the Dalaverse

As you've probably noticed, I haven't been feeling much in the way of PotC fannishness lately. It does make me sad. However, this summer I've been going through a sort of nostalgia for my first, and in some ways best beloved, fandom. Allow me, friends, to tell you a little story.

It was early 1997. I was not quite twelve, in sixth grade, and my awkward, geeky, unhappy middle school years were in full swing (most people look back on high school with a shudder, but for me it was middle school). An issue of Disney Adventures magazine, of which I was an avid reader, informed me that they were about to re-release the Star Wars Trilogy for its twentieth anniversary. I specifically remember an article where they described how they cleaned up the original film (using a still from the opening sequence onboard the Rebel ship in ANH, not that I knew this at the time), and another with the most obvious gaffes from the whole trilogy (Mark Hamill yelling 'Carrie!' as he jumps down from his X-wing is still one of my favorite things in all cinema). Somehow I had not managed in nearly a dozen years of life to see these movies, although I knew who the characters were and that Darth Vader was Luke and Leia's dad (and oddly enough, I watched 'Space Balls' all the time as a kid because it was my cousin Michael's favorite movie). I thought hey, this looks interesting, and my dad took me to see ANH in the theater.

The first bombastic note crashed in my eardrums, and the title flashed onto the big screen, and the crawl went off into nowhere, and the Star Destroyer started its slow journey through space and seemed to go on forever...and I was hooked.

For a couple of years I lived and breathed Star Wars like only an adolescent can. I put up posters in my room - they're still there, in fact. Two of them are on the ceiling so the last thing I see before I go to sleep at night is All I Need to Know About Life I Learned From Star Wars (SO TRUE). I rented the old versions before the Special Editions came out on video. I discovered that there were books written about Luke, Han and Leia, and raided the local library accordingly. My first meeting with one of my best friends went like this: 'You like Star Wars? I like Star Wars!'

One day that summer I tagged along while my dad did some lesson planning, and on his work computer with THEINTERNETOMG...I discovered fan fiction. It was the old fanfix.com archive, and I thought I'd died and gone to Corellia. About an hour after I discovered fanfic, I discovered slash - there was one solitary story about Luke falling in love with a guy named Justin. I didn't go 'blech' so much at the male/male content as at the idea of a guy being named Justin in SW, although it didn't interest me at the time. And that was because I wanted to find Luke-centric het.

Yes, I plead guilty to being a total Luke Skywalker fangirl. I loved all the characters, don't get me wrong, but it was Luke around whom all my fantasies revolved. Just yesterday I was cleaning out my desk drawers for the first time in - well, ever, and I found some old journals and pages printed out from our ancient Apple II (still attached together, with the holey pieces on the sides). Honestly, y'all, I did not not even remember writing this awful, terrible fic back in the day. I remembered making up a Mary Sue for Obi-wan when TPM came out (her name was Asaya, and she had red hair and purple eyes), but I had somehow managed to block the Luke stuff from my memory. I'm not even gonna post it for the lulz, although I'm glad I found it. Anyway, my point is that I was absolutely in love with Luke Skywalker even though he could be a big old whiner, and even though I knew Han was so much cooler. It probably just comes down to the fact that Luke didn't have a steady girlfriend for twenty-odd years, whereas anyone attempting to separate Han from Leia would've immediately gotten me to hit the back button. (As a side note, I discovered twincest on my first foray into fanfiction.net, and also PWP in a story about Qui-gon and Jar Jar's tongue that is still indelibly, painfully burned into my brain.)

My ardor was at its height when I finally saw TPM at the Uptown in 1999, which in case you don't know is the best movie theater in DC and possibly the world. I clipped magazine articles, I bought a couple of action figures even though I didn't like action figures, and I distinctly remember recording the world premiere of the trailer and watching it eighty-four thousand times. By the time AotC came out three years later, the first blush and full bloom had ended, and my fannish love had been transmuted first to 'X-Men' and then HP (neither of these unions was nearly as fruitful or passionate as my affair with PotC, but they were important to fannish development nonetheless). I was at a point where I could admit that the movie kind of sucked, and I had abandoned the novels back at the first NJO book, Vector Prime.

Cut to summer 2008. For some reason I feel very SW-motivated again, and it pops into my head to reread some of my novels. My reading was piecemeal back in the day, based on whatever the library had in stock and my own small collection: the novelizations of the OT, Shadow of the Empire, the Thrawn trilogy, the newer Han Solo trilogy, the Children of the Jedi trilogy (which I had to own because hello, Lukemance), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, the first two PT novelizations, Vision of the Future (which blew my fragile little Luke-loving mind), Vector Prime and the first edition of the Star Wars Encyclopedia (a big Christmas gift that year). Oh, and the first six or seven of the Young Jedi Academy series. Naturally, I picked up Timothy Zahn's trilogy first - I remembered it as being the best of the lot, and I wanted to see if I was remembering right.

