For three blissful weeks, Star Wars: Zero Company was poised to deliver me from my worst fears about the franchise. I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars fan for 20 years, but the spark that fueled my fire at age 10 has long since dimmed. Sometimes I can’t even remember what about this saga captivated me in the first place. At best, I’ve been ambivalent to Star Wars; at worst, outright antagonistic. But this tactical role-playing game, of all things, offered me a path back to a wonder I haven’t felt since my early days as a fan, back when Star Wars lived as much in my own imagination — maybe even more — as it did in George Lucas’.
I’ve written and read countless fan fiction about the Clone Wars era, and the second I booted up Zero Company, I projected as much of it into the game as I could. I spent hours in the character creator bringing my OCs (“original characters”) to life: Whoever you create, you have the option to recruit them into your squad later on, and you’d better believe I conscripted a small army of my own glup shittos when the time came. I pored over every conceivable facial preset until I got spots in my eyes. I meticulously crafted my character’s backstory based on the trove of costume options at my fingertips. I played mission after mission for days — after work and into the late night, on weekends, on my lunch break — pouring my own canon into the pockets of this world. It felt about as exhilarating as stumbling onto my first “what if?” one-shot on LiveJournal, which taught me at a laughably young age that Star Wars is totally customizable if you think about it hard enough.
