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Original text was found here on Quora, but I'll copy it here as well.

Great machines crawled across the snow; and in the midst was a huge walker, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, striding on mighty legs. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Kuat, and its hideous head, founded of dura-steel, was adorned with deadly blasters. AT-AT they named it, in memory of the AT-TEs of old. General Veers piloted it, and a legion of storm troopers followed in its train.

But about the base’s blast door resistance still was stout, and there the hardiest of the Rebels stood at bay. Blaster and laser fire fell thick; AT-STs crashed or blazed suddenly like torches. All before the base on either side of the blast door the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet still driven as by a madness more and more came up.

The AT-AT crawled on. Its steel hide no blaster could pierce. Over the hills of slain a hideous shape appeared: a cyborg, tall, cloaked in black. Slowly, trampling the fallen, he strode forth, heeding no longer any blast. He halted and held up a crimson lightsaber. And as he did so a great fear fell on all, defender and foe alike; and the hands of men drooped to their sides, and no blaster sang. For a moment all was still.

With a lurch the AT-AT sighted on the blast door. It fired. A deep boom rumbled through the base like thunder running in the clouds.

Then the Cyborg raised his hand and cried aloud in a dreadful voice, speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and steel.

Thrice he cried. Thrice the great machine fired. And suddenly upon the last blast the door broke. As if stricken by some blasting spell it burst asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground. In strode the Lord of the Sith. A great black shape against the snow beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In strode the Lord of the Sith, and all fled before his face.

Characters

I really don't care what you do in terms of a lot of things. But if you mess with the characters that I know and love...

Well, THAT is what gets me angry.

Existing relationships and the personality that makes them start and continue are things you can't quite just toss out the window because it breaks characters. Unless you're taking the position that the author is Wrong about who some character would/wouldn't get into a relationship with, which I seem to remember being a fairly common claim among Harry/Hermione shippers back in the day.

Your example of James/Sirius as adults would need a good deal of explaining before I'd buy it.

- Tomash

As usual, I've stated my position poorly. I'll see if I can do better the second time around.

Many popular ships are for characters with pre-existing canon relationships. Which can imply orientation, or at least something about that character. People are bi, and people experiment, so it's often not so much orientation that's the problem as it is personality in many cases. There are many fics that just outright ignore canon relations, which... breaks things. James would not be getting it on with Sirius as an adult, because James is absolutely in love with Lilly, and would never do that to her.

Rockall, Malin, Hebrides. Southwest gale 8 to storm 10, veering west. ~The Shipping Forecast

I am not, by and large, much of a shipper (except in my PPC characters, who I ship so much with each other that I ended up with family trees), but I do on occasion. I go for things that are compatible with canon, even if they're not canon themselves - I have a Susan Pevensie/Maglor story out there, which exemplifies this.

More recently, I've had my eye on femslash, for philosophical reasons: there isn't much out there, and that lack of representation bugs me. Turns out the reason is that it's hard to find two women who can be shipped in a canon-friendly manner - there's nothing viable in the Star Wars films, for instance (Leia/Mothma? But Leia is pretty straight, and this would just smack of 'they don't actively hate each other, so they must be in luuurve'). (Jyn/Rey could work if you could get around them being 30 years apart. But th'ain't no time travel in Star Wars.)

I have an in-process Luthien/Galadriel story, which does justify its existence alongside their canonical romances, but in general Tolkien's lack of women - especially unmarried women - and their lack of character development when they do exist throws things off. I could write steamy Diamond of Long Cleeve/Estella Bolger erotica, but I'd have to make their personalities up from whole cloth, so it wouldn't really count.

(Dropping back to the other kinds of ships, I tend to stick with canon in Middle-earth, and I've never seen a slash pairing that convinced me, though I have written both a gay elf and a lesbian dwarf.)

Other canons are more viable, mostly because when you have a large enough cast you can write anything. Sticking with the big-name canons, I can't pass up this opportunity to unveil my new fic: a femslash (as mentioned) tale from the USS Voyager, starring one of those minor characters who nevertheless is developed enough to write:

The Ill-Fated Love Life of Tal Celes, a romance in 11 chapters (rolling out over the next couple of weeks).

In summary? I will generally respect the canon (except when the canon is WRONG [/Team Jacob]), am not particularly attached to any specific ships, and will mostly write femslash if anything for philosophical reasons.

hS

... I'm pretty sure you would have a moral objection to the story. Thanks, though. :)

hS

You should already have my email address, but just in case, the link is available.

Now, to give various slash authors some justification, most characters aren't explicitly specified to be straight, and bi people are a thing.

(Now, I don't think I'd use this because I'm not super-interested in writing that sort of thing, but it could be used to support a slashfic without adding another extra point of divergence to the implied AU or maybe without breaking canon at all.)

I really go against canon. And I will *only* ship if there is canon support. Period.

That also means no arbitrary orientation-changing: If canon says the characters are straight, then they are straight, unless you can give me a VERY compelling reason for them not to be. Which means I will very rarely write slash... at least for common pairings.

Well, okay, I never write slash (shut up, that doesn't count), but if I DID...

OTOH, if you write a really good slashfic or shipfic that DOESN'T follow these rules, it doesn't necessarily mean I'll hate it. It just has to be very well written. I think The Shoebox Project might be an example of that, but I haven't gotten to the slash part yet, so I dunno.

