Wherein Justin Forgoes an Emotional Monologue on Returning from the War and Instead Dorks Out on Something Really Random 1:48 PM

For coverage of the wonderfulness of being home from Iraq and associated topics, see our affiliate blog at thetomatobear.blogspot.com. It isn't that I am the slightest bit less overjoyed at being home than my wife, it's just that she's already said all the fuzzy emotional stuff I feel; leaving me free to dork the hell out on my blog :)

Speaking of dorking the hell out I would like to discuss a topic which is of great concern to the nerd population of America. That topic is Star Wars. Now, those of you less familiar with Nerddom and its various sub-fiefs may ask, "you like Star Wars, what's the problem?" Those of you with a passing knowledge might say; "Justin, Revenge of the Sith came out four years ago, quit whining about how much the prequels sucked and move on with your life you pathetic refugee from a Star Trek Convention." While the prequels did suck ,"JAR-JAR MUST DIE!!! AND HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN IS THE ANTI-CHRIST OF SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA!!!!" That's not actually what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to talk about the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, and its bearing on what Michele and I have dubbed the, "going back to the well" problem.

Even most Star Wars fans stay within the Holy Writ Canon of the movies, either sticking with the dated but wonderful original trilogy or, in fact, embracing the new, shiny, poorly written, soul-less on-screen abortions of the prequels which all REAL fans see as a George Lucas giving anyone with multiple digits in their IQ the finger... oh wait, I'm not bitching about the prequels, sorry, forgot for a second. (but the Gungans ARE racist. They're like amphibious Jim Crowe's)

The point is that a wide and deep well of Star Wars fictions exists outside the six movies, and no I'm not talking about the Ewok movies that aired on the Disney Channel. The three mediums most common to Expanded Universe Star Wars Material are novels, comic books and video games. Now, one would naturally jump to the entirely logical conclusion that these products would be varying degrees of mind numbingly awful, being an OBVIOUS attempt by LucasFilm to cash in on the success of the film franchise. In many cases they are... BUT.

But then there are novels that have tightly woven plots, three dimensional characters, even explanations for some of Lucas's inexcusably sloppy plotting from the DREADFUL prequels. I was confused upon reading some of the novels because I realized that, from a purely artistic perspective, some of the stories were actually better than my beloved original trilogy because the same unbelivably neat concepts, the Force, Lightsabers, High Space Opera, were in the hands of a writer with some freaking talent. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a LOT of crap in the field, just as you would expect, but the best of the novels and comics are quality enough that I would rate them as solid Second Tier fiction; not terribly meaningful ala BSG, Heinlein, LOTR, CS Lewis, etc etc, but DEFINITELY entertaining.

Ironically, the best example of Expanded Universe Star Wars fiction I have seen, the one that almost moved from second to first tier, was not in novel, or even comic book format, but in a video game. The game Knights of the Old Republic has an outstanding story, and some real choices; what romantic relationships to pursue, what characters and sub-plots to explore and, ultimately whether to be a bright shiny Jedi Knight or to fall from grace and become a Dark Lord of the Sith.

Being a Nerd of the First Order, I have spent much time considering what made Knights of the Old Republic so fascinating to me. Believe it or not it actually takes a lot for a video game to catch my interest at all, as my wife will attest, and Knights is the only video game in the last ten years of my life that I have spent an entire day, from dawn until nightfall, playing. Even the joy of massacring terrorists in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only held my interest for three to four hours at a time :)

Some of the success is in the format; video game RPG's really do give you a choose your own adventure feel and the particapatory nature pluses up some pretty decent writing. But the one thing that finally floated to the top from a purely fictional stand point is that Knights of the Old Republic is its own story, set within the Star Wars Universe. As good as some of the SW novelists are, they are essentially writing prequels and sequels to another man's story. Say the equivalent of a really talented writer writing Harry Potter 8. Sure, they might do as good a job as possible, but, really, they're isn't any need for a Harry Potter 8.

Which brings me back to the "Going Back to the Well" paradox. Michele and I read a lot of the same stuff (including the magnificently wonderful Harry Potter novels) and I'm prone to want more whereas she is prone to say, "enough is enough." I have lightly suggested that in order to wash out the taste of those GODAWFUL prequels (DEATH TO JAR JAR, MIDI-CHLORIANS DO NOT EXIST) she might read some of the Expanded Universe novels that, while not high literature, are FAR superior to ANY Star Wars property produced on the screen past 1984. She has politely declined due to the aforementioned sentiment encapsulated in the Harry Potter 8 analogy. There are three good Star Wars movies, why muck with it any more?

But the one day I was playing Knights of the Old Republic and found that Michele was watching the game like a movie. The reason? It was Star Wars, but not really, because it wasn't Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia, it wasn't even their descendants or ancestors, the game was set several thousand years before the movies, so it was, well and truly, a completely different story.

Therein, I think, lies the secret behind the dangerous practice of going back to the well. Sure, some fictional universes are so damn cool that they demand more material, but we don't need books about Harry Potter's career as an Auror, or even books about Albus Severus, James and Lilly Potter, and Rose and Hugo Weasely (yes, I'm THAT big of a nerd that I DIDN'T have to look up the names). What might be cool though, is reading about the struggle between Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Why that and not Hogwarts: The Next Generation? Because it's unrelated, you'd have ONE character for tie-in and that's it. Voldermort and all of his Death Eaters haven't even been born yet, you could use the universe to tell an ORIGINAL story that wasn't just new wrapping paper on an old plot. Not that I'm dying for another Harry Potter book, and NO ONE but JK Rowling should be allowed within a thousand miles of that franchise, but if there were to be more material, I think it's vital to break away in time and casting from the original material in order to find another story in a big universe.

More on this later.