Ad Astra and Star Wars

A quick aside. As I'm getting close to finishing the expansion content with my Jedi Knight, and getting closer at least to finishing the class stories with characters five and six (leaving me only two to go; and if I'm skipping much of the content except the class stories for all four of them, it'll all happen pretty fast) I'm thinking that my recording characters are closer to being due to start than I sometimes think. I'm doing what I can to gather the proper cosmetics for them all. One of those is weapon crystals. While in theory it applies to any weapon, in actuality, of course, it only really matters a lot for lightsabers. What have I used, and what am I thinking of using still? 

I haven't been very interested in the "common" crystals, just because they're too bland looking, or we've seen them too many times for them to still be interesting, I guess. While I can't remember all of the crystals that I've ever used for any of my characters, I know for sure that my Sith Marauder was wielding dual amythest colored lightsabers for a while, before upgrading to the black-orange crystals for both sabers, which is possibly my favorite of all of the lightsaber colors of all time. Imagine a darksaber, except instead of a white nimbus or halo, it's a fiery, lava-colored yellow-orange. Just amazing. They're not cheap, so I was hoping to get a good alternative with the charred orange cartel market crystals, but honestly, those are kind of flat and bland in comparison, unfortunately. His companion Jaesa, who wields a dual-saber, I had with first amythest, then white-purple-blue (not to be confused with the white-blue-purple) which I liked, but I've since updated her to the hot orange. I now have hot orange in my collections, and it is an amazing looking crystal, that I'm sure I want to use more of... although I'm not 100% sure where I want to use it yet. 

I can't remember what I did with my Jedi Guardian, but I know that for quite a while now, he's been using the black-blue crystal. I really like all of the black core crystals, and this one is a much cooler color than the hot black-orange, obviously. 

My Jedi Shadow was using crafted lightsabers, and for a while I didn't put any color crystals in them, because I wanted to see the crafted lightsabers in their natural color. I quit doing this, though. I haven't leveled up enough to use all of them yet, but with only one exception, they were all basic yellow. I recently put an extra white-purple-blue crystal in his current saber, but I may end up using the hot orange with him when I update to my next lightsaber again. 

My Sith Assassin has been using the black-purple crystal, which is just as cool as the black-blue. Of course, with a dual saber, you see more of it.

I can't remember what color I used to have with Kira, who was my companion most of the time after I got her up until I couldn't have her any more (I now usually use my security key customized T7.) I'm sure I bounced around with a few different colors with her over time. 

My plans for my next wave aren't entirely finalized. I'm swapping the advanced class for each of my classes, though, so I since I have two dual-saber wielders now, I won't have any next time around. My Jedi Sentinel will be using the rakghoul lightsabers, but instead of their default green blades, I'll be using the special rakghoul black-green crystals, which is probably as cool a color as the black-orange crystal, and I'm really looking forward to seeing him running around using them. I've got the sabers and crystals already in my legacy bank, so I expect he'll pick it up in the fleet as soon as he finishes Tython.

All three of the other lightsaber wielders use one, regular lightsaber from this point on; the Sith Juggernaut, the Sith Sorcerer and the Jedi Sage. The colors I have on my radar, although I'm not sure who will use what, are the black-red crystal, the hot red crystal, and maybe the crafted fire-red crystal. That's a lot of red, though—I'm not 100% sure I want my Jedi Sage using a red lightsaber. But maybe I do, because they all look pretty cool. If I can find a sovereign gold and blue at a not outrageous price, I might think about that one. If not, yellow-blue is pretty similar, althouh more blueish, while the sovereign one ends up looking a bit more purple. Frost white might be an option too. And although I've done black-blue and black-purple already, I didn't record either of them, and I might want to. For that matter, the same might be true of the black-orange.

And I do have companion characters with lightsabers sometimes that can use some of these colors that my actual character maybe does not.

