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From: Dr. Qwi and her muse
To: Star Wars fandom everywhere
Re: RP and the great beyond
Let’s get this out of the way: Star Wars has been a fixture in my life for as long as it has existed. I’ve been reverently immersed to my geeky maximum in it in a roleplay sense for as long as technology has been making it possible beyond writing on paper at a party. And yes, if you asked me if I believed in the Force, I’d have to answer that, from a certain point of view, I do. What I’m saying is, I consider Star Wars sacred territory. Canon and maintaining it are not new concerns to me.
However, I think that the particular technology of Twitter and the nature of the interactions that go on there have nudged even those with the purest intentions to go somewhere that could be considered out-of-character (again, from a certain point of view). I struggle to find an example of someone who has not meandered into blurry territory, save for @Chewbacca who, also because of the nature of Twitter technology, is reduced to typing gibberish.
There’s no need to get into the timeline issues since @jedijon has aptly addressed that situation. So let’s establish right now that there is no one who has not strayed or overlapped or done something that, had they asked Lucas first, he probably would’ve said no to. And then possibly have insulted them or thrown a tantrum.
Having been involved in this Star Wars Twitterverse phenomenon relatively early in it, I can see that it started out with a set of folks (myself included) who, having gotten dibs on a strong username/canon character combination, felt ownership of that role. If you had the cleanest username, you were apt to, not entirely incorrectly, consider yourself more official or “real”. It started out looking like a set of hardcore RPers being available to give very in-character responses to public queries. It was looking to be a one-way situation; sort of a Dear Abby but instead it’s Dear Lord Vader, and so on. This was peppered in with some intercharacter interaction that was also generally in-character. But as the interaction increased, the characters developed, as human interaction is wont to provoke. It became more intriguing.
The result: people want in on the fun. None of us can appoint ourselves owner of any of Lucas’s or his associates’ characters anyway, so the natural response has been for people to use their creativity and extrapolate so that they can get involved. We’ve entered a blurry whirlpool of stories where none can stake claim on reality at all. From a media standpoint, it’s just the next step beyond what book writers did with the EU. Who is allowed to write stories in this world in this day and age? That’s right, like it or not, it’s now everybody. Ask yourself how many people you know who don’t have a blog. Those that don’t can start one before you finish reading this.
In summary, most people here are playing a character and retain elements of that character even when they do unusual things - and to attempt to lay down any law about who can and can’t get away with unmeasurable subjective things is just not practical in this environment. There is no original here. There never has been. The type of exclusivity implied by strict adherence to canon only as it has been molded by others every second of every day removes the very point of this style of social interaction. Its current structure actually makes it impossible. It’s supposed to evolve and be dynamic, not static and one-way. I’d rather see the mythos be kept alive in this dynamic, ever-evolving way than to let it collect dust in an archive until its original creator, who is wholly uninterested in our activities, croaks. The universe deserves more, and the Star Wars Geek cannot be contained anyway.
Keep the creativity and the muses alive, and May The Force Be With You all! No exceptions!
