Lit Flirt Junkies, Ho! Romance, Sex, and Erotica in the Galaxy Far Far Away, 2.0

Started with a simple question by HanSoloKniser3 in 2004, the original Sex Thread as it came to be known lasted 4 years with 7830 posts. And with the recent proliferation of topics regarding sex in the EU, perhaps it is time for a central thread to return for these sorts of discussions.

From empowered princesses taking over their own rescue to stolen kisses in a carbonite chamber to golden bikinis, from questions about angels to secret weddings and children, romance and (implied) sex have long been a part of the Star Wars saga. Since then, there has been a massive variety of romantic and sexual pairings, from the chaste and implied, to relatively explicit, to official nude artwork of a sertain star wars character.

The current discussion, in the Sexualizing in the EU thread asks basically a central question, one that is a good start for debate- In the line between explicit and implied, how should sexuality be treated in the EU?

Additionally, you have the topic of gender, gender identity, and gender politics as discussed in this thread

 

Eh, suggestive is where they should draw the line.

I mean, the Ben and Tahiri scene in Invincible might have been somewhat appealing, had Ben not been a mere 14 years old. As it is, what Tahiri did there, to a fourteen year-old boy was utterly disgusting, immoral, and downright evil.




I'm really shocked that Luke didn't exile Tahiri from the GFFA entirely, or just lock her up in a detention facility forever. If that had happened to my son, I'd want to take the perpetrator and lock him/her away forever. That Ben can even stand to be around Tahiri now, and that Luke doesn't take extreme offense to even having that child molester around his son is something I will never understand.

Edit: If this isn't the kind of thing you want to discuss in this thread, then I do apologize. It was not my intent to derail the discussion before it's even begun. But when I hear Sexuality in the EU, the first thing that pops into mind is that very explicit scene in Invincible.

 

I find the absence of sex droids to be conspicuous. In a galaxy that's had artificial intelligence for more than twenty-thousand years, let's face it --- the development of pleasure robots would have proceeded at the same rate of space exploration. We often get references to womanizing politicians, avaricious gangsters, and even prostitutes and harems, but it's always been sentient-on-sentient. As far as I know, the only reference we've ever had to a sentient getting it on with a droid is Xizor and Guri. I haven't read Shadows in a long time, so I can't even remember how subtle that implication was.

I'm not saying that sleazy droids should be propositioning our heroes every time they land at a spaceport, but I do find it conspicuous that the concept is never even acknowledged, when realistically it should be so widespread. Where are the HJ-4U units? The FU-69s? With all of the seedy backwater worlds our heroes and heroines visit, I find it unbelievable that they never encounter prostitution in general, let alone that of the metallic kind.

 

Also needs to reference, and incorporate:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/a-character-with-a-different-sexuality-in-star-wars-eu.50014459/

 

Thanks, added the link to the first post

 

I think the very fact that you have a droid based off of Bettie Page to be suggestive.

 

Stop it with the irrelevant spam posts.

 

How subtle the implication was? I'd say very. If it was even made, I blocked it out for my sanity.

Guri was an assassin droid, and I enjoyed her character. She ripped the head off Vigos and choked them. She took no guff. She fought Luke Skywalker equally in combat. She was often portrayed as more intelligent than her master. Xizor was a creeper, but that was not portrayed in a positive light at all. He also drugged Leia. I find the idea that Guri was a 'sex droid' stupid. It's a cliche for how often it appears in fiction, at least in manga/anime.

 

Was there actually no implication? Ah, my apologies. Maybe someone suggested it in a thread and I ended up remembering it as having actually happened. You're right; she was definitely an awesome character.

In which case we've had zero references to sex droids? And only a handful of references to prostitution in general? I'm not saying we need to have page-long descriptions of it, but the authors burying their heads in the sand and pretending it doesn't exist is another thing entirely. Which is kind of what I feel they're doing when characters walk through a seedy spaceport and acknowledge the pickpockets, the blaster-toting toughs, and the low-lifes smoking spice, and leave it at that. I mean, surely TIE pilots get shore leave. Should there really be that much stigma attached to sex? It's barely ever even acknowledged as existing.

 

No-one, from what I can recall in fandom, has addressed the following question:

After Anakin's duel and defeat at the hands of Obi-Wan during Episode III, he was dismembered.

He obviously lost his arms, legs, etc.

As a result, did Anakin (Vader) have a functioning penis? Did the heat and lava affect?

Could he have had more offspring, if he really wanted to?

I therefore refer you, dear readers, to the following article that is related to heat and sperm count:

http://www.menshealth.com/health/effect-heat-sperm-production

 

Guide to the sex thread going forward:

Before posting, take a moment to consider the following;

• Is this statement ill-informed?
• Are there decent odds that someone else made the same stupid statement a page ago, or will a page from now?
• Am I Bib Fartuna?

