#note to self: do NOT sign up for 2 lab+lecture courses in the same semester

[alistairian]

Stressed all yesterday cuz I forgot to do an assignment that was due today but now classes got canceled and I have an extra week to do it ❤️

[prophetkristy]

slayer of stars

Twenty years ago today, I came down the hill from my History 101 course with my brain a-whirring, made my way to the computer lab in the dungeon basement of my dorm, logged onto Usenet [1], and posted the following to alt.fan.wedge:

Subject: SW and animism From: Kristy <…@uidaho.edu> Date: 1997/08/28 Message-ID: <872787391.28561@dejanews.com> Newsgroups: alt.fan.wedge

Okay, I just got back from my History of Western Civilization class, and I have to vent. It’s no secret that GL got his ideas from other cultures and traditions. So it wasn’t too surprising when my teacher(who’s pretty awesome, IMO) was explaining animism today, he used SW as an example. (it sure made taking notes a lot easier. ::g::) Animists believe that the universe is alive, i.e., the Force is there. And they have shamans who are basically Jedi knights. I identified with evrything he was saying until he got to explaining their general classes of gods. Here’s what they have: the old father god, the young warrior god, the young goddess of war/love, and the trickster. There were parallels here to SW: trickster=Han Solo, wise father=Obi-Wan, goddess=Leia. But my teacher went on and on about how the young warrior was the coolest of all, he went off and fought battles and monsters and all the cool stories were about him. So who else would he choose for the SW parallel but Farm Boy. Bleah! I _almost_ went up to him after class and protested. Farm Boy isn’t the coolest warrior! _Wedge_ is, of course!

Yet another example of the oppression Wedge fans suffer at the hands of Farm Boy…. ::sigh:: Well, he’s guaranteed I’ll remember _that_ part of the lecture.

How about: Vote Wedge. He’s the true animist warrior god.

Thank you for listening, you’re the only people who would ever understand. :-)

–Kristy [2], off to an astronomy lab

Palpatine’s dead. Vote Wedge. –Antilles/Celchu ‘00–

From such humble [?!] beginnings was the True Animist Warrior God movement born. (Some time later I printed out a post signed with the TAWG [3] campaign slogan and taped said slogan onto my history notebook.)

This was not to bag on the history course. It was only the second day, as far as I can tell from my notes [4]. I had wanted to take the honors section of the course, but it wouldn’t fit in the schedule of other classes I was taking [5]. It turns out that I don’t regret this, as I very much enjoyed the class. It was actually taught by a graduate student, IIRC, and he was very good; he described many events in a human context with the emotions and motivations of the players. [6] Really, the worst thing about the course was that it was at 7 am—a less than ideal way, shall we say, to start college [7]. (Oh my TAWG, I’m going absolutely berserk with the footnotes! My brain keeps going off on tangents, but I don’t want to interrupt myself all the time. wheeee!)

(Interestingly, the next semester I continued on with Hist 102, which this time was taught by a professor. Who wasn’t nearly as interesting as the grad student!)

According to my heading for the Animism post in the Classic Threads section of the AFW website [8], I previously linked Star Wars to the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh–where Farmboy was Gilgamesh, taking all the credit, and Wedge was Enkidu, doing all the work. I think now this might be a little revisionist history. I can’t remember in which course I read Gilgamesh, but it’s likely that it was Lit of Western Civ that same semester (high school Senior AP English was British lit, where we watched every Jane Austen movie Ever Made *gag*). The earliest post of mine I can find referencing the two was actually the *next* week or so, in the midst of the Epic, Historical “Fantasy Toys” Thread, in response to Quiara:

> We understand you, dear. Where else could I admit to writing a Hero > essay about him in the same year that I did a book report on Rogue > Squadron?

I really want to write my Lit of Western Civ essay on the parallels between Gilgamesh/Enkidu and Luke/Wedge, but I could never get four pages out of that and have my teacher actually like it. ::pout:: [9]

Both of these posts were commenting on what I felt (still do feel, to some extent) was a sad state of affairs in being a WedgeFan. Namely, that Wedge was a lot cooler than most people give him credit for. (And, underlying that feeling, a WedgeFan’s natural disdain for Luke “Farmboy” [10] Skywalker.) This would reach its fannish culmination in the Book of Wedge, but had real-world significance in the woeful lack of a separate carded Wedge Antilles action figure. As well as the lack of Wedge awareness among those who weren’t huge pilotfans.

Despite that, 1997 was a fantastic year to be a WedgeFan. Maybe if you weren’t Quiara, Brett, or myself, it was different—we three were quite chatty—but I never heard anyone complain. ;-) [11] It wasn’t actually our most active year, but it was the beginning of what I think of as the “golden years” of AFW. The first four X-Wing books (by Historian of Wedge Michael A. Stackpole) had been released by January 1997, and Mike actually lurked and occasionally even posted. I joined in the spring of 1997 as a senior in high school (with a very embarassing post which will not be reproduced here). Quiara was in high school. Brett wasn’t being challenged too much by work or life, because he also apparently had a lot of time on his hands. Somehow the three of us had some mojo (and also probably high blood sugar content) that just led to wacky hijinks. Quiara declared Wedge’s candidacy for President in April, a story which would last well *past* the 2004 election. I declared him TAWG in August. The Fantasy Toys thread was started earlier in August, thus cementing me into the AFW madness and keeping me frequently posting even when I probably should have been paying attention to college. (eh. I gradutated.) The “the world is falling down…” thread was that year, too.

