Are Warsies trying to re-make Star Wars, or even hijack it?

[CrippledVulture]

I'm not talking about the idea of the validity of the EU to the debate. What I am saying is that I think that a great deal of revision is taking place in certain communities. It's not the EU as a whole or any specific work that I have a problem with, it's the cherry-picking and groupthink you see in the aforementioned communities that puts a stamp on certain things, while ignoring others.

I do not want to open up the EU debate here because I simply haven't read enough to participate in any honest way.

The problem is that when you take the Star Wars universe and you apply a series of examples from the EU that are plucked with a specific purpose from a wide net you end up with something that doesn't resemble the Star Wars I remember. There is a disconnect.

[ILikeDeathNote]

In fairness, a little re-imagining comes with the territory. SDN folks will bemoan and decry "stupid" people who simply watch the shows as entertainment and, seeing more gee-whiz and polish in Trek, assume a higher tech level. But the fact is, that sort of gut-reaction analysis of a fictional universe is as much as it deserves.

What we all do is quite different.

When a casual watcher sees a special effect of, say, a ship blowing up, the casual observer does not calculate its yield or freeze-frame to see if particular sections of the spaceframe were damaged first. That's because the ship blowing up is a question of plot, and if the effect serves to illustrate the plot point of the ship blowing up then it is a successful special effect and the creators care no further.

The debate changed with the alt.startrek.vs.starwars newsgroup. There, the concept promulgated by the Star Wars fans of deeper analysis -- as if watching a documentary -- was tested. So, too, did arguments of canon finally settle on an ownership standard as opposed to a creator standard, though in many cases these merge.

The essential problem with that came in two separate ways.


Second, the standard of canon was not adhered to. The same folks who would spend weeks going line-by-line analyzing character statements would not apply the same rigor to the canon issue. This caused a very obvious cherry-picking on their part.



As for me, when making my site I employed the ASVS standards of analysis and canon policy as stated, but correctly employed. Instead of cherry-picking the canon policy I derived the correct analysis (doing so around the same time as SW EU experts were saying the same thing). Instead of cherry-picking the depth of analysis of the material itself, I took it deeper still and found that many of the ASVS conclusions were false. Others followed and did better still.

Through it all, we've gotten further and further away from the casual viewer going to the theater to be entertained on some idle Friday night.

Well, I suppose, if people were not so overly concerned with the deeper analysis (or of the series were perfectly internally consistent), there would be no need for a canon policy in the first place, the word "canon" would rarely be used outside of religious and literary academia and most people who would look at the word would probably assume the same thing I did when I saw for the first time SW and ST canon policy being compared:

"Oh, cool, they're going to compare the firepower of Star Wars lasers to Star Trek phasers! Also, the author of this website left out an 'n'".

[Airlocke_Jedi_Knight]

haha, I remember thinking something similar.

[ILikeDeathNote]

haha, I remember thinking something similar.

Well, there was further argument behind that, but unfortunately I lost it (I had spent several hours attending to other things when I had difficulty formulating and articulating this argument - for something as, admittedly, unimportant as the verses debate I tend to get distracted easily).

The basic structure of the argument, if I can remember correctly, is that the whole concept of having a canon policy is endemic to the concept of fans reshaping a popular franchise like this, and it could be applied to the Karen Traviss thread too. If a franchise was perfectly internally consistent, and/or if people didn't feel bothered to pick and choose what best suited them, and if people didn't try to argue in favor of a particular view of the franchise that they best saw, then there wouldn't be a point to having a canon policy in the first place.

But I feel that I just basically repeated myself.

And at this point I just realized that this thread, and the other thread, are more appropriate to the Rules of Evidence thread, but I suppose that's of little practical consequence.

[Tyralak]

(There was another problem insofar as the cultural component there. ASVS earned its reputation as 'a hive of scum and villainy' because the game-players there found that being complete psychopathic buttholes was also an effective tactic because one's opponents would leave in disgust.)

As a proud ASVSer, I've always considered ASVS more like a proctologist's office. Full of assholes, all of which have issues.

[PunkMaister]

(There was another problem insofar as the cultural component there. ASVS earned its reputation as 'a hive of scum and villainy' because the game-players there found that being complete psychopathic buttholes was also an effective tactic because one's opponents would leave in disgust.)

As a proud ASVSer, I've always considered ASVS more like a proctologist's office. Full of assholes, all of which have issues.

This ASVS no longer exists does it?