If any of the above applies to your post, perhaps you should reconsider.

 

There was total implication.


As he watched her walk away, he briefly considered telling her to disrobe and join him in the water. He had made her do that a few times when he wanted company he could trust absolutely, and she had demonstrated to his satisfaction that she could pass for a woman in virtually every way during those times . . .



There are also references to sex droids in Planet of Twilight -- the second-rate HRDs there are pretty much stated to be mostly for sex purposes. Anyway, there have been more references and implications than you'd probably realize, but it is a family franchise -- you're not going to get a lot of casual mentioning of hookers.

General warning to everybody: There was a reason the original thread was locked. If people cannot handle posting about this topic in a mature, responsible fashion, they will get edited and possibly banned. If too many people cannot handle it, the thread will be locked. No thirteen-year-old snickering juvenility. No drooling fantasies. No dirty-old-man routine. Serious discussion of the topic as presented in the GFFA or nothing.

 

Personal persecution and vilification is highly unwarranted, nor unneeded.

 

Grr...my post got eaten.

Okay, short version, I'm very much on the side of the implication approach. Star Wars, as a whole, across basically all media formats, is pretty much Teen rated. You can hide a lot under a teen rating (TOR sure does, and TCW managed to squeeze in some shockingly brutal fantasy violence in later seasons), but being sexually explicit is pretty much barred completely.

I don't think that's a problem, because generally explicit description of sexual content is done for the purpose of titillation, not for storytelling. The average Hollywood 'sex' scene, for example, is an excuse to show a female celebrity with as little clothing on as possible, not to convey anything useful about the characters through the lens of sexual experience. Given that, I think explicit sexual depictions are something Star Wars can safely forgo with a loss of very little real value.

 

I refer you to the work of one Jo Duffy.

On the face of it, you're right, and I apologize. But I'm not the only person who thinks you've walked a fine line here at times.

 

Well, that's the first I have heard of it! I have posted mainly in jest, tongue-in-cheek... if I have personally offended anyone, pray do tell...

(I apologize to the board at large if my sense-of-humor is out of line)

 

You get used to it around here.

 

Should we ever have to 'get used to it' in life?

 

That quote doesn't imply anything about Guri's character to me but rather Xizor's. To me that scene is no different than him using his 'pheromones' on various females throughout the story including Leia. Guri's just an assassin droid with a female personality. Considering her a sex droid would be like calling any human replica or human shaped droid one.

 

I've not been 'back' all that long, but thus far i've found Bib's posts to be generally somewhat amusing, and the post about Anakin did make me wonder for a moment - it falls under the topic of the thread, I would imagine - and would have in universe implications. I would assume he is sterile, if not non-functional, or just emotionally shut off from from his sexuality. After all, Dark Lord references that he has to have necrotic skin cleaned from his body, so that implies that at least droids in a sterile environment remove his suit, and he didn't immediately die at the end of TFU, so we can assume he can be without the suit for at least a short time.

I believe he is sterile, as otherwise he would have killed Starkiller, and used his own sperm to have a test-tube baby, if the Emperor hadn't beaten him to it. I also believe that after Padme, he is so emotionally wounded/shut off that he effectively has no libido.

 

I agree. Saying that more sexual content should be permitted or that there should be more references to it etc is all well and good, but what would the purpose of it be? Honestly? And how much do you trust our current crop of authors/writers to be able to tastefully and appropriately put discussions of sexual conduct or actual sex scenes into their works? I've seen enough embarrassingly bad sex scenes in movies that are thrown in for cheap titillation (Star Trek 2009 and Into Darkness), and enough of the bad teenage romance novels (Twilight), that I don't want that in Star Wars. Unless it's done right, I'd rather it not be done at all.

 

This was my initial thought on it and I don't know that I conveyed it well enough in the other thread–but my point was, does Troy Denning write females in skimpy outfits for the plot, or for the purpose of having females in skimpy outfits? For example, did Leia have to wear a tube top and Daisy Dukes, or could she as easily have been disguised as, say, a normal female of any of dozens of species, fully-clothed? Was the only purpose of having Leia in a tube top and Daisy Dukes to excite Denning and disgust Jaina? If so, it was not needed (and I don't think it was). Same with Alema–the only difference here is that it was written into Alema's character for her to dress like that, and it isn't in Leia's character.

 

While personally I'm hardly clamoring for more sex scenes in the EU, I think a lot of talk about whether the "current crop of authors" could handle it is just shorthand for "I don't like Denning so no". Keep in mind that the "current" SW author roster includes JJM, Stradley, Lebbon, Reaves, Zahn, and Allston--all people who either have handled sex maturely in the past or who I'm perfectly confident could if they wanted to.