User:PacifistPrime

Hi there! I'm Pacifist Prime, longtime Wikipedian, hopefully to be an even longer-time Wookieepedian! I'm a writer from Sydney who has the misfortune of living in a share-house full of Star Wars nuts. They recently discovered this wiki and hooked me onto it too and I was amazed to see that I was already a contributor without even knowing it!

You see, I was the original creator/writer of the (fairly large) article Lucas Bashing back in its original form on Wikipedia, from which it has evidently been copied here. Back on Wikipedia it was subject to a huge, long, stupid and very ugly debate, besieged by users who variously thought it was not notable, biased/POV and even outright slanderous to Lucas. Which amazed me; all I was ever trying to do was point out that many SW fans have an entrenched tendency to bash on Lucas for things that they don't like about SW and yet never seem to praise him for the elements which they DO enjoy. I went to great lengths to make the article purely descriptive and as neutral as possible, and yet many people felt it was inherently biased for or, (bafflingly, more frequently) against Lucas.

Anyway, I dipped out of the argument myself after a while, as it had all got too incredibly unpleasant and illogical. In my absence the article was split in two, creating a second article called Fan criticism of George Lucas, which I see has also been replicated here on Wookieepedia.

The Lucas Bashing argument has been heavily re-written by others, both on Wikipedia and (it seems) even more so here on Wookieepedia. In many cases it was for the best, including the addition of various sources to back up my argument which I myself never had the time or patience to find, despite my coviction over the accuracy of my facts. For those of you who are interested to know, the Lucas Bashing article as it now exists here bears only vague resemblence to what I originally wrote. The essential core of my argument (as stated briefly above) has been largely lost, but a lot of other things I was saying have remained, albeit in a heavily rewritten form. However, the split article Fan criticism of George Lucas actually still remains quite close to what I wrote, with about 80-95% of its content still being my original text.

As to me personally and my possible continued contribution to Wookieepedia, I'm very interested in how fandom reacts to the SW material over time, particularly hostile/mixed reactions to the prequels and probing less obvious reasons behind such responses. I'm also interested in the intersections of the EU, fandom, fanon and merchandising with the canon of the main films & TV spinoffs. Although I will do my best to respect Wookieepedia's rules/customs regarding official canonicity, I will just state here that I see SW canon as an intrinsically unstable thing filled with mutual contradictions, and that I regard many notionally canonical sources (other than the films) with a grain of salt, despite being "official" in LucasFilm's eyes.

Anyone interested in expanding the general topic of Lucas Bashing ie fan reaction to new articles? For example, I'd be interested in an article specifically exploring commonly-held bits of fanon and EU canon that were gradually eroded or contradicted by subsequent films, or also looking into an article detailing retcons and "continuity massages" used in Rebellion-Era and New Jedi Order onwards texts to accomodate apparent contradictions to EU canon by the prequels. I'd be interested in spearheading such things but would certainly need some collaborators.

Love to all, PacifistPrime.