[Mike DiCenso]

ASVS still exists, though the activity levels have dropped considerably since it's heyday and before the advent in 2002 of the AOTC: ICS.
-Mike

[Tyralak]

ASVS still exists, though the activity levels have dropped considerably since it's heyday and before the advent in 2002 of the AOTC: ICS.
-Mike

Yep. The ICS was a debate killer. And considering Saxton has taken part in the debate at times, and he credits Wong and other Warsies in the ICS, it's obvious that was the intent of it.

[PunkMaister]

ASVS still exists, though the activity levels have dropped considerably since it's heyday and before the advent in 2002 of the AOTC: ICS.
-Mike

But since then his ICS has come increasingly into question to the point of being almost if not entirely anything but a bad joke of the past, anyhow does anyone have a link to to the ASVS then I'm assuming ASVS is not SDN is it?

[Mike DiCenso]

No, ASVS is not apart of SDN, it is a Usenet newsgroup. You can get it through google newsgroups, or Dejanews. But I'll provide the link so you can get to it by clicking here.
-Mike

[ILikeDeathNote]

Yep. The ICS was a debate killer. And considering Saxton has taken part in the debate at times, and he credits Wong and other Warsies in the ICS, it's obvious that was the intent of it.

How many Warsies are explicitly credited, and for what?

But then again, I suppose this information is available on the relevant ICS threads, of which there are quite a few.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yep. The ICS was a debate killer. And considering Saxton has taken part in the debate at times, and he credits Wong and other Warsies in the ICS, it's obvious that was the intent of it.

How many Warsies are explicitly credited, and for what?

But then again, I suppose this information is available on the relevant ICS threads, of which there are quite a few.

At least three major Warsies are credited in the AOTC and ROTS:ICS books' acknowledgements: Michael Wong (SDN), Wayne Poe (The Ultimate Star Trek vs. Star Wars Database), and Brian Young (The Turbolaser Commentaries).
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

Yep. The ICS was a debate killer. And considering Saxton has taken part in the debate at times, and he credits Wong and other Warsies in the ICS, it's obvious that was the intent of it.

How many Warsies are explicitly credited, and for what?

But then again, I suppose this information is available on the relevant ICS threads, of which there are quite a few.

IIRC, it's just a list on the acknowledgements page. I'm not sure we've gone into great detail here about the inside cover acknowledgements, although this page about the ICS and a mailing list names Wong and Poe as on the list. I would guess that some of the other people he says are on the mailing list are listed in the acknowledgements, but I don't have a copy of the ICS on me to check.

[Tyralak]

ASVS still exists, though the activity levels have dropped considerably since it's heyday and before the advent in 2002 of the AOTC: ICS.
-Mike

But since then his ICS has come increasingly into question to the point of being almost if not entirely anything but a bad joke of the past, anyhow does anyone have a link to to the ASVS then I'm assuming ASVS is not SDN is it?

ASVS = alt.startrek.vs.starwars Usenet newsgroup. You can get it by going to google or using a newsreader program. (Xnews is the one I use)

[Mike DiCenso]

Yep. The ICS was a debate killer. And considering Saxton has taken part in the debate at times, and he credits Wong and other Warsies in the ICS, it's obvious that was the intent of it.

How many Warsies are explicitly credited, and for what?

But then again, I suppose this information is available on the relevant ICS threads, of which there are quite a few.

IIRC, it's just a list on the acknowledgements page. I'm not sure we've gone into great detail here about the inside cover acknowledgements, although this page about the ICS and a mailing list names Wong and Poe as on the list. I would guess that some of the other people he says are on the mailing list are listed in the acknowledgements, but I don't have a copy of the ICS on me to check.

Even if it was just Wong, Poe and Young, it still is rather interesting to see such prominent pro-Wars Versus debaters listed there. Certainly if a Star Trek technical book were written where it was stated that a single photon torpedo on maximum yeild was hundreds of gigatons, and the power output of a Galaxy class starship's warp core was billions of terawatts, and it's shields capable of shrugging off a teraton or two, then imagine that the author of the book was a famous Trek tech fan with a notable Trek technology assessment site, like DITL's Graham Kennedy or Ex Astris Scientia' s Bernd Schneider, which also just happened to include in it's acknowledge list three prominent pro-Trek Versus debaters... what would the SDN reaction to the be, especially if said hypothetical book were considered at least semi-official in which some of the contents were okay for writers the movies and any TV series to use as reference? They'd scream foul, that's what they'd do and spearhead an attack against it with everything they had.
-Mike