Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
From what I understand, the Phantom Menace brought Star Wars slash into the fannish mainstream, when Qi-Gon/Obi-Wan exploded onto the Internet ca. 1999-2000, and it was a big enough phenomenon that LucasFilm didn’t bother pursuing it anymore.
<Thomas Sanders> Storytime! </Thomas Sanders>
In the early 2000′s I hosted a Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan fanfic archive on my website that got picked up as Something Awful’s Awful Site of the Day. While I sat and tried to deal with the sudden influx of porn subscriptions and hateful messages that linking brought on, I noticed the site was visited multiple times by people at the ISP lucasfilms.com aaaand sure enough, I got a cease and desist letter within the next week forcing me to take my site down. LucasFilm doesn’t pursue everything, but they were definitely on watch where they could be.
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