So I love Star Wars, this is not news for people who know me.
Star Wars was and is a huge part of who I am today. I fell in love with the series when I saw it with my dad at the age of nine. Some of my earliest fanfiction was me in the Star Wars universe, exploring things and having all kinds of adventures. My family, of course, was always Corellian. It seemed to fit them the best (still does).
I learned there was an Expanded Universe when I saw The Crystal Star by Vonda N. McIntyre in the Paperback section of our local KY Kroger. I begged and pleaded for my mom to buy that for me. I was a tiny kid who was already reading on a college level at 9. My parents had an easier time keeping me in sneakers than in books.
It blew my mind. Because here was the after I had been looking for, the what happened next, and this book wasn’t the only one. Luke was a full blown Jedi, Han and Leia were MARRIED. WITH KIDS!! My nine year old mind was over the moon. Here were all the details and the stories that happened after! Scoping through some of the pages, I saw that it wasn’t the only one either.
So I fell into this universe in a way I hadn’t before with any of the other things I loved, unless you count reading as a fandom of its own. Star Wars was really the first IP where I actively became part of the fandom as much as I could.
It was pretty slow at first, that was right around the time that we were moving overseas. However Episode 1 came out and saved my life (I wrote about that over here). That Christmas, I got the score and the novelization from visiting relatives and I fell further down the hole of fandom.
As I got older and had more access to the internet, I found websites like TheForce.Net and fanfiction.com and I started reading everything I could. I couldn’t get enough of it.
I joined a forum specifically geared towards Jedi Girls and through it, I met the first person I fell in love with. We moved again and our closest “neighbors” that worked for the same agency my parents worked for had a kid my age that owned a HUGE chunk of the Legends books that had come out at that time. They went back stateside for a year and I got to babysit the books while they were gone. It was kind of a dream come true.
I got to take my time reading through the Expanded Universe and revelling in all of the words and the adventures and the characters. The good and the bad and the weird (I still am not exactly sure about what the hell even The Black Fleet Crisis was about, it’s been 16 years and “Bzuh” is still my entire reaction to that trilogy).
These were the books that taught me what “canon”, “deuterocanon”, and “apocrypha” actually looked like, where 3-4 years of studying religious doctrine and history couldn’t. How piecing together different campaigns from across several books/trilogies actually functioned and the importance, not just of gaining knowledge, but also sharing it (Wookiepedia and so so so many fansites in the Geocities/Angelfire years) so that others could also nerd the hell out.
I fell in love with pilots to the point of ordering the entire X-Wing series with birthday and Christmas money from Amazon.com and having them shipped to me overseas (the estimated time of arrival without having paid for expedited shipping because I really didn’t want to give Amazon an actual kidney was anywhere from 6 weeks to 4 months, depending on the mail and customs). The books I was babysitting for my friend didn’t have all the X-Wing stories so I had to procure them elseways. This drove me bananas, because my impulse control to read all the things had to contend with the fact that I knew reading them out of order would mean that my brain would hyper-focus on what I’d missed.
Pretty sure that the only people happier than me getting those books were my family members, having to put up with my anxious slightly manic self. They were in 3 packages and I didn’t get them in order. I remember getting books 1,2, and 8 in the same package and agonizing because I wanted to read them in order and waiting until I had all of them was a special kind of torture. It paid off though because the joy of getting to binge read the entire series was so good.
Episode II came out and I saw it three times in the regular Brasilian theaters and then wonder of wonders, it was still in the Imax theaters near my grandparents when we landed stateside for a brief assignment. My dad took me and my sister to a late night Imax showing of it and it was the best thing in the world.
Episode III was the one where I camped out for tickets. Nothing was getting in my way from seeing this. Coming out of the theater from that movie and then pretty much getting back in line for tickets because I needed to see again. There was so much there that my brain needed to unpack and filter through what we already knew of the universe and how it fit into the EU and this opened up so much more of the already vast universe.
Part Two Tomorrow!