A view to the gallery of my mind

Unlike the other kids in my neighborhood, who went to the Finnish-speaking elementary school right near our suburban home, I went to a Swedish-speaking school much closer to the inner city. Because of this, my mom would come pick me up from school, and sometimes we would go do things in town, since we were already nearby.

At one point we developed a habit of making a video rental store the first stop after school. We’d return whatever we had rented the last time, and I’d get to pick one thing to rent next. The store had a whole rack devoted to NES games, and there was a time when I was systematically going through their whole collection, seeking to play everything that seemed interesting. But at times I would also look at their VHS collection, and that was how I first found Star Wars.

I don’t have a recollection of what it was to see any of the Star Wars movies for the very first time. But I do have various recollections of how they influenced my life, afterwards.

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For many years, there was “Sotala Force”, an imaginary space army in a setting of make believe that combined elements of Star Wars and Star Trek. I was, of course, its galaxy-famous leader, with some of my friends at the time holding top positions in it. It controlled maybe one third of the galaxy, and its largest enemy was something very loosely patterned after the Galactic Empire, which held maybe four tenths of the galaxy.

The leader of the enemy army, called (Finns, don’t laugh too much now) Kiero McLiero, took on many traits from Emperor Palpatine. These included the ability, taken from the Dark Empire comics, to keep escaping death by always resurrecting in a new body, meaning that our secret missions attacking his bases could end in climactic end battles where we’d kill him, over and over again. Naturally, me and my friends were Jedi Knights and Masters, using a combination of the Force, lightsabers, and whatever other weapons we happened to have, to carry out our noble missions.

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There was a girl in elementary school who I sometimes hung out with, and who I had a huge and hopelessly unrequited crush on. Among other shared interests like Lord of the Rings, we were both fans of Star Wars, and would sometimes discuss it. I only remember some fragments of those discussions: an agreement that Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were superior movies to A New Hope; both having heard of the Tales of the Jedi comics but neither having managed to find them anywhere; a shared feeling of superiority and indignation towards everyone who was making such a blown-out-of-proportions fuss about Jar-Jar Binks in the Phantom Menace, given that Lucas had clearly said that he was aiming these new movies at children.

The third last memory I have of seeing her, was at a trip to a beach we had at the end of 9th grade; I’d brought a toy dual-bladed lightsaber, while she’d brought a single-bladed one. There were many duels on that beach.

The very last memory that I have of seeing her, after we’d gone on to different schools, was when we ran across each other in the premiere of the Revenge of the Sith, three years later. We chatted a bit about the movie, what had happened to us in the intervening years, and then went our separate ways again.

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For a kid interested in computer games in 1990s Finland, Pelit (“Games”) was The magazine to read. Another magazine that was of interest, also having computer games but mostly covering more general PC issues, was MikroBitti. Of these, both occasionally discussed a fascinating-sounding thing, table-top role-playing games, with MikroBitti running a regular column that discussed them. They sounded totally awesome and I wanted to get one. I asked my dad if I could have an RPG, and he was willing to buy one, if only I told him what they looked like and where they might be found. This was the part that left me stumped.

Until one day I found a store that… I don’t remember what exactly it sold. It might have been an explicit gaming store or it might only have had games as one part of its collection. And I have absolutely no memory of how I found it. But one way or the other, there it was, including the star prize: a Star Wars role-playing game (the West End Games one, second edition).

For some reason that I have forgotten, I didn’t actually get the core rules at first. The first thing that I got was a supplement, Heroes & Rogues, which had a large collection of different character templates depicting all kinds of Rebel, Imperial, and neutral characters, as well as an extended “how to make a realistic character” section. The book was in English, but thanks to my extensive NES gaming experience, I could read it pretty well at that point. Sometime later, I got the actual core rules.

I’m not sure if I started playing right away; I have the recollection that I might have spent a considerable while just buying various supplements for the sake of reading them, before we started actually playing. “We” in this case was me and one friend of mine, because we didn’t have anyone else to play with. This resulted in creative non-standard campaigns, in which we both had several characters (in addition to me also being the game master) who we played simultaneously. Those games lasted until we found the local university’s RPG club (which also admitted non-university students; I think I was 13 the first time I showed up). After finding it, we transitioned to more ordinary campaigns and those weird two-player mishmashes ended. They were fun while they lasted, though.

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After the original gaming store where I’d been buying my Star Wars supplements closed, I eventually found another. And it didn’t only have Star Wars RPG supplements! It also had Star Wars novels that were in English, which had never been translated into Finnish!

Obviously, I had to buy them and read them.

So it came to be that the first novel that I read in English was X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble, telling the story of the Rebellion’s (or, as it was known by that time, the New Republic’s) struggle to capture Coruscant some years after the events in Return of the Jedi. I remember that this was sometime in yläaste (“upper elementary school”), so I was around 13-15 years old. An actual novel was a considerably bigger challenge for my English-reading skills than RPG supplements were, so there was a lot of stuff in the novel that I didn’t quite get. But still, I finished it, and then went on to buy and read the rest of the novels in the X-Wing series.

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The Force Awakens, Disney’s new Star Wars film, comes out today. Star Wars has previously been a part of many notable things in my life. It shaped the make believe setting that I spent several years playing in, it was one of the things I had in common with the first girl I ever had a crush on, its officially licensed role-playing game was the first one that I ever played, and one of its licensed novels was the first novel that I ever read in English.

Today it coincides with another major life event. The Finnish university system is different from the one in many other countries in that, for a long while, we didn’t have any such thing as a Bachelor’s degree. You were admitted to study for five years, and then at the end, you would graduate with a Master’s degree. Reforms carried out in 2005, intended to make Finnish higher education more compatible with the systems in other countries, introduced the concept of a Bachelor’s degree as an intermediary step that you needed to do in between. But upon being admitted to university, you would still be given the right to do both degrees, and people still don’t consider a person to have really graduated before they have their Master’s.

I was admitted to university back in 2006. For various reasons, my studies have taken longer than the recommended time, which would have had me graduating with my Master’s in 2011. But late, as they say, is better than never: today’s my official graduation day for my MSc degree. There will be a small ceremony at the main university building, after which I will celebrate by going to see what my old friends Luke, Leia and Han are up to these days.

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.