Scene from The Terran Jedi, (Fenspace Infinite edition) Wrote:“So.” Fnord said with a sidelong glance at Xander. “A Jedi, huh? I’m sure there’s a dilly of a story there.”
“Oh there is,” Xander replied. “A great big dilly ding-dong of a story, starting with a chaos mage, a spell and dressing up as Obi-Wan Kenobi for Halloween.”
Fnord blinked and cocked his head to one side, like a dog who’d just been told to tap-dance. “Who?” he asked and Xander blinked.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he repeated. “You know, bearded guy, trained Luke, died fighting Vader in A New Hope?”
“Noooo,” Fnord replied. “In the Star Wars I know Akira Dainoga trained Luke through the first couple’a movies, then died facing Vader in Return of the Jedi.” He gave Xander a cockeyed grin. “Are you sure you’re using that thing correctly?”
Xander stared at the interdimensional traveller for a long second, then sighed. “You know I’ve told this story a dozen times,” he said, “and this is the first time that the Star Wars part was more freaky than the magic spell part.”
“Enh,” Fnord waved. “It happens. They probably haven’t released your version at home yet. When this is all over I’ll see if I can’t send you a gift basket with all seven of the original series.”
“Wow, seven?”
“Yeah. They did a reboot starting a couple years ago but… not a fan to be honest.”
Well, I promised a big ol’ effortpost, so let’s talk about Fenspace and popular culture.
At heart, Fenspace is a world in love with pop culture, no need to be evasive. And in Fenspace Infinite we’ve got a whole multiverse to work with, to seek out and find all of our favorite media stars and go have adventures with them.
So why am I suggesting that we lock down Fenspace Infinite’s pop culture so it’s different from ours or Fenspace’s mainline? Well, imagine a crossover/SI story where one party is expressly fictional to the other party. How many of those stories have the protagonist use reading-ahead-in-the-script powers to solve all the problems, win all the things and drain all the dramatic tension out of the encounter? A lot of them, right? Using fictional omniscience to drive a plot is tricky at best, and it’s tempting to just steamroll because the outtime protagonists already know everything. So my proposal is to remove the temptation, at least in part.
“But Mal!” I hear you cry, “what about Fenspace? What about our beloved Trekkies and Warsies and anime fans? Does this mean they’re now going to have to be boring mundanes?”
No! Don’t be silly! Of course not, we just have to tweak pop culture a little.
It’s an alternate universe, we can do that.
Let’s take Star Wars as an example. OTL and mainline Fenspace have the same basic pattern: the three original movies, then 15 years of increasingly weird spinoff material until the three not-as-good-as-the-originals prequels. So for Infinite we can mix things up a bit:
(This material’s adapted from an AH.com timeline called “http://www.alternatehistory.com/discuss ... ?p=5566674]An Alternate Rise of the Blockbuster,” which is short & worth taking a look at for tweaking ideas.)
* Instead of the OT/PT we have a full seven movies produced in sequence from 1978 - 1990.
* Lucas only directs the first one with the others farmed out to other directors. (My personal favorite is Lucas tapping David Cronenberg to direct Chapter IV. Yeah.)
* The scripts are different, based more in earlier drafts, resulting in new places and characters.
* Some of the actors have the same roles (Carrie Fisher frex) but others get changed, sometimes radically (Levar Burton as Han Solo? It could happen…)
The result is a Star Wars story that’s familiar in the broad strokes - Rebels vs. Empire, Jedi vs. Sith, good vs. evil - but the details have changed. Warsies still exist, the movies were still successful (with seven of them they’d have to be) and people still dress up like Jedi and carry lightsabers, so all of that is familiar… but if you came from OTL cold there’d be so much you didn’t recognize. Or if you came from Fenspace Infinite to the OTL galaxy far far away (or a timeline where the OTL version of Star Wars is the known one) then things would be recognizable but still unfamiliar.
This is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say we can tweak pop culture in Infinite. We don’t have to do this with everything pop-cultural, that’s a lot of work and despite my grouching I’m not above some fanboy geeking out, but I do think making changes to key Fen cultural touchstones (Wars, Trek, Whedon, Dr. Who, some key anime) helps heighten the differences, especially as the Convention starts reaching out and touching some of those strange new worlds.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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