Eru's Journal

Fandom Ramble
Anyone who has known me for a long time knows of my particular fetish once I enter a fandom; I believe it's one of the more unusual of my fetishes, or shall we say, personal interests:

I am a history nut.

Most people tend to go straight to the imagined or (if possible) canon children in their fandoms if they move beyond the realm of present happenings in their writing, and I'm certainly no stranger to that either, as I am alternately bemused and befuddled by the changing ages of Luke and Leia and the sheer odd presence of young Anakin Solo in such close proximity to four-year-old Skywalker twins, but that is life. Or rather, that is the no-holds-barred reality of my brain.

However, my plotwise bread and butter, instead of being the children, is formed mainly by the parents, grandparents, and sometimes great-grandparents of the darlings of the hour.
I want to see the history behind the Jedi, the personal stories of the mentors who came before, the socio-political makeup of the galaxy before our heroes were even BORN.
I want to see the people they came from.
And if the creators didn't provide us with names and personalities, it's my solemn duty to have as much bloody fun with it as I possibly can.
It's so much juicier to do this with ancestors for some reason rather than the children... Perhaps the joy of foreshadowing and the idea of history as a mutable object... But I digress.

I am an unabashed history nut, and readers of my writing will find allusions to made-up parents, grandparents, and elderly neighbors every which-a-way, as well as shameless parallels to the march of our human history. I enjoy my old people. They were young once- often in fascinating and dire situations of their own.
This gives the main characters of any particular fandom (I'm going to use the Star Wars fandom as an example, as it is my personal obsession at the moment) a neat twist and perspective; there were other quirky people in the world before Obi-Wan and Anakin came along, and those people blazed the way for younger Jedi to follow.

Still, I find myself wondering if I'm one of the few who really and deeply wants to explore characters barely mentioned in canon simply because they came a few generations before and no one seems to take the least bit of interest in them, either because the main characters are sexier than a blip on Wikipedia or because a writer considers the task of furbishing history while cleaving to canon too daunting.

It's one of my personal fetishes, second only to my Preserve Strong Female Characters fetish (Read: Padme Naberrie Amidala and every damn Handmaiden she ever had WHY DO PEOPLE GLOSS OVER THE QUEEN YEARS PADME IS AMAZING AND HAS HER OWN NON-ANAKIN-CENTRIC ISSUES THANKS?), and I love love love it and wish for many others to love it, too.
So that we may be dorky history nuts together.

Then again, perhaps I should revel in my uniqueness, as I seem to be the only Star Wars fan with Lord Plagueis the Wise.

And I like him.

He does such terrible things to Palpatine and it's damned hysterical. XD
Favorite adage of his: "Old age and treachery will always triumph over youth and talent."
And it does.
Even though apprentice Palpatine manages to finally kill old dear Plagueis in his sleep, the elder Sith one-ups him brilliantly... Complete with a gloating holorecording.

I really like this new addition to my menagerie.

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