Star Wars Fan-Ficcery Revisted

This is a weird one:

I.M.P.S. The Relentless Chapter 2 from Blacksheep Productions on Vimeo.

It’s a Star-Wars fan-fic movie, and a fairly accomplished one at that – in its way… although I’m not entirely sure what (if anything) is actually going on.

What’s weird about it, is that the whole thing is shot from the POV of The Evil Empire in a style that’s a cross between Star-Ship Troopers (which is satire, that an awful lot of people didn’t get) and an embedded “documentary” of America’s ill-advised adventures in Where-everistan. It’s like an docu-advert for Darth Vader’s side.

I think the motivation for it is “filling in the detail”… but as I said previously, fan-fic to me always feels like kids playing at being grown-ups… more often than not doing things that they’ve seen being done on television. This clip is like a really, really subtle satire on something – so subtle in fact, that I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that’s being satirised.

I mean back in the 70s/80s (in NZ at least) you couldn’t turn the TV on without there being some American Import involving a hero “Accused of a Craarm he did not commit”. Everything from The Hulk, to Rambo, to Sigmund and the Sea-monsters, to The A-Team, to Dukes of Hazzard etc… “Just-a-fightin the system like-a-two modern-day Robin-hoods… Yeeehaaaer”…

… and now the chips have fallen again, the dust has settled… and out of the fantasy-milieu comes this clip… where the Americans have managed to change sides… and are now on the side of the empire (shooting at Han Solo’s ship?)… but “are just doing their jobs”. I thought it was traditional for bad guys to have European Accents? In the 70s Darth’s lot were all British weren’t they? I never expected Imperial Storm Troopers to sound a bit like John Wayne in Green Berets.

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A bit lower down the page that I found this on is an advert for Eve Online… which I find quite interesting as well, although I’ve never played it. Never dared to. I have an extremely addictive personality.

But anyway – it’s this massive multi-player online game set in space… comes from Iceland I think, and at one point was in the top 10 biggest computer clusters in the world. Obviously there are about a million clips of game-play on Youtube

And I can never really tell what’s going on, although it is quite photogenic.

There is Sooooo much “content” out there surrounding this game – thousands of sites, millions of man-hours… stories etc etc… none of which is the slightest bit interesting unless you’re on the inside.

There seems to be this drift towards a virtual parallel universe where movies and games and reality all overlap… a bit like the universe of Dune, but where everyone’s an annoying teenage boy, with really bad taste in music.

Still… not attempting to use the first clip to read anything into the wider culture. It’s just quite an odd thing to see… usually Sci-Fi is about an anti-hero set in an oppressive culture. It’s quite odd to see a story told from the POV of the oppressive culture – well, in fiction anyway. In our own wider culture we hardly ever hear anything else – that’s what embedded reporting is for.