Chapter Text
This is my first time posting meta or non-fiction on AO3, so I'm a little discombobulated about the shape of it, especially since my draft Google doc is something like 30k words and counting. So I figured a bit of an introduction was in order.
What is this?
Fundamentally, this is what happens when you raise a child to be the next Thomas Aquinas, and then they run as far away from the Catholic Church as possible and wind up at 1990s Star Wars tie-in novels instead.
Um. I keep trying to say more, but that really sums it up.
Why these novels, specifically?
Originally because Wes Janson's PTSD mirrored my own in a lot of ways I didn't even recognize yet. Then there's the found family, and the humor, and the layers, and just Aaron Allston being a really damn good writer. And for the last few years, there's been a fandom of more than one person, which is nice. (Check out the Rogue Squadron Discord if you're reading this sometime before the inevitable fall of Discord and the rise of whatever the next fandom platform is.)
For fair use purposes, I'll be trying not to quote the entire books, but for analysis purposes, obviously I have to quote the parts I'm talking about. When I have page numbers, they'll be from the mass market paperback editions of the books; I've actually reordered new copies, having given away my previous copies long ago due to homelessness, but it's not like there are multiple editions to choose from, let alone hardbacks.
A few initial headcanon and reference matters:
Most of this work, having been developed sporadically over the last fourteen or so years, is based solely on the "Legends" timeline. Given that the Legends timeline was in many ways a huge clusterfuck, I'll try to make it clear at any time which bits of said canon I'm accepting. By and large, anything that happened onscreen in the Original Trilogy is canon for these purposes, but deleted scenes are treated case-by-case; for example, Hobbie is not squishified. Anything that's explicitly stated in the works under consideration, i.e. Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, Solo Command, and Starfighters of Adumar, is canon except possibly where it directly conflicts with the OT, in which case the conflict will be discussed. Anything stated in any other sources, I feel no especial obligation to accept but may discuss as it suits me.
There is no reliable canon source for parts of the pilot ages and event timelines I use, so I may as well outline those here. Tycho's age is the most well-established: Alderaan explodes on his twenty-first birthday. Wedge is nine months younger than Tycho, as stated in Rogue Squadron, so he's twenty when the first Death Star is destroyed.
Hobbie is in Biggs Darklighter's graduating class at the Imperial Academy. There is no solid source for Biggs' age, especially if you go through the Wookieepedia changelogs on his page, which cite him as anywhere from 19 to 24 with no sources given. Tycho may or may not have been in the same class, depending on which parts of comics canon you cite; I'll probably start tackling the comics at some point, but reliable image hosting is always an exciting part of comics textual analysis. For convenience, I usually figure Hobbie as being Tycho's age, therefore 21 as of the Battle of Yavin.
As for Wes, there's literally no evidence of his age in any of the sources I've consulted. In order to have something consistent, I actually went back to actor ages; Denis Lawson was about 33 when The Empire Strikes Back premiered, while Ian Liston was about 32, so roughly a year younger. So if we keep the age difference the same, then when Wedge is 20 in ANH, Wes is nineteen, or about the same age as Luke and Leia.
Wedge gets plenty of backstory in the comics, and Tycho in the Stackpole novels. Wes and Hobbie have little more than home planet names. Wes's home planet, Taanab, comes from a throwaway line in ROTJ, Lando's explanation that he's now a general due to "my little maneuver at the Battle of Taanab". One of the Star Wars planetary atlases, if I recall correctly, gives a little more detail, but I don't have the reference handy, so this might be from multiple sources: Taanab is a former jungle planet turned farming world, which supplies some ridiculously high percentage of foodstuffs for the Core and Mid-Rim. The equatorial regions are owned by large conglomerates, while the regions closer to the poles which have to use orbital mirrors for a longer growing season are home to individual family farms. It is usually presumed that the Jansons owned/ran one of those smaller family farms. Taanab also has, according to at least one source I haven't been able to track down again but have adopted wholeheartedly, mini rancors, which run "only" four or five meters long and are not sapient.
(The Dathomir rancors in The Courtship of Princess Leia are ten meters tall and tell their children stories. It is unclear which type of rancor Jabba kept in his palace. Legends is a trip, y'all.)
The only other thing we know about Wes's childhood is that he began practicing marksmanship at a young age. There's nothing on his family, background, education, or how he was treated. I'll probably be coming back to that, because it's something I'm always torn on in my writing -- whether I want to give him parts of my own abusive upbringing, or give him a better childhood that I might wish I could have had. Also, whether we can get any indications about his background from the particular ways he reacts to trauma and other circumstances over the course of the books.
As for Hobbie, we know approximately three things about him: he comes from Ralltiir, which is a banking world; he was sent to the Imperial Academy to become a ship's officer; and he has really strong opinions on dress clothes. Depending on the canon you accept, it's also possible that Ralltiir was blockaded by the Imperial fleet for the whole of the Original Trilogy in retaliation for a Rebel contact mission Princess Leia ran there just before Yavin. We'll get into this more in Solo Command and Starfighters of Adumar, where he has his few moments in the spotlight, but based on those three facts, we can hypothesize that he belongs to a high-ranking family in the Ralltiiri banking hierarchy (one where he would have had to attend a lot of events requiring formal clothing), but that he's a younger son or otherwise not high-ranked within his own household, since he's sent away as a political pawn to strengthen ties with the Imperials rather than being set up to help run the family business.
(Hobbie also has varying numbers of prosthetic limbs depending on what parts of canon you accept. He loses his left arm somewhere above the elbow and his right leg somewhere below the knee in the Darklighter comic, which makes an oblique reference to him possibly having damaged/prosthetic genitals as well. Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor establishes that Hobbie has a prosthetic left foot by the time of that story, post-Endor, but does not give any more specifics on the timeframe or the amount of leg lost. I usually headcanon that he lost this leg on Hoth when he rammed Veers' AT-AT as seen in the ESB deleted scene, but it varies depending on what I'm doing with the setup.)
Not to toot our own horn too much, especially since the main story that was intended to serve as an introduction to this concept is still down for revisions, but my longtime coauthor Camshaft22 has created an incredibly rich and original Ralltiir culture based on the minimal information we have from canon, plus some really fascinating ideas of her own. If and when we get that story polished up and reposted, I'm definitely linking it here.
Which brings us to another fact I need to mention. This thing, by its nature, is going to be in flux. I'll try to post links on the main fannish platforms when I update anything significant, but I'm still deciding how to handle things like chapter breaks.