→ I know the geekerwebs are all about Marvel right now, but the big (‘big’) Episode VII rumor today has been yet another ‘leaked’ piece of concept art. Several sites are backing it up (Making Star Wars, Indie Revolver) but my gut instinct is that this is the Karen Gillan’s wig for Knights of the Old Republic fans. (Bias of note: Nothing KOTOR-related is ever going to get me excited.) In short, meh.
→ MSW, meanwhile, has been theorizing about the opening sequence and the villain’s ‘haunting embrace, plus some speeder details.
Depending on J. J.’s willingness to indulge fanboy fetishes, he might add a short sequence with a bunch of Sith lords or their respective ghosts. Might even make sense from the point of view of the story group: They could canonize The Old Republic that way, milking that particular cash cow a little longer and testing the waters for a KOTOR era spin-off.
Or it’s just a ring wraith after a cheap photoshop make-over. Oh well, at least the black robe should be fairly accurate. :-)
Ohhh….If that’s really Revan….please let it be a woman!!!!!!
Canon can be rewritten…or I will forever maintain that the records were flawed!
Hey, question: would it be possible for you to ever, even just once, post a KOTOR/Star Wars video games related news item without ramming down your readers’ throats once again how OMG SOOOO UNINTERESTED you are in the subject? Because we get it already. Believe it or not, some of your readers actually *do* like KOTOR and other SW games, and you spewing your negative bias everywhere makes the site kind of unfriendly for us.
I mean, I personally couldn’t care less about Mara Jade or anything related to her whatsoever. Imagine I ran a sizable Star Wars news site and every time I posted some MJ rumor or item, I was ABSOLUTELY SURE to add, “By the way, I’ll never be enthused about anything Mara Jade. Meh, yawn, etc .” Sure, it would be within my rights to do so as site administrator, but I would also stop to think, “hmm, eventually this might get a bit irritating and tiresome for people who *are* fans of her character, who might otherwise really enjoy my website.” Get where I’m coming from?
This is a blog. Opinions are part of the deal. If you love KOTOR, that’s fine. I’m not going to tell you to stop squeeing about it, I’d just scroll or filter or whathaveyou. But I’m not going to hide all my exasperation at all the stuff that needs covering, particularly when it’s something that comes up so rarely. And I wouldn’t demand a gaming site change their tone, either, on the off chance I ever even read a gaming site regularly enough to notice.
But in this case, I treated much of the frantic overreaction to Karen Gillan’s wig (and, in fact, a lot of Mara/EpVII/Rebels stuff) with a similar disdain. It’s less about the actual source material than the willingness of fans to latch onto any clue or speculation, no matter how sketchy, that a major EU character will somehow be relevant to EpVII, mainly because they really, really want an EU character to appear somehow. (And there’s not a doubt in my mind that LFL knows about that tendency as well, which only adds to the layer of skepticism, particularly in this case.) Extreme cynicism, even as regards my own foci: Also part of the deal.
That said, KOTOR/video games in general are something I do try to write about as little as possible. I don’t care about them, I don’t like covering them, so mostly, I don’t. (The only reason this thing got written up was EpVII.) Hell, the last time I recall getting snarky about KOTOR was more than a year ago, and that’s three pages back on the little-used gaming category (and who knows how many pages back in the spin-off tag) so it’s hardly a flood. We likely wouldn’t even have that rerelease post from a few days ago if a) X-Wing/TIE weren’t involved and b) James hadn’t written it. Is it big news for SW gamers? Yeah. Is it big news for us? Negligible. But if I’d written it it would barely have been a link post and I’d probably have forgotten to mention KOTOR entirely.
But if this bothers you enough to write a comment bigger than the actual post? This might not be the best blog for you. We may have more readers now than we did 10 or 5 or even 2 years ago, but the intention has never been to be a ‘mainstream’ Star Wars site. We don’t cover everything, and we don’t do it equally. We are very much a blog, and that means there is going to be a definite point of view on some things. That’s the nature of the beast. If we wanted to be a straight-faced down-the-middle news site, we’d be a straight-faced down-the-middle news site.