My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Recently, Disney/Lucasfilm made some fairly big news by announcing that they would be de facto decanonizing the Star Wars Expanded Universe. They’re doing it in a nice way, of course, by rebranding it as Star Wars Legends and continuing to make material for the fans who still love it and taking it to a farm where it will be much happier, but the long and short of it is that the stories a generation of Star Wars fans have accepted as the continuation of the universe…isn’t, anymore. And while a part of me is actually happy about this, on the grounds that it frees us from a lot of straitjackets (for one thing, I’ve always felt like people took Yoda at his word that there was no redemption once you started down the path of the Dark Side, when the conclusion to the trilogy was all about him being manifestly and self-evidently wrong), I think it’s worth trying to understand why people adored the Expanded Universe. And for that, I think it’s worth talking about West End Games.

Because when West End Games picked up the Star Wars license in 1987, the property was pretty much dead. The corpse was still twitching here and there, but it had been four years since the last movie and there was no sign from Lucas that he ever intended to film the promised prequels or the promised third trilogy (or the fourth trilogy that fans had heard rumors of based on third-hand rememberings of old magazine interviews…it was a pre-Internet era). There was no TV show, no cartoons or specials to perpetuate things, and the Marvel comic had just been canceled. Even the action figures were off the market. This was, pretty much, the nadir of Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon. Which first meant that West End could afford the license, but second and more importantly meant that they were the only game in town…figuratively, as well as literally.

And they did exactly what a game company does. They systematized and organized the fictional universe. Star Wars went from being three movies and a handful of ancillary material, all of which revolved around the adventures of a few specific people as they battled a few specific antagonists, to being a complete fictional environment that you could immerse yourself into for a few hours at a time. Things that Lucas had glossed over were given depth, weight and texture in order to satisfy people who wanted to play that weird looking thing in the back of the Mos Eisley Cantina. Vague mystical powers were given rules and rationales. And most importantly of all, you could enter that universe yourself. You could join in. It held a tremendously powerful allure for the Star Wars fanbase that was still out there and that wasn’t being served anywhere else.

It’s little wonder that the Star Wars novels felt like a natural outgrowth of the West End material, to the point where planets and technology first referenced in WEG sourcebooks became significant in the series. Likewise, given how starved for material they were, it’s no surprise that the WEG sourcebooks synergistically fed off that new material in the 1990s and detailed it for their games. The West End Star Wars was an incubator, a crucible where new ideas and new material could be tested and refined for an audience of devoted fans before it went mainstream again. And the fans who were around during that time, who were the most loyal of all because they cared about it when nobody did, all identified with that material strongest of all because it was theirs in a way no other form of Star Wars could be. I might not be a huge fan of the EU, but I can certainly understand that.

Plus, it was just a fun game. Any game where you get to roll more dice as you become more powerful has a certain cachet that mere “+X modifiers” can’t match. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of rolling a double-handful of six-siders and realizing you’re absurdly bad-ass in a clear, tangible way. West End Games helped Star Wars fandom get through the hardest time, and Star Wars still bears the stamp of its influence. And despite it all, I feel like that’s a good thing.

In my email inbox today, in regards to this post from 2011:

SUBJECT: Sad, racist and delusional

Also the funniest part, even if Dorne was the Middle East, or North Africa or even just modern day Turkey(and per the author, it isn’t) that guy from the Indian subcontinent who even by Indian standards is incredibly dark, would have no place representing those regions as he does not look like any of those people, whether Arab/Turk/Persian or even Israeli, that last image confirmed to me your racism and your delusion.

A few points, I think, need to be made here.

1.) I am white as all get out, so suggesting that that argument was made on the basis of insecurity about my own race is kinda fun to say the least.

2.) “Why don’t you create your own” – er, I did.

3.) Naveen Andrews is not “incredibly dark” by Indian standards. If anything he’s relatively light-skinned as Indian folks go. And he’s not from “the Indian subcontinent,” he’s from friggin’ London, born and raised.

I could go on – including the fact that GRRM made his qualifications about the Dornish mostly after that blog post, in part to respond to suggestions like mine – but yeeeeeeeeeeah.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Recently, MGK made a delightful post in which he calmly and eloquently asked all of the sexist/racist/homophobic assholes in fandom to kindly fuck off out of our collective lives. I wholeheartedly approve of this gesture. This probably doesn’t surprise many people, because if I wasn’t the sort of person that wholeheartedly approved of this gesture, I wouldn’t have been the kind of person who gets asked to do guest columns for a site that makes this gesture.

The post spawned comments, which is unsurprising. One of the occasional themes in these comments was, “But if these people fuck off out of our collective lives, how will we ever convince them to be better people? We can’t be continually hostile to them. We have to engage them and sway them with well-reasoned discussion instead of attacking them.” This is a theme I wanted to address further, while making it very clear that I am not speaking for the site, only for myself, and that MGK reserves the right to make his own further responses on this topic. With that said, here goes.

This is an understandable impulse. We all understand the way that people get defensive when someone makes them feel like they’re in the wrong, and we all want to believe that we can bring people around to our point of view. Plus, there is kind of a deep-seated social conditioning against actively telling someone, “Fuck off out of our collective lives”, at least directly to their face. So I can get wanting to find a different way to handle the racist/sexist/homophobic assholes.

But that presumes that these people are arguing in good faith. It takes as a basic assumption that when someone shows up on a message board, forum, comments section, private email of a person who criticized their favorite comic book, voicemail of someone whose phone number they dug up, whatever, that they are attempting to engage in an actual discussion about the subject of whether sexism/racism/homophobia in comics and fandom is genuine and undesirable. And it also assumes that even though they have staked out a position and feel strongly about it, they are willing to listen to counter-arguments.

