#newcanon

[fakewedge]

artistically I don't really agree with newcanon wedgeluke (it doesn't have the panache and interest that their dynamic in legends has, and I kind of hate the overarching vibes of post-rotj newcanon as a whole anyways) but jason fry did break new ground with "you know, just for a hour I'd like to know what it's like to fly with the force watching my back" "it's almost as good as having you watching my back." and he did it in a middle-grade novel that no one talks about the rest of.

[iandsharman]

Chewie and the Porgs! This is adorable! And it’s canon...so now we know that when the Porgs first saw Chewie they thought he was something they could eat! #starwars #newcanon #chewieandtheporgs #porgs

[fakewedge]

"I believe she is a girl but not anytime soon" is kind of my take on newcanon wedge. my armchair assessment that I cannot explain or justify. just trust me.

[fakewedge]

riffing off of existing worldbuilding and creating speculative gender schemata is my passion. like yes on a galaxy-wide institutional scale I think that misogyny and transphobia and homophobia exist in star wars. however. I think that those things can manifest differently depending on context. and also there are places that have insulated themselves from the bulk of their effects or that have local institutions that function differently.

all that is to say that I've been thinking about alderaan. because the list of things we know about gender and reproduction on alderaan is basically "women can and do inherit the monarchy," "in newcanon, men can and do take their wife's surname, including men in positions of power," and "adopted children can inherit their parents' estates without it being a point of contention." and all of that kind of implies a gender structure where the ability to reproduce does not need to be controlled and possessed, right? like alderaanian men as a class are not treating presumed-capable-of-being-pregnant women as their possessions, because the head of household is oftentimes (if not always) a woman, and not being personally capable of being pregnant is not necessarily a way to "fail" at womanhood, because you can still have a family that is legitimately seen as yours.

and this is kind of a double-edged sword, right? on the one hand, reproduction being in some ways decoupled from gender performance means that heterosexuality and cisgender-ity are also decoupled from gender performance - I think you can be gay or trans on alderaan without it threatening the normative order, because you can still Have A Family That Is Yours. additionally, the seeming lack of structural misogyny means that transmisogyny either doesn't exist or looks very different - if being a woman isn't seen as a bad or inferior thing and is in fact admirable, then you don't really need to punish people for wanting to be women.

but on the other hand. one must always ask where the adopted children are coming from. like in the wake of the clone wars, you do have war orphans, but in peacetime, people who are putting up children for adoption are often going to be those who lack the material resources to care for their children or who could not (for whatever reason) terminate the pregnancy. depending on the setting, one must ask why the former does not have those resources or why the latter does not have access to abortion. and considering that alderaan is a monarchy, I think the former concern is much more salient. AND it also allows us to ask questions like "how are the people putting their children up for adoption treated in a social context that prioritizes and valorizes having a family that is yours?"

[fakewedge]

is this thing on

[fakewedge]

(guy whose senior project was on maps as social objects rather than the objective representations of fact we often think of them as voice) haha yeah so there's a new canon map? awesome. do you think that perhaps the idea of there suddenly being a "new map" that immediately implicitly condemns all of its predecessors as "false" or "incomplete" reveals something about the imperfections that the new map may someday be "revealed" to have and thus the nature of cartography as a whole

[fakewedge]

the top gun intertextuality can always go deeper btw. one of the instructors at skystrike academy in the antilles extraction really smacks of viper. both re: visual appearance and his actual name. your tom skerritt character homage with a distinctive mustache and widow's peak is named skerrik. okay. so they just sent sabine wren on an undercover mission to top gun.

[fakewedge]

I knew that newcanon reused the general concept of the Widowed Love Interest arc because people crack jokes about it re: wedge antilles's taste in women but I truly did not know the extent of the reuse until yesterday, when idle and/or morbid curiosity led me to the aftermath series's plot summary. evidently we've got the entire progression of "husband established as missing, presumed dead" to "blossoming romance" to "the dead husband is back now" to "the not-dead husband was actually turned into a sleeper agent while he was presumed dead" ?? decanonized 2014 reused with a fresh coat of paint 2016 welcome back iella wessiri and esd lusankya