Yes, "Death Star with the knob turned up to twelve" pretty well summarises it!
It's not just the fans (and in particular the slash writers) who have
taken to making every intense relationship all about sex; I could
insert a lot of bitter comments about a society that uses 'sexy' as a
generic term of approbation and genuflects before the Holy Orgasm (or
is it medicinal, to be administered x times weekly? Or merely an
obligatory expression of psychological good health, to avoid
Repression and Fixation?)
That's one reason why I was/am really hoping that the friendly
partnership between Peter and Lesley in the "Rivers of London" series
is not going to be taken down the stereotyped route of spilling out
into a passionate unacknowledged attraction...
It sounds very wise to declare all the previous tie-in material
officially void, since it gives them a free hand without the
stultifying weight of all that prior continuity adhering raggedly
around the edges. (And they couldn't possibly use all of it, if the
timeline has already been written well into the next generation -- so
you get the question of which bits of development are still valid and
which aren't.)
As someone who has taken to writing fresh backstories for every plot
(after previously taking it for granted that all my fan-fiction shared
a common universe -- although SF world-building is a little different)
I can sympathise :-p
Given what became of the political sub-plots in "The Phantom Menace"
et al, it may have been a wise choice to skip that for pacing/length
:-(
I'm definitely not happy with the idea of having important details
only revealed in tie-in novels/novelisations, though -- not least
because in the nature of things, people writing novelisations are
generally working from early copies of the script, and they inherently
need to embroider all sorts of extra background motives/history onto
their characters to fill in the gap between observing people on the
screen and inhabiting them on the page. (Alan Dean Foster's
novelisations of 1980s SF are interesting in that respect - it's what
happens when you give a hack writer's task to someone who is a
novelist in his own right.)
But none of that necessarily has any basis on what was intended in the
making of the film and planned for a sequel, so it becomes very
dubiously 'canon' - it's more or less extrapolated fan-fic.
Personally I'd always assumed for some reason that 'Ben' was a
'particle' in the formation of Obi-Wan's weird futuristic name (like
the Jewish Bar- or Bat-), rather than a mundane inserted 'Benjamin'
:-(
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2016-05-16 11:17 am (UTC)Yes, "Death Star with the knob turned up to twelve" pretty well summarises it!
It's not just the fans (and in particular the slash writers) who have taken to making every intense relationship all about sex; I could insert a lot of bitter comments about a society that uses 'sexy' as a generic term of approbation and genuflects before the Holy Orgasm (or is it medicinal, to be administered x times weekly? Or merely an obligatory expression of psychological good health, to avoid Repression and Fixation?) That's one reason why I was/am really hoping that the friendly partnership between Peter and Lesley in the "Rivers of London" series is not going to be taken down the stereotyped route of spilling out into a passionate unacknowledged attraction...
It sounds very wise to declare all the previous tie-in material officially void, since it gives them a free hand without the stultifying weight of all that prior continuity adhering raggedly around the edges. (And they couldn't possibly use all of it, if the timeline has already been written well into the next generation -- so you get the question of which bits of development are still valid and which aren't.) As someone who has taken to writing fresh backstories for every plot (after previously taking it for granted that all my fan-fiction shared a common universe -- although SF world-building is a little different) I can sympathise :-p
Given what became of the political sub-plots in "The Phantom Menace" et al, it may have been a wise choice to skip that for pacing/length :-( I'm definitely not happy with the idea of having important details only revealed in tie-in novels/novelisations, though -- not least because in the nature of things, people writing novelisations are generally working from early copies of the script, and they inherently need to embroider all sorts of extra background motives/history onto their characters to fill in the gap between observing people on the screen and inhabiting them on the page. (Alan Dean Foster's novelisations of 1980s SF are interesting in that respect - it's what happens when you give a hack writer's task to someone who is a novelist in his own right.) But none of that necessarily has any basis on what was intended in the making of the film and planned for a sequel, so it becomes very dubiously 'canon' - it's more or less extrapolated fan-fic.
Personally I'd always assumed for some reason that 'Ben' was a 'particle' in the formation of Obi-Wan's weird futuristic name (like the Jewish Bar- or Bat-), rather than a mundane inserted 'Benjamin' :-(