Are you that hard up for cash? Seriously?

So yeah…I’ve got Star Wars burnout.

I’ve mentioned this before of course…and it’s the contributing factor as to why Raptorsquad.Net hasn’t enjoyed the number of updates as it has in the past. I don’t know….maybe it’s the years and years spent playing the RPG, or the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written chronicling our teams adventures in fiction, or hell, maybe it’s the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours spent building and updating the website. Who knows?

Or it could be that I’m a little sick of what the Star Wars franchise has become.

See...I’m old enough to remember what I’ll call “the good old days”. I remember when you had the movies, a handful of paperbacks and well, that was pretty much it. Then, back in the 90’s a guy named Tim Zahn came along and wrote a fine little trilogy that picked up and shed light on what had happened to our heroes after the Battle of Endor.

Cool.

The Zahn Trilogy was really something special…for the first time in like, a decade we got to see the adventures of the Star Wars characters continue…and it ended great…everyone was happy, just like a nice space opera should end.

Then the floodgates opened.

Quick as you please the comics started rolling…then more books…then talks of the prequels. And suddenly this nice little story that had a solid beginning middle and end became…well…sh*t.

I’m sorry it did.

I don’t really care if folks agree with me, and don’t get me wrong, there are certainly some bright points to the material that followed (albeit few). But as with anything, you go to the well too often, it tends to dry up. And the Star Wars well was repeatedly accosted by so-called “writers” who decided instead of telling a good story in the Star Wars fashion they would “leave their mark” on the legacy by taking a nice steaming dump all over the characters and history.

They freaking killed Chewie for God’s sake.

And when that wasn’t good enough, it turned to “Hey! Let’s knock off some of the Solo kids…or hell, turn them darksiders! Because, you know, that makes us ‘edgy and cool’ and takes the story into uncharted waters not explored before yadda blah blah frrrppppt”

Frell you, you useless hacks. I hope that nice juicy paycheck went a long way towards buying you some sort of conscience, since you didn’t seem to have much of one before. And heads up, killing off characters doesn’t make you a good writer, it makes you a desperate writer who lacks enough imagination to produce real drama and intrigue. It’s cheap, and no different than when comic book writers do it, especially since all you are trying to do is make another buck because you don’t have enough confidence in your own abilities to think you can sell books without some cheap-ass plot device.

But you know who I blame most? Lucas.

I know he doesn’t give sh*t one about the franchise anymore, and it’s just a way to fuel his “future projects” and all of that crap. Hey George! Maybe we’ll get Howard the Duck 2 now huh? But still…he steers the ship, he calls the shots. And the fact that his greed has allowed him to let these not talent ass clowns systematically rape and defecate all over these beloved characters makes me sick.

But anything for a buck apparently.

Heads up Georgie Boy, just because YOU don’t give a crap about these characters any more doesn’t mean other folks don’t.

And yeah, I hear all of the clueless Fanbois out there chomping their teeth and hammering their mom’s dining room table with their meaty fists proclaiming “But it’s his creation! He can do what he wants with it!”

And yeah, that may be true. And in the end the only thing I can do is ignore these freaking “Officially Licensed Lucasfilm” abominations that come out and stick to what I like and ignore the rest.

But that still doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean I have to keep quiet about it.

What bothers me is the lack of responsibility for his creations, the lack of “ownership”. It’s not just a problem with Georgie and the Star Wars franchise either- it’s a freaking refelction on our society as well. I won’t go too deep into all of this, as this blog sure as hell isn’t going to turn into something political- suffice to say, I think that folks need to learn to take some damn responsibility for their actions and stop blaming the government, society, religion, the ice cream man down the street, etc. Stand up! Be freaking accountable you losers! Stop trying to hang your phobias and hang ups on crap that happened to you twenty or thirty years ago or some politician you never met because you don’t have the stones to stand up and say “Yeah! I did this, it was my choice and now I’m ready to face the consequences!”

But I don’t expect that to happen. Our society is lazy, goofy and has no little direction, and until people start getting a foot dead up their ass, it isn’t going to change.

But back to more trivial matters….

So, I hope George has enough money now to keep him in plaid shirts and nose hair trimmers, and hell, it only cost him some integrity, right? Nice work man.

Meh.

See, this is why I keep Raptor Squad running. Because at the end of the day, I can play in the Star Wars sandbox, with MY characters and not have to ask for permission from anyone. MY characters, MY story, My adventures. The way I want to tell them. And if a character dies in the story, it’s not so I can sell a few more books.

So…that’s that. End of my rant. What was going to be a nice little post about how I lost the drive to update my site turned into this. I do so love me some stream-of-consciousness.

As always, feel free to sound off, agree, disagree, whatever you want. Just keep it civil fanboi, Vic doesn’t suffer disrespect lightly.