needs Women: The Disappointing Nomi Cancellation in a post by Nanci, then Chris wrote his rebuttal: EU Action/Reaction: Let’s Stop Thinking About Gender 
This post from Club Jade says it very well. Why do we want more women highlighted in the Expanded Universe?  And so does Tosche Station Why Star Wars Needs Women – Now More Than Ever.

One of my Twitter friends asked why women were so mad at the moment, well I think partly the post from Chris over at the EUC didn't really help matters and also I think that we're seeing several things collide at once not the least of which is probably a subconscious push against the misogynistic tendencies going on the e USA at the moment. There's a war on women and it's spilling out onto the streets ( but that's another post for another time)  

Does the Star Wars franchise need more strong female characters? Yes I think it does. While one can argue that SW is full of women, for the most part, as characters, they are not treated very well nor are they, as characters, written very well either and this is part of the problem.

Yesterday, when asked to pick out a strong female character in the scifi / fantasy world the 1st person that came to mind was Ellen Ripley. She is the standard by which I personally set the bar by. After that Zoe and Inara from Firefly also came to mind, both incredibly strong characters but for vastly different reasons. Olivia from Fringe, and let's not forget to mention half the cast of BattleStar Galactica. There is a wealth of strong female characters in today's sci fi, movie and tv. Women who are tough, smart, sassy, vulnerable, emotional and essentially human and very believable. And this is the point. Many of the female characters in Star Wars are two dimensional and personally I don't give a rat's ass about them, although in all honesty I feel the same way about many of the male characters in SW as well.

So I thought about this a lot and I think the issue is not so much a lack of female characters, because there are actually quite a few in the SW universe, but rather the incredible lack of really good writing. I've touched on this before but I think it bears saying again. Most of the SWEU books I've read are crap. While reading the NJO ( the new jedi order series in which an entirely alien and brand new to the SW universe bad guys set out to destroy all) I had to restrain myself from having a  good old fashioned book burning.   Honestly I've never read a worse set of books. There were one or two exceptions to this ( Matt Stover being the one that comes to mind) but for the most part I wanted to toss the set out the window. Waste of money. Why? Because they were awful. Bad plots, terrible and unbelievable dialogue and for the most part boring as hell. Evil bad guys vs out numbered jedi yeah what ever... And don't get me started on the Killik series which featured giant bugs and a bunch of the stupidest ideas I've ever read - ever. ( even worse than the NJO)

Well here's the thing. I find that Star Wars in general as of late has become a great deal about merchandising and tie ins and less about story and substance. ( in many but not all cases) It's a money maker. I get that, it's a business and it needs to make money. If something has the lable Star Wars slapped on it people WILL lap it up like cats at a cream bowl. I've seen people buy anything you can think of just because it's SW related. The same goes with books. People are so desperate for anything Star Wars related many don't care and or don't notice how badly done so much of it is, especially in novels.

Now there's a rising vocal group who want more. We clamour for well written books. Well thought out, in depth, clever plots with characters we can identify with, male and female. No more rehash of the movies, no more recycling the movie lines. Let's have more thought provoking situations with complex adversaries not some variation of keystone cops and overly empowered super jedi with some gratuitous harlequin romance thrown in for good measure.

When I wrote my fanfic I did so because, honestly, this was the book I really wanted to read. Something where the Imperials were not all mustachio twirling idiot megalomaniacs hell bent on destroying the universe before letting it fall into the hands of the enemy. ( Isard and her stupid plan to poison Courescant...really? Come on.) I wanted characters I could love and hate. People I wanted to hang out with and be friends with or shoot. These are the reactions I should get when reading books. Good, well written books make you feel. You fall in love, you feel pain, you learn to hate a little, you clamour for revenge and so on. You go on a ride along and if the book is really good, for a short time you're totally transported to another time and place. You should not be aware you're reading a book because you have been transported into the book instead.

Why is it that a single jedi can slaughter an entire battalion of battle droids and not get a single scorch on him. What is the point of all these super battle droids if they can't hit their mark at least once? Maul comes back as mechno man? Plot holes as big as the Atlantic and more all add up to YAWN as far as story telling is concerned.  What made Palpatine such a great bad guy is he WAS clever and evil and luckily for us portrayed by Ian McDiarmid in such a way that every time he was on screen he game me goosebumps and not in any good way.  Palpatine was evil, clever and subtle. In this respect we were shown not told.

There are a lot of awesome things about Star Wars and I love it in spite of its failings but I think there is a lot of room to improve and grow. So let's set aside all the weird gender issues. Star Wars is not just for boys and finding some great writers who would be willing to create or write really well rounded believable female characters in books with decent plots and worthy adversaries would go along way to helping this.

