User blog:Brandon Rhea/Where there's a Whill, there's a Yahweh.



Here I am, back with another blog post! In this posting, I wanted to talk to you a bit about the Order of the Whills and its inclusion in my novel Star Wars: Episode I - The Chosen One. The inclusion has been met with somewhat of a mixed reaction, so I thought I’d make a blog explaining some of it. The idea of the Whills was originally created by George Lucas when he was writing the first drafts of the first Star Wars film. He originally wanted to have the story of the films told by an immortal being called a Whill. This Whill would watch the whole story and then record it, and Lucas felt that this Whill was likely wiser than anyone in the actual films. Lucas dropped this story and the Whills became the Force, but Lucas kept the Whills in his notes, quotes and background information for the films.

I first decided to bring the Whills into my Alternative Star Wars Saga stories back in 2005 after seeing a mention of the Shaman of the Whills in the Episode III script and deciding that I wanted Ussej Padric Bac to be this Shaman. These Whills had some articles on Star Wars Fanon, but they were mostly part of MY notes, quotes and background information. Eventually, come 2008 and 2009, I started to flesh them out some more. The Whills were brought to a planet called Ashlan Four by a great order around the year 99,945 BBY, specifically a member of this great order named Matthew of Skywalker. Matthew had found these Whills on their home planet of Brodo Asogi, and while some Whills decided to stay behind on their home world, most of them traveled with Matthew to Ashlan Four.

After they arrived on Ashlan Four, the great order began to construct a monastery for the Whills. Once this was done and the Order of the Whills was founded, a Chief of the Whills was appointed and Matthew of Skywalker shared with the Whills his knowledge of the Force and the history of the great order and the planets in the Ashlan Nebula. The Whills began to document this in the Journal of the Whills, a manuscript that they would use to document galactic history. After this, the great order had no further contact with the Whills, who were left to their own devices to record galactic history.

Flash forward 96,000 years to around 3,900 BBY. Ussej Padric Bac fulfills his previously foreseen destiny and becomes the Shaman of the Whills. After his mortal death, he finds himself on Ashlan Four and discovers the Whills, who told him that they had been waiting for him. Ussej, helping to fulfill the mandates of the great order and the Whills, tells the Whills about the history of the galaxy from the, a conflict between the {{sw|Sith Empire|First Sith Empire]] and the Galactic Republic, to the Second Ashlan Civil War, a war that took place in the Ashlan Nebula. This is all in a span of around 1,100 years. The rest of the information about them can be found in The Chosen One.

So basically, the reason I wrote this (and shamelessly added in information that can be placed in my article about the Order of the Whills....) is because the reaction has been somewhat mixed so I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. Some of the reaction stems from the feeling that the inclusion of the Order of the Whills and the “storytelling” feel that it had in The Chosen One just didn’t feel enough like Star Wars. I get where that reaction would come from, but I still think it fits well. Stuff like this has always existed in Star Wars, but only really mentioned in passing. I see this as an elaboration on source material rather than creating something new and different, but as I said I can certainly see where you're coming from. The storytelling feel is also basically just an elaboration on source material - it's implied that you're basically reading the Journal of the Whills here.

Heh, the crux of this blog is in those last few sentences, yet it took me a few paragraphs to get here. Nevertheless, I just wanted to get that out there in a more public setting. Just as an update, I hope to have the third and fourth chapters of The Chosen One out this coming week, as it’s my spring break and I’ll have plenty of time to work on it considering I’d rather not go to Mexico and get killed by the drug cartels....

And on that happy note, thanks for reading! {{tongue}}