Anyway, that's all discussion about cosmetics, which probably don't matter too much except that I'm recording this for posterity and I want them to look as cool as possible for that reason. Otherwise, I like bouncing around with looks for my characters, although I won't be doing that with my recorded versions. But I've talked more about this than I wanted to already. What I really wanted to talk about was compare where I am with Ad Astra and where Star Wars is.

It's no surprise that Ad Astra started as Star Wars, and then I decided not to play in someone else's sandbox, but I did want to use a lot of the exact same types of influences and have a very similar feel. In this regard, however, I'm more interested in mirroring the feel that was shown—and hinted at—during the first movie only along with the drafts of the first movie, and the comments and directions that Lucas and crew thought that they were going to go following the first movie but before they really got very far along in developing what became The Empire Strikes Back. What exactly does that mean? I actually think that it means I need to be a tad less epic and a tad more swashbucklery. As Star Wars became more ponderous and took itself a bit more seriously, and dug further into the hippy-guru weirdness that the Jedi kind of devolved into, it changed tone, and not for the better. I've discussed that at length before (see below) so I won't get too far into it now.

Another thing that sets apart the original movie, to a lesser extent the entire original trilogy, from the prequels and sequels, is the humanocentrist position on it. We tend to talk about humanocentrism as something that applies more to fantasy than to space opera, but I like it in both for the exact same reasons. And if you look at it, the original trilogy, especially the original movie, are much more humanocentric than what followed, and I think that was part of its appeal, actually. 

Yet another point of interest is that in the original version of the scripts, it wasn't quite so clear that the Empire and the post-Republic Rebellion were the only significant factions kicking around in the galaxy at large. The shocktroopers (which evolved into Boba Fett and eventually into the Mandalorians) were leftovers from the Clone Wars at one point, and exactly what that meant was never really defined. But they seemed to be kind of independent operatives, to the extent that they still existed even. The early Han Solo trilogy of novels published in the late 70s and early 80s didn't have the Empire as the bad guys at all, but rather a faction called the Corporate Sector Authority. The Jedi were also less of a mystical order of self-righteous monks and more like samurai in their original incarnation, the Sith were a tribe of force-using pirates of all things, that were a rival tradition to the Jedi. That got changed into a very ponderous, heavy concept that took itself a bit too seriously; I kind of rather like a more balkanized and independent picture both from the force-using castes and politically overall, which Ad Astra certainly does have. My Jedi are less like Jedi and more like often independent orders of warriors with modest superpowers who could represent any ideology you can imagine, and who don't have any kind of dark side light side angsty navel-gazing about childish interpretations of morality. Imagine a more John Carter and Flash Gordon style scenario, although with characters who have Jedi powers. Maybe not the super over-the-top Jedi powers of the prequels and beyond, but the more modest ones of the original trilogy. And the lightsaber isn't a device, it's a manifestation of their power that just happens to resemble an energy blade. And the stories I'd like to tell tend to be more intrigue and skulduggery driven in many ways. 

In other words, look to a combination of The Three Musketeers, James Bond and John Wayne style westerns for the plots, and the invited comparison to Star Wars really kind of becomes more in the setting; although Marvel comics when they weren't terrible probably is nearly as much of an influence as Star Wars. Especially the cool cosmic Marvel comics lines like the Starjammers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and famous stories like the Kree-Skrull War or the Shi'ar and Inhumans stuff of more recent years (War of Kings, etc.) But with less overtly "I'm a super powerful superhero that normal people can't possibly hope to deal with" kind of nonsense.

What am I going to do with Ad Astra? I dunno. In theory, I'd like to write, but in reality, I've been saying that for years. To be honest with you, if I just tinker with it for my own amusement, and eventually run a game or two in the setting, that's probably enough to make me think it was worth it. If I end up generating stories or even novels, that'll just be gravy. It's hard to imagine that I would do that until I'm an empty-nester though. (Although that horizon is much closer than I'd like to think it is.) That'll be enough to keep my satisfied in an era where I won't ever be able to count on Star Wars itself ever satisfying me ever again.