Of all the Internet friends I have, interestingly it’s Quiara and Brett whom I’ve never met in real life. I actually haven’t heard from Quiara in years; she dropped off the radar at about the time she started college, I think, thus proving her work (study) ethic. ;-) I can’t say I really knew her all that well—AFW was almost exclusively the limit of our interaction—but I still consider her to have been an early partner in crime. I still hear from Brett occasionally, and I actually can’t believe I haven’t found myself visiting his city before now. Brett holds a special place in my memory not only for being such an integral part of that first crazy year on AFW, but also for scoring me the Wedge action figure I like to call “biceps Wedge”–the one from the Milennium Falcon carrying case, which his comics store was selling loose for some reason.

Resorting again to Google Groups (we never know, when we’re making history, that we are doing so, and as such fail to keep track of these things), it looks like I first styled myself Prophet Kristy on October 8, 1997, in a short thread titled “Random Thoughts.” [12] Quiara, bless her heart, actually accused me of being humble:

> –Kristy, Prophet of the Great One

Just a prophet? you could make Cardinal at least, if you wanted.

(Yeah, maybe I could have—I am Catholic, after all—but, y'know, “Prophetess” works better on the back of a kickball shirt that “Cardinal”. “-ess.” Er, see what I mean?)

One month later (AFAICT) I first signed a post as “Prophet Kristy”–and the rest, as they say, is history.

I could go on and on with the AFW nostalgia——but I should probably get to work on actual, you know, work. And this is getting LONG. However, I do want to mention one other thing in relation to the TAWG / Prophetess thing.

The Book of Wedge was my default icon on LiveJournal—a little cartoon made by terrathree, originally for Terra Group, that she kindly made 100x100 when I started LJing. I didn’t actually come up with the idea for the Book of Wedge—the document I wrote was largely an adaptation from “The Adventures of Wedge Antilles” written by Mike Scorsch and posted on his late web page Corellian Bloodstripes. I’d always been greatly amused by the idea of revisionist SW history with Wedge being the person behind *everything*–especially having Wedge actually blow the first DS as well as the second. Having declared myself a Prophet, I also felt it was only fair that I write a Holy Book. Thus was born the Book of Wedge, wherein Wedge not only blows up both Death Stars, but also shoots Greedo, fights off the Slave I with a blaster, and generally saves the day. In it, I declared Quiara and Brett to be Apostles of Wedge along with Jim and Marji, two others who were in the thick of AFW in late 1997. And generally had a blast being silly and fangirly.

Quiara followed this up with the Book of Quiara, a short history of the campaign and other silliness. And much later, terrathree expanded on an observation I’d made about the constellation Orion looking like an X-wing and wrote the tale of the Hunter of the Sky.

These are only a few of the many, many tales of Wedge spawned by AFW, but they are the Holiest. So sayeth the Prophetess of the Great One, Wedge Antilles, the True Animist Warrior God. *makes the Sign of the Exploding Death Star*

I imagine our old IRC chat server probably doesn’t even exist anymore (is IRC even still a thing??)–Feast Days used to always be Chat Days–but have a good Feast Day of Wedge, won’t you all? Do the Ewok Dance, drink some Ewok Juice, bag on Farmboy, and revel in the glory of the Rebellion’s Greatest Starpilot.

[1]=Yeahhhhhh, Usenet. Back in the day. [2]=As you see, I didn’t self-identify then as Prophetess; that was to come later. Wow, I’d forgotten I used to use my fanfic Knave Leader and the ASCII parked X-wing in my .sig. Nifty. [3]=I’m almost positive that Morwen was the one to coin that acronym. Once again showing us all up with her mad language skillz, especially considering this isn’t her native tongue. [4]=yes, I’m enough of a nerd that I’ve kept my freshman history notes. [5]=probably this was a good thing, since I was taking the honors sections of Chemistry 111 AND English <memfault—Literature of Western Civilization>. [6]=I haven’t been able to turn him up by Googling, but I hope he found himself a faculty position somewhere; he deserves it. [7]=I cordially loathe all those students who boast of arranging their schedules to never start before 10 or 12. I was never able to do that—there was always a class I needed that was a 7:30 or 8 or 8:30. Pout. [8]=Yeah, I know it’s gone. It needs a new server space. And its webmistress needs to pay attention to it. I’ll just have to link to Google posts here. [9]=It looks like I had dropped the Knave Leader by this time, but was still not calling myself Prophet Kristy. [10]=How much do I love that Mara always calls him Farmboy? [11]=Oh, no, that came much later, spurring the Project Boussh Polite Flame War of '01(?). [12]=this was also apparently the thread that spawned the phrase “rakish rebel scum”, which Brett quickly hailed as a great band name. And it was only a 7 post thread! aaah, for the time to just read and relive the posts of those years.