Fan works that have helped you think about Star Wars?

[Glelukun]

I was thinking recently about some of the particular ideas I have when preparing for or playing in my SWD6REUp game, or when I guest GM our occasional GM-had-no-time-this-week dark side mini-campaign. Ideas about e.g, how the empire or the rebellion work, practically or rhetorically, or how I think about what happens materially or affectively for characters when we use Force points. Of course I’m thinking about my favourite bits from the films, TV series, and other media (for some reason passages from Splinter of the Mind’s Eye always stuck with me) as well as more recently hints from WEG material.

But another source that I find myself drawing on strangely often is this pair of essays by RPG writer Malcolm Sheppard. They’re written as texts produced in-universe, as if by a historian or a political scientist, trying to analyse and explain events from the Skywalker saga with a particular limited - and in places purposefully characterised as misinformed - viewpoint. That frame does make them a bit wordy, but for me at least the juice was worth the squeeze.

The first is Leia Organa: a critical obituary written as part of a tribute around the time of Carrie Fisher’s (RiP<3) passing.

Later he wrote a longer sort of companion piece,
The Dark Side of Capital: Economics, Ideology and Palpatine’s Empire, which dives further into the character of a stuffy theorist, even coining the term noetic capital to talk about the influence of the Force on events.

To me they’re really cool first just because they give us another of those extra angles of view that can be so helpful in revisiting any setting, and secondly because the particular angle they give us is of an outsider to the story without being an outsider to the world, in this case an academic, trying to figure out these huge events with their own pre-existing framework. Almost anyone we write or play is an outsider to a lot of these events too, and sparks often fly for me once I’m able to pinpoint what their framework and point of view on the history unfolding around them is.

I’m wondering if anyone else has had an unofficial fanwork serve as this kind of fun touchstone for Star Wars inspiration!
_________________
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. [...] Remember this. Try."
— The Trail of Political Consciousness, Karis Nemik

[CRMcNeill]

I posted a link to the Publius files a while back. Lots of deep-dive stuff there.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index