#bc tros was such a mess and there's really no point trying to make sense of it...

[supremeprince-bensolo]

do you think dathan and miramir made bad batch season 3

With Palpatine and Project Necromancer being a big part of this season, it's definitely a possibility!

[bedlamsbard]

fascinated by the distinction drawn between "audience member" and "fic writer" bc I think I know what you mean in regards to kind of re-writing it in your own head not as the secondary way of interacting with it but as the first. But I would not have thought of putting it that way!

A lot of it has to do with the specific fic genre I write in, which is long plotty AUs that I’ll probably be working on for years -- to some extent I can set aside everything in canon that occurs in in-universe chronology after the span of my story; Backbone and Crown doesn’t have to take into account the events of the OT and ST because they haven’t occurred yet.  On the other hand, I can’t totally set aside major set piece events that involve causes and players outside of whatever characters and timeline I’m working with, because depending what I’m working with things are still going to happen whether or not my characters are involved.

And I make compromises all the time about whether things are going to make it into the story -- there’s a whole discarded Backbone subplot about Zare Leonis that I considered really carefully before not including, even with the knowledge that leaving him and his interaction with Ezra out of the story meant that his arc in the Servants of the Empire novels will be completely changed.  Backbone covers about half the span of S1, maybe less; I was always running out the timeline of S1 to figure out what events would be happening that would or would or not be affected by the Ghosts’ changed circumstances and if that merited being included in the story.  Rebels S1 is very small-scale; going further into the timeline of the show means that opens up further and further and a lot of other factors are in play.  The earliest version of Backbone was also quite different; the Free Ryloth fleet didn’t exist, Cham and Alecto were members of the Rebel Alliance, a number of other Rebel Alliance characters were there; I reworked it after Siege came out and it was revealed that the Rebel Alliance wasn’t yet a thing.

With Gambit, otoh, there were a lot of galactic-scale repercussions; I was always running the timeline back and forth and figuring out what the originating events were and how those would play out in the altered timeline of this single-point divergence AU.  But the crucial difference is that for Gambit (and Wake), I was working is that I was working with a closed canon -- I didn’t have to worry about something down the line adding something to the in-universe chronology, and a lot of it was heavily altered by the divergence point anyway.  (Actually, that canon reopened partway through Wake when The Lost Missions dropped in a way that was relevant; the chip scenes were somewhat shoehorned in because I couldn’t leave that out.)  Crown is working in a tighter timeline but one that comes a lot closer to the set piece events of the saga; I have “where is this in relation to Rogue One?” running through my head when I’m working through any of the Rebel Alliance scenes.  There are a number of small-scale changes that aren’t immediately clear (because the story’s not finished) that have come about because of the story’s divergence point that would have a much greater influence on galactic events than they did in canon.

When it comes to out-of-universe chronology, the added canon that comes out after I’ve already started working on a story, it can be a lot harder to deal with.  95% of the time, if the additional canon deals with the character/setting of my WIP, I’m going to ignore the bulk of it but occasionally integrate details here and there as relevant (such as the name of the Tann Province in Backbone -- you may note it doesn’t show up until quite late in the story, after the S3 ep aired).  I didn’t change the names of the Inquisitors -- in fact, I made the decision early on that however I named the Inquisitors it would be different from what canon did, as that was prior to them being called “Seventh Sister”, “Fifth Brother,” etc.  5% of the time it’s something that I cannot ignore, like the clones and the chips -- that’s pretty rare, tbh, but it happens.  (I’ve scrapped a story because of additional canon; I had a chunk of Kanan/Hera time travel written where they both got thrown back to the Clone Wars, but the Kanan - The Last Padawan comic coming out threw me too badly with their clones as opposed to my OCs.)  To some extent, I try to only work with the canon that was available when I started writing that story; that’s not entirely sustainable with canon coming out so rapidly, and sometimes it can throw out a reader.

The worst part, as a fic writer, about dealing with additional canon isn’t trying to integrate it into an ongoing story: it’s that it may change how I feel about Star Wars, or if it’s done poorly, I may end up in the kind of mental place where I get very “why am I doing this when the canon doesn’t even care.”  There’s a scene in the Darth Vader comics where the Inquisitors are doing shots after killing a Jedi and stealing his baby.  When that particular issue came out, I was working on the big Inquisitors vs. Kanan & Ahsoka fight scene in Backbone, and I was so badly thrown by the disconnect that I had to step away for a few days.  I hated the Rebels finale so much that I couldn’t work on Backbone for a while even though it’a completely different universe.  A lot of what canon did with Ahsoka post-S2, and the way she gets idolized by both fandom and the PTB, has messed with my perception of her so much that with Crown Ahsoka and the backend of Backbone Ahsoka I didn’t trust myself writing her and had to have multiple beta readers just for her characterization, something I have never worried about before.  (This is one reason I did that deep dive the other week to figure out what the hell was going on in the writers room about her, and honestly?  I feel better about it now that I’ve rationalized what was going on in a way that makes sense to me.)  I had to stop reading the Doctor Aphra comics because Hera was so out of character there that I was getting really, really upset (and also the animal harm), and then I just stopped reading all the SW comics because they were making me mad and I wasn’t enjoying myself.  Sometimes you get big universe consequences stuff that doesn’t deal with your main characters (looking at you, TROS) and it’s frustrating if you don’t like it!  Then I have to sit down and try to decide “hey, am I going to use any of this Palpatine stuff?” -- this was actually a problem for Crown, because the Palpatine scenes weren’t written yet when TROS came out, and I was so badly thrown by TROS that I didn’t know how to deal with that in Crown even though it’s mostly not relevant.  Would I be happiest if I was working in a closed canon, or if at least I knew (or thought) my main characters weren’t going to get any more canon stories about them? GODS, YES, THIS IS WHY I STARTED WRITING PREQUEL FIC BACK IN THE LATE 2000S.  (Ironically, I started writing PT fic before TCW came out, then flipped fandoms and came back in 2012 -- but all my 2012 PT fic only used the closed canon of the EU Clone Wars/Republic comics, not TCW.)

Mostly as an audience member I don’t want to see my writing characters on the screen anymore -- there’s a certain amount of hypervigilance that comes with having your writing characters or settings active in canon, even if you don’t intend to integrate any of that.  I watch and read Star Wars very differently than I watch and read anything else; I mostly don’t find it relaxing because I’m always aware of the fact that the stuff I care about could pop up at any moment, or because I’m concentrating so hard on characterization/nuance/worldbuilding that my brain is going 150 mph, or because I have very specific deal-breakers.  (I do find reading in the EU relaxing because bro, that is CLOSED CANON.)  I would like to relax!  If canon finally contorts itself to the point I can relax again that will be a relief, tbh, even as frustrating as it would also be.

...this is probably a much longer response than you expected.