This is obviously wrong. If someone has gotten to the point where they say this (which is an actual motherfucking thing that was actually sent to Janelle Asselin):

“Women in comics are the deviation, the invading body, the cancer. We are the cure, the norm, the natural order. All you are is a pair of halfway decent tits, a c*nt and a loud mouth. But see, it doesn’t matter how loud you get. It doesn’t matter how many of your lezbo tumblr and twitter fangirl friends agree with you and reinforce your views. You can be all “I’m not going to be silent about misogyny so f*ck you!” all you want. In the end all you are is a pathetic little girl trying to effect change and failing to make a dent. You might as well try to drain the ocean of fish. That’s the kind of battle you face with people like me. We won’t quit. We won’t stop attacking. We won’t give up. Ever.”

Then I think it’s pretty goddamn safe to say that they are no longer arguing in good faith. At that point, I think it’s pretty motherfucking safe to say that their only intention as far as engaging you in dialogue is concerned is to punish you for continuing to talk. This is not speech as an exchange of ideas. This is speech used as a weapon to threaten, harass and intimidate. There is no longer any point in attempting to discuss the issue with these people. At this point, all you can really do is fight back.

So yes. This is the point where people like me make it clear to people like whoever wrote that message that no, they will quit. They will stop attacking. They will give up. Because people like me will shout them the fuck down just the same way they’re trying to shout down women in comics. And despite their pathetic, miserable, whiny delusions, there are more of us and we are louder than they are. And yes, this means that they may never change. They may persist in the belief that they’re the real victim here, and we may never have the chance to convince them otherwise.

But at least they’ll shut the fuck up about it, which is more than they’re doing now.

I keep meaning to post about how fanboy nerds are treating girls awfully but the problem is that I sit down to write the post and then BAM something new happens. Like, there was that “I hate fangirls” tee-shirt brouhaha and I was going to post about that but then like not two days later somebody tried to break into Janelle Asselin’s bank accounts because they didn’t like how she pointed out that a shitty comic book cover was shitty, and when it’s not comics nerds it’s corporations more or less saying girls can’t be Spider-Man and it never ends. Writing a pithy post that adequately sums up my feelings about all of this is essentially impossible because a certain subsection of nerds seem determined to never, ever stop being terrible people, and put all of their energy into being terrible people, and make sure that they win simply by exhausting anybody who’s even halfway decent.

Anyway. I am mostly powerless about this, but I do have one response, and that is to take a page from Kurt Cobain:

I write a blog, I does a Twitter, I make comics. And this one goes out to the dickheads out there who seem determined to make life as difficult as possible for fangirls and geek girls and girls generally: don’t read my stuff. Just pass it by. I will make do without your eyeballs, attention, and (when there is opportunity for you to spend) monies. You are not needed; you are the fleshy little wart on the ass of Life, purely extraneous and mostly unpleasant, and I don’t want your business.

And for everybody else who makes comics – or other nerd stuff – you should be telling these people the exact same thing. You’ve probably been implying it anyway, but it’s time we all vocalized it.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Plague Inc. You ever get frustrated with a game because it’s got a great idea and then simply doesn’t go deep enough with it? Plague Inc. is one of those games. Take the old Pandemic II skeleton, put more options into it, really have fun with it. And in some ways Plague Inc does that because they put in a lot of new game modes – Neurax Worm and Necroa Virus are both interesting, fun ideas for a plague game to tinker with. But the problem with this game is that in most of the modes, there is exactly one way to realistically win: lurk in the background for a long time with as little visibility as possible until the entire world is infected, and then turn on fatal symptoms immediately. In short, the only way to win the disease game is to make sure your game doesn’t play anything like diseases actually do. And that’s kind of boring.

The latest episode of Game of Thrones. Depending on which showrunner you’re interviewing this week, you’ll get a different answer about whether Jaime raped Cersei or whether she was into it. (HINT: the first one is the one who’s right. You are entitled to slap anybody across the face for advancing the “she was into it” argument.) But of all the changes the show has made from the books, this one is by far the worst so far. I vaguely suspect it was done to humanize Cersei because Cersei is so awful that in order for anybody to feel sympathetic towards her something really awful has to happen, but here’s the problem: nobody needs to feel sympathetic towards Cersei. She is a villain, and that’s fine, and her villainy actually comes from a perfectly reasonable place (her anger at her relative lack of power as a woman, even as a noble). Choosing to have her be raped is a cheap plot point, and although Game of Thrones is usually a well-written show I don’t think it has the narrative room by half to dwell on the ramifications of the sexual assault in a way that would make it worth including in the narrative. (For the record, Sons of Anarchy did it very well in the second season and should probably be considered the model for “if you must do a sexual assault storyline, this is how.”) Just a terrible idea on so many levels.

The end of Superior Spider-Man. Maybe “sucked” is too strong here because this was not a bad comic especially – but after a superhero comic run as refreshing and solidly entertaining as Superior was, it definitely limped to the finish. Otto’s heroic sacrifice was a wet fart of an ending for his character arc, the most blatant “we’re doing a retcon of this entire storyline because we have to, okay” that I’ve seen in some time. Ditto Peter’s return, which was just… bad, a deus ex machina without the machina bit, expressly rewriting what had gone before in the comic – and you have to figure it’s because the movie’s coming out in a month and we need the status quo back for the movie. Slott is still writing good stuff here, overall, and the last issue is reasonably entertaining and it’s nice to see Peter in the costume again, but that doesn’t really change the fact that a remarkably good comic dropped to “basically acceptable” right at the end.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.