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Notes -
They are now. Which is why I'm not.
Back in my day, Star Wars fans played the West End Games version of the Star Wars RPG, the miniatures game, and fantasized over the source books. The latest and greatest Star Wars video games were X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were super nerdy and demanding flight sims. Dark Forces had just come out too, and was super heavily teen boy coded. It was a 90's FPS after all.
That was the fandom.
Funnily enough, all the source material written for West End Games Star Wars RPG was sent to Zahn, and he used it to bootstrap his Thrawn trilogy.
So yeah, there was no "slash fiction". A lot of the creativity of the young fans I interacted with as a young fan myself was spent coming up with RPG ideas, sharing Star Wars total conversion WADs for Doom, using the source books to try to game out if a Wampa could defeat an AT-ST walker, etc. Or, since nobody had read all the EU fiction because there were no online book stores, or ebooks, or even a wikipedia of what all the EU books even were, we'd hear tales of this or that awesome droid or alien from the random jumble of EU books our parents had haphazardly found on a shelf for one of us.
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