There is at least one exception, which is that I might ship something - in an AU, obviously. Shipfics are kind of implied AU to an extent - if it is A) adorable, and B) fits canon reasonably well. Namely, I am a strong proponent of shipping Primarch Vulkan and A relatively (emphasis on relatively) normal Nocturnian girl who has, somehow, caught his attention. I dunno. Maybe she's really good at blacksmithing. Not as good as he is, obviously, but... good for a mortal.

I don't trust myself to write this, so I haven't worked out the details, but... trust me, it would be adorable!

AAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW!

I love this!

Thank you for writing, and continuing this project. ^^

Containerization — best idea ever or best idea ever?

Wait, no, wrong type of shipping.

So, do you ship?

In what circumstances? (Only certain fandoms, for example.)

Who?

and so on and so on.

I personally don't ship much, in the sense that I almost never look at characters who aren't in a romantic/sexual/... relationship and go "Hey, these guys should be a relationship!"

I will certainly root for characters who are/were in a relationship to have that keep going/start back up again, though. (For example, the nicely developing interspecies romance that was Hilfy/Tully before the author cut that off.)

- Tomash

so 72 in a week is probably not all that unlikely, but it means that no big excuse for people to post has come up.

Also, the Discord is rather active.

https://rc1587.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/blank-sprite-mission-record-10/

In which Nikki is finally brought to remember her own past, but memories aren't the only thing emerging from it.

Has been running for the better part of September, and had a really big number of posts.

The ones that are currently up have been extending longer and longer. There's 72 posts in the last week alone.

.... I've gotten very bad at replying to anything. Checking over the Front Page...

... sweet mercy, how is the entire month of September still up? Where's everyone gone?!

Anyway, no, you're not being shunned, but apparently everyone's stopped talking.

hS

The closest thing I've seen is that thing creators do sometimes when they make one story's protagonist the descendant of another story's protagonist as kind of a fun detail or easter egg. (Yep. iD Software in my brain again.)

...You know what? You've got me motivated. I seriously want to try my hand at something like this genre - probably a fantasy counterpart, since I'm not really a historical fiction person. That would be pretty cool. Now to figure out a plot!

-Twistey

(Am I being shunned, or do I just need to learn how to make my Board posts better at adding something to the topic? Probably the latter. That'll take some time to learn, given how I was with my Scratch comments... }:P)

Wikipedia has a list of some popular works in the genre.

is the North and South trilogy by John Jakes. It presents the U.S. Civil War period through the eyes of two separate families from Pennsylvania and South Carolina, reaching from the decade of unrest that led to the war to the reconstruction period long after. The focal characters of each family are sons of roughly the same age, who meet while attending West Point and become friends, only to end up fighting against each other during the war.

It's not exactly a fee-good story, and for me, it had rather too much sex in it. The last book felt like it went a bit off the deep end compared to the earlier two, and some of the supporting characters dive a bit too far into the realm of strawmen as well, Overall, though, I think it gives a much better feel for the place and time than any history textbook I ever encountered could manage.

—doctorlit

...Because look at Foundation: It has a lot of aspects that you're discussing: an heirloom (The Seldon Plan and the videos) as a common thread, following a common line across a wide swath of history (but now the common line is a civilization). OTOH, this isn't historical at all, being entirely set in the future.

I've noticed lately that there seems to be a subgenre of what I have to call generational historical fiction. This is where a book or series of books doesn't follow one character, but a family line across a long swathe of history.

The first example that comes to my mind is Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth saga, which runs from the height of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest. Thd family with the dolphin ring (another thing: there's quite often an heirloom passed down the family, to maintain the narrative thread) is fairly common, but they make a great window on British life pre-conquest.

There's also Steven Saylor's Roma and Empire, which run from before the founding of Rome to the reign of Emperor Hadrian. That also has a piece of jewellery, and sticks with the same family; it does bring its protagonists rather closer to greatness, though (they hang out with basically every Emperor).

But I don't know how big this sub-genre is. In particular, I'd love to know if it exists for history outside western Europe. If someone's done this for, say, China, or one of the African nations, it would be a fantastic way for me to fill some of the gaps in my feel for history.

Does anyone have other examples? I think Stephen Baxter's Time's Tapestry also counts, running pretty continuously from the Roman invasion of Britain to Columbus' journey - though it is a bit more sci-fi-ish, with the 'heirlooms' being messages from the future. I can't count something like his Northland trilogy, because it only shows three widely-separated generations, not the slow progression.

Anyone?

hS

The Castellan /is not/ Rassilon; he's just pretending. He doesn't even have his power, like the Master does Omega's - that's why he needs to make the De-mat Gauntlet.

For the finale, our trio come face to face with the shades of the three Founders. Rassilon steals the Castellan's form, turning the lie into truth. Omega steals his own power back from the Master. And the Other simply whispers something in the Doctor's ear, and points towards the Omega Arsenal.

If Romana is still around to ask, the Doctor can tell her what he's doing: 'It's time to sieze the moment.'

hS

Josie McZample has female body traits. She considers herself fully female, and is attracted to men. She also wears her hair short, wears a mix of male and female clothing. Enjoys some stereotypical masculine things and some stereotypical feminine things. She is hetero cisgender with a neutral gender expression. I think that the expression can be netral without falling into nonbinary?

...You can see starting about ten tweets down her acknowledging the poster as her brother in response to what happened on the thread.