Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

NHS: the National Health Service - formed based on recommendations of the Beveridge Report following the Second World War by Clement Attlee's Socialist Labour government to provide universal health care for citizens of the United Kingdom.

GP: General practitioner - a doctor.

 

She enjoyed the battleship, but things didn't work out.

But I have a date tomorrow with a girl I met on Match.com, so we will see what happens!

--Adm. Nick

 

Well, good luck.

 

I've never been able to take online dating services seriously after having watched Sneakers. That said, good luck, Nick, Force be with you and all that.

 

Good news, bad news on the Erikson front:

Fall of Light, Book 2 of the Kharkanas trilogy aka Anomandaris prequel bumped to Feb 2015!

BUT....

Willful Child bumped forward to Sept 2014!

 

Dammit. I read FoD back in January. It took a while to take off, and a lot of the cameos felt a bit pointless, but it was overall an enjoyable book. Although, Willful Child does sound pretty entertaining.

Also, I've decided that Giancarlo Esposito would make an excellent Adaephon Ben Delat.

 

The Secret Origin of Starkiller (OOU):

"...A similar situation arose with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’s protagonist, Starkiller. “[That name] was only supposed to be a nickname or call sign, not a proper name from the beginning,” a former LucasArts employee says. The development team hoped that Lucas would give Vader’s apprentice a Darth moniker, which at the time, was something that didn’t happen often.
“The team threw a Hail Mary to George, saying the game would have more credibility if the apprentice had a ‘Darth’ title,” a Force Unleashed team member says. Lucas agreed that this situation made sense for Sith royalty, and offered up two Darth titles for the team to choose from. “He threw out ‘Darth Icky’ and ‘Darth Insanius.’ There was a pregnant pause in the room after that. People waiting for George to say ‘just kidding,’ but it never comes, and he just moved on to another point.”
Team members involved in the decision to not use these ridiculous Darth titles could not be reached for comment, but three LucasArts employees believe an excuse was made to push the Darth title to the sequel. By the time development on that title commenced, the names were long forgotten by Lucas and weren’t muttered by the development team again. Starkiller remained Starkiller in the games, but was also named Galen Marek in the greater Expanded Universe fiction."

 

canon

I think that shows how seriously Lucas took TFU, or how "involved" he was in the plot. He didn't care.

The Indiana Jones game that the article mentions was potentially going to be developed by Terminal Reality, but they opted to do the Ghostbusters game instead, which worked out since the Indiana Jones game was cancelled. I guess they chose GB because it was a new story rather than an adaptation of a film.

Edit: I do think the article is somewhat misleading when it rattles off several of the games that never got developed. Stuff like Jedi Master, Smuggler, Rebel Warrior, etc. were all competing ideas to be developed in-house, and the project ultimately became TFU. There was never a scenario in which all of them could have been developed by other studios.

 

Ugh. Thank the Force and the gods that be the Maker no longer has anything to do with the franchise. I'm glad the LucasArts team had the cajones to ignore the suggestions; if Darth Vader had said, "Now rise, Darth Icky," I would have thrown my controller at the karking screen.

 

I'm partial toward Darth Insanius myself.

 

We will eventually get Darth Iki. Somewhere. TOR, maybe.

 

I'm sure someone has a Darth Icky in TOR right now.

 

Darth Ikki:

 

I do wonder if that Lucas story concerning TFU isn't embellished or otherwise told in a way to assert an agenda.

Like why is LucasArts asking Lucas to come up with a Darth name? Del Rey had a "Darth Who?" contest, for god's sake. It isn't this sacred thing that only Lucas can decree.

I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas didn't say he was joking because he felt they knew he was joking and he didn't want to come up with a name to describe a character that he didn't invent and probably didn't know much about.

 

From what it sounds like, it was in a meeting they had with him to discuss story ideas and planning, likely keeping him up to date on what sort of story they wanted to tell with TFU. Note that, after he proposed the names, they moved on to other matters, meaning it wasn't a meeting solely to ask him that question, it was just one item on the agenda. And, like with Stewjon, George's jokes are often taken far, far too seriously.

 

I think George Lucas is taken too seriously in general.

 

He's taken too seriously in some aspects, and not taken seriously at all in others. It's a strange dichotomy. He is the literal punchline to jokes about bad movies, bad writers and bad directors, but we're a part of a fanbase that, in a lot of ways, hang on every word he says like he spits gold.

 

Rhett? With a Darth title?

Hmm.

Darth Sult.

 

It's kind of hard to ignore him when his every word is, quite literally, law for every single aspect of the universe, past, present, and future.

 

I'm not sure if it's his insistence or simply the whole "yes man" culture that people rail against.

 

If someone were to ask him what's Motti's first name, would he even remember his previous answer?

That said, Conan Antonio Motti 4ever.