Dear @staff:
This is my last post on your wonderful website. I want to thank you profusely for all of the diligent, hard work you put into this place; all the long hours, creative energy, frustrated tears, exhausted sighs. They were felt, seen, appreciated, and worth it. To me, and to a lot of people around here, you are heroes.
Heroism is a funny thing. We conflate it with championship, because often our heroes, along the course of their adventures, do great deeds— win tremendous battles, right unthinkable wrongs, surmount insurmountable odds. But being a champion and a hero are two very different things. A dragonslayer is just an exterminator by any other name. There are many impressive successes and victories won by people decidedly not heroes.
Because to be a hero is different than being a winner, a victor, or a champion. Those are all public and for the most part binary- win or lose, succeed for fail. Heroism is inward, private, and messily transformative. As Star Wars fans, we talk a lot about the “Hero’s Journey”— but again, we mistake its nature for the fictions we consume. The Hero’s Journey is not a template for creating stories; it’s a common set of events that keep cropping up in story after story, tale after tale, across cultures, continents, and millenia. The Hero’s Journey is a unifying factor of human life on the planet Earth, a common story that keeps emerging for the simple reason that it accords with the pattern of a lived life.
And it starts with the Call.
Really, I think that’s the core of being a Hero— accepting your Call.
See, the journey of a hero is a journey of internal transformation. There might be some talisman, some macguffin, at the end of the thing, but it’s what the journey does to you— who you become because of the journey— that makes you a hero. A hero leaves their home and comes back to their home and they find that their home hasn’t changed at all since they left; but they themselves are vastly different now. To leave on a journey is to leave the person you were behind— the Luke Skywalker that leaves to find R2D2 one morning on Tatooine will never come back to his home again, though he’ll return to Tatooine time and time again.
That’s what’s at risk in accepting the Call— the knowledge that you will change, and the almost surety that the way forward will be dark and treacherous. Because there’s no journey without trials. There’s no happy ending without tears before hand. Paul Atriedes sticking his hand in a box and getting a sting unknowingly is an accident; Paul Atriedes sticking his hand in the Gom Jabbar knowing what it is and what will happen to him is transformative. I was reading a Winnie-the-Pooh story to my daughter last night, and in the story Pooh collects flowers to make baskets for his adorable friends. Even then, he runs out of flowers before he finishes Christopher Robin’s basket. Even Winnie-the-Pooh cannot escape hardship along the way. That’s life.
You accepted your calls. You took the risk. To make Cohost was a tremendous undertaking, and I know you’ve sacrificed much and faced tremendous trials along the way. Right now, maybe it doesn’t seem like it was for anything. Maybe it all feels wasted, useless. I’ve had my teeth kicked in by life too, this year and plenty of years prior. I know how you are feeling. I love you and I know exactly how you’re feeling.
But even if Cohost is ending, you aren’t. Your story goes on, and we’re just in the middle of that.
My favorite thing is Star Wars, of course, but my favorite novel isn’t. It’s an old fantasy book, “The Last Unicorn” by Peter S. Beagle, and along its fairy-tale story it has a few digressions about the nature of stories themselves, and I’ve always loved this passage. You might have seen it before, but it’s relevant to the subject at hand:
“The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
Often, things in the middle seem lost. It’s because we can’t see how they connect to the rest of our lives yet. There’s hardly a single clean victory in the whole of Star Wars. A New Hope ends with the Death Star destroyed, sure, but The Empire Strikes Back still opens with the Empire in charge and our heroes on the run. Rogue One sees our heroes complete their mission and lose their lives a second later. All the way through, from the Clone Wars to the Emperor returning, our heroes seem destined only to fail, to lose, to make things worse. But… the stories continue. Luke Skywalker losing his hand while dueling Darth Vader at the end of The Empire Strikes Back feels, in the moment, like a cruel punishment for his bravery. How could good come from an injury like that? Yet in Return of the Jedi, that wound becomes a source of life-saving empathy for Luke. The wound transforms him in a way he can’t understand until the moment it makes sense. That’s life. Buddy, that’s fucking life if I ever saw it.
My dad died this year— like I said, I’ve been kicked in the teeth plenty— and… as odd as it feels to type this, it’s made me stronger. It’s made me more compassionate. It’s brought out parts of me I didn’t know I had, or things I thought I wouldn’t ever have. That’s the journey. That’s the story. One morning, you leave home, and you never go back to it, because something changes. The journey continues.
Cohost has been a tremendous journey for us all. Cohost has been transformative for many of us. Let me tell you how Cohost has changed my life. Because I decided to post about Star Wars here, I engaged with my fandom in a deeper way than I normally would. Because I did that, I got involved in the communities around @MoreCivilized and #Andor and I made some wonderful friends. Lots of people did. Because I was engaged as a fan, I drew fanart of an RPG session More Civilized ran with the wonderful @jessfromonline, and because she saw it, I got the opportunity to meet her- a blessing in its own right- and to make the cover art for her Going Rogue 2E. Because I made that cover art, I got interested in TTRPG design, and I made two short pamphlet games. Making those games reignited my love of graphic design. I took part in @yotsuben- another new Cohost friend!-’s wonderful logo design challenge over on my @ykarps alt account. Doing that not only inspired me to make custom artwork for my posts here, but had me build up a backlog of assets that’ve ultimately led me to doing, of all thing, manga adaptations. Right now I’m hand-translating the first chapter of Dragon Ball for fun, and teaching myself how to read hiragana. I know Japanese now because of Cohost, how odd a journey is that?
In fact, writing it all out, I can’t think of a single artistic endeavor I’ve taken in the past two years that hasn’t, in some way, resulted from this website. Transformative. A true adventure.
So @staff, I just want to say: from all of us who posted here, you are our heroes. You took a risk, stepped out into the unknown, and along the way, transformed not only yourselves, but a lot of us along with you.
I don’t know where your stories will end up. I hope— we all hope you all land on your feet, and find new work, new projects, and new adventures along the way. I hope you find a new hope of your own somewhere in the future. I hope this trial, and the wounds you’ve gotten for it, inspire you to greater courage and empathy in the future. I hope you see how we see you. You did a wonderful thing here, @staff. You did a truly wonderful thing, and it was all worth it, down to the last second.
Thank you so much,
and may the Force be with you!
- David Bednar, your BB8