And then I thought - what if I read all the others? The ones I missed in the old Bantam line, and the NJO I'd given up on, and whatever came after? So I sat down for a couple of hours and made a shopping list.

I don't regret starting with Heir to the Empire, because it is indeed quite excellent. But after that I wanted to start from the beginning - convenient because I have AC Crispin's Han Solo novels already. In the past few weeks I've acquired the Brian Daley trilogy, Tim Zahn's Allegiance (and how excited am I about that?), The Truce at Bakura and The Courtship of Princess Leia. And now, before I really get into this rather massive project, I will share my exceptionally tarnished memory of the books I did manage to read as an impressionable young thing.

The Truce at Bakura: there's a page in one of my journals where I obsess over the picture of Luke on the cover, and the only thing I really remember is Gaeriel Captison. It takes place like two hours after RotJ, and there are aliens...?

The Courtship of Princess Leia: this one takes place on Hapes, where a prince tries to marry Leia. I distinctly remember a scene where Han is trying to get a giant worm or something out of the ground, and the people are all shouting 'Wuff! Wuff! Wuffa!' and it is stupid. Also, it has yet another failed Lukemance. The library's copy had the cover with Leia dressed up in Sarah's fluffy white dress from "Labyrinth," but I managed to buy the one with a RotJ image of her in camo.

The Crystal Star: I remember this as being one of the crackier ones and yet one of my favorites. The twins get kidnapped by some dude and are actually kind of cool. Then Leia disguises herself as a bounty hunter and goes after them with Chewie, which was really cool. I remember a scene where she's putting on makeup and dyeing her hair and Chewie's all mystified, and she goes, 'What, you think my eyelids naturally look like this?' I have no idea what Luke and Han were off doing, except that the Luke characterization sucked and he was being an angsty freak about it.

The Jedi Academy trilogy: I disliked Kevin J. Anderson so very much. It'll be interesting to see if I still do. Luke starts the Jedi Academy, duh; the kids are off on that secret planet that is so incredibly stupid I can't even talk about it; is this the one with the new Death Star? I remember Luke goes into a Force coma at some point. I fucking hated Kyp Durron although now I can't remember why, and I also hated Qwi Xux - wasn't she Wedge's girlfriend? With pink hair, who had some kind of stupid issues and was afraid of a bunch of stuff? I remember my hatred a lot better than I remember the actual plot.

Children of the Jedi/Darksaber/Planet of Twilight: Luke meets a ghost named Callista and falls in love with her, then one of his students gives up her body so Callista can live again, then they're together but they break up because she's not a Jedi anymore. And it is totally angsty and it made me cry buckets. I remember the first one best - it had more Gamorreans than usual, and Callista was in the computer and that was how she talked to Luke at first. She came from a planet where she rode a giant fish. And there's a part where they have Force dream sex, which passage I laboriously typed out on my Apple II. I wish that was a joke, but it's totally not. Somebody let KJA write the second one for some unknown reason, and there's a part where Callista has a nightmare and it's clear she and Luke aren't sharing a room and my twelve-year-old self was like BULLSHIT. I think it has Mara in it for a bit. And then in the third one Callista leaves for good. To be honest, I'm not even sure I made it all the way through that one. I might've just found the Callista/Luke parts and cried. But I do remember that Barbara Hambly's actual writing was quite good.

The Corellian Trilogy was about Han Solo's crazy cousin Thracken Sal-Solo. I think this was the very first EU material I read, and I don't remember a damned thing about it. Seriously, nothing. Maybe they're on Corellia for a bit? And either Gaeriel is in it or that was a fanfic. My journal claims that I read The New Republic but I don't recall that at all. And the Jedi Academy books are a bit blur in my mind - I'm sure I didn't read all the ones I actually have.

So there you have it: my assignment, should I choose to accept it. It's gonna take some time and some shelf space, but I figure if I should ever want to do an epic re-read at some point in the future, at least I'll have all the books on hand. I know a tiny bit about what happens in the vast wasteland after I stopped reading, but I'm trying to keep myself unspoiled for the things I don't know (specifically what happens in the big Caedus showdown, so zip it). I might post mini-reviews as I go along. My review for the Thrawn trilogy - two thumbs up. I'm about halfway through the Solo trilogy now and I gotta say, it is not living up to my memory of it.

And for the record, yes, I am still a bit hung up on the stupid farmboy. I can't help it, it was hardwired into my brain years ago. Man, I wish fanfix.com hadn't died. That would surely be a trip down memory lane.

ETA: THANK YOU WAYBACK MACHINE! Luke's comin' out, he wants the world to know, got to let it show...