"Sporking" was a form of reviewing bad fanfiction, popular in the era of the Internet where making a joke about Van Helsing killing Edward was the funniest thing you were allowed to do. It was originally called "MSTing" after Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a TV show where three robots and a trapped lab assistant talk over a bad sci-fi film, but was renamed after a reference to gouging your own eyes out with a spork. (Back then sporks were also funny for some reason). It's not popular now for a lot of reasons, the main one of which being that making fun of a random teenage girl's persistent typos in her self-insert fic where she kisses Sauron is now considered kind of dickish, but the basic "MSTing" concept has survived to form 80% of all internet comedy. I'm invoking it in the title of this thread to set the tone.
What is "Supernatural Encounters"
hoooooooooo boy
In the year 2002, Star Wars Gamer magazine, a spinoff magazine devoted to what it sounds like, agreed to publish "Cult Encounters", an article by Joe Bongiorno about some of the weird little groups from the Alan Moore Marvel Star Wars comics and how you could fit them into your campaign, shortly before it went bust. In 2007, Joe Bongiorno hit up Pablo Hidalgo, an old colleague who was doing lore advice for Lucasfilm, and asked if he could publish Cult Encounters and another piece spinning off from it on Hyperspace, the Star Wars online fanclub thing. Hidalgo provisionally approved the first drafts of both Cult Encounters and the new Supernatural Encounters, but before Bongiorno could finish the final draft Lucasfilm shuttered Hyperspace. A few years later, they also shuttered Legends, leaving him no choice but to continue working on this thing in his basement forever. (The above history is the basis for the work being "canonical", by the way. It's like the Thuc Line for Legendsloppers.)
You're probably familiar with Supernatural Encounters from the most annoying commentator on your Star Wars discord, the guy who keeps trying to get you to watch a YouTube video powerscaling Waru against the Zilo Beast. He thinks it's the greatest piece of Star Wars fiction ever written. He hasn't read it. You haven't read it. I haven't read it. Well, I haven't finished it, as last time I gave up at a point where it will become obvious why I did. I then gave a brief review in the books thread, and resolved to come back for an exhaustive review "later", which became "once people start posting on this forum again". And now they kind of have, so I have resolved to be the change I want to see in the world.
Why are you doing this to yourself?
It was free.
No, really, it's free. You can just download it as a PDF from his website https://www.starwarstimeline.net/Supern ... nters.html. So, naeively, as a relative neophyte to Legends (I've only read the Thrawn Trilogy, the duology Zahn did tying up Bantam, and the first few chapters of The Crystal Star before my dog ate it), I assumed this would be a fun place to jump in. I thought it'd be something like the outer reaches of the Doctor Who extended universe, full of fascinating new ideas and witty metafiction. Instead, I found something more like Wold Newton, reading decades of fiction into something half conspiracy theory and half dull taxonomy. And much like in the Lovecraft Joe Bongiorno is so fond of, the experience of reading this dreadful tome has forever changed me, making me seek to inflict the madness on others.
What's the deal with this review?
Well, it'll be here on this thread; I'll go section-by-section, possibly breaking up sections if there are bits I want to focus on, since actually doing a full line-by-line spork would kill me and kill the servers. Also unlike old sporks, I won't be making numbered tallies of writer sins because that's kind of pointless and just encourages nit-picking. In the next post, though, I'll lay out the basic themes/issues at the heart of Supernatural Encounters, that should hopefully prepare you for what you're going to read...