What if... ( a rant about Star wars books)

@Tosche_Station (twitter) asked the twitterverse what #SWEU books would we love to see. You can check out the page with some of the answers here: https://t.co/vCEsTCnS 

But it got me thinking about Star Wars books in general. First off I have to admit that I stopped reading most SW novels after I finished the NJO. It sucked. Sorry to all who loved that series but I didn't. In fact with the exception of 1 book (Matthew Stover's Traitor )I don't even remember most of what was written although I do recall wanting to toss at least one of the books in the series out the hotel window I was staying at when I was reading it, I couldn't actually tell you which book that was now. My biggest problem with it all, I think, was that it was essentially a huge rehash of the original movie stories with a larger than life set of bad dudes and a whole bunch of lightsaber waving. I'll probably have to re read it because everything deserves a 2nd chance.

I'm a hellishly picky reader. I LOVE to read but I find that I get bounced out of books easily when author intrusion or just bad writing ensues. If I read a book and find myself going...eh hang on a sec that's not right.... then for me this is NOT a well written book and in the star wars universe of books this happens A LOT.

I don't really care much for the Jedi of today. When Star wars first came out they were mysterious and magical, they had powers but were not supermen/ women in bathrobes. Now we have it all explained, the force is actually microscopic beings that invade  symbiotically live inside a person's body. Midichlorians . When this tidbit of info was dished out during The Phantom Menace I remember sitting there going wtf? Really? To this day I do not really get why we needed an explanation at all. People believe in a form of God every day and as far as I know there's still no actual proof he /she/it /they exist but we still believe. But I guess George felt an explanation was important so we got one. meh.

(where was I ...oh yeah jedi...and books)

This universe, this Star Wars universe is vast and full of very cool characters most of which get bit parts and maybe one or two lines then exit stage left or worse get offed so that the holy three and their offspring get to live another day. ( Unless your name is Anakin then you're screwed)  Yet repeatedly we see the same characters doing the same things over and over again. I read the reviews of the new books that come out and I am glad I don't spend any more money on them. One of the few ( I thought) cool stand alone books that came out, Tatooine Ghost was referred to by the author as chick lit, why? Because it was a predominantly Leia oriented story, charcter driven, not so much warfare and shooting and had more than just a hit of romance in it.  My mind kind of boggled at this. Club Jade does a nice write up here about the whole thing and says it better than what I can about how I feel about the whole deal.

Really if a SW book features a mostly female and or character oriented story it's chick lit? How dismissive and narrow minded. As a woman, I don't need a book full of "I love yous" although George did see fit to put a bunch of this soppy puppy love BS in the prequel films, but I get insanely tired of war, conflict, lightsaber waving super jedi. And don't get me started on the whole giant bug theme. Tell me a story do not give me a giant blow by blow narrative on war.

What I wanted in Star Wars books I could not find ( so I wrote my own - a whole other blog that is). I wanted well rounded, meaningful stories about people. Real people. I wanted to see all sides of the galaxy not just the all Imperials are stupid, evil or maniacal mustachio twirlers ( Thrawn being mostly the exception). I want to read about non jedi characters and their lives and how they entwine through the already established galaxy. Give me a full on book about Soontir Fel and Syal Antilles.  What an amazing love story that is, what an amazing war story that is as well. combine it in a well written, thoughtful manner I'd buy it in a heart beat.

I am so tired of all the clichés. Watching all 4 seasons of TCW back to back is a form of hell. Really who the fuck writes this stuff? The stories are on occasion okay but the dialogue is PAINFUL.  My husband's theory is that it's actually a computer programmed with all the movie dialogues and it just randomly spits out a script on a weekly basis using only these lines. Now, when we watch it, we play a drinking game with having to take a drink every time a character utters a line from the original films. Thank god we are drinking water or else we'd be in a hospital suffering from alcohol poisoning.

So yes I have more than a few ideas about what I'd love to read / see in the star wars world of books etc... I want character driven stories that are well written and make sense.  I want strong female leads that don't wind up marrying or becoming a jedi only to be killed off because they are expendable.

Some of the best stories are actually to be found in the comics, along with some of the coolest characters as well. I'm trying to track down the Omnibus collections now since that seems to be one of the best ways to collect them all. And as for the books well, I'll borrow them from friends I guess, because I'm loath to support something I think has been turned into nothing more than a money making machine with no thought towards what the fans really want.

So my last words to all the Lucas Arts peeps out there if you are listening is dare to be different. Take a chance on new authors and new stories that break the mold. Step away from the same old- same old, cast of thousands, super jedi waving light sabers muttering about their bad feelings.

I'm looking forward to see what Timothy Zahn does with his new stand alone Han Solo novel but as for the rest...it doesn't look promising but as a die hard Star Wars fan I keep hoping.