Sunday, December 19, 2010

Stars Bringing Purple! - Part 2

 A Claymation Werewolf Digital Digest Exclusive!



          By now Karol H. Laminton had started to feel the effects of her own popularity. She fell more and more in love with the mythology that she had created. The book signings and speaking engagements she participated in, exposed her directly to her rabid fan base and they all wanted more. Not just more books but more of what they love in the books. More magic, more fantasy violence and more sex. Book Three “Stars fall” Picked up immediately from the second book and gave the people what they wanted. X-R had completed his metymorphosis into a vampire and throughout the book is constantly torn between the loyalty to his team and obedience to his dark master NOS4 A2. Unable to deal with the constant temptation to feed that his team mates represent he is forced to leave star command, and soon travels to the side of his dark creator.

          Ty and Mira seem to develop a new power in every chapter of this book. Mira can now fly and communicate with any alien species, and Ty can kill with just a touch. Because of the incredibly power that the phasing has allotted her, Mira begins to phase, and phase a lot! She phases with Ty, she phases with the team leader of a rival squadron, she phases with an entire team of new recruits. The more people she phases with the more power she gets and the more explicit Laminton writes the phasing scenes. Near the climax of the book she phases with two men and a woman at the same time in a very very detailed chapter. By the end of the book she has phased with dozens of people. She also had sex with several of them. No longer the reclusive royal being she began her written life as, Mira has blossomed into a willfull, powerfull and commanding character. She is also written with larger breasts and much tighter clothes.

          Before the end of the book it is revealed that the forces of NOS 4 A2 have formed an uneasy alliance with the Empire of Zurg and decided to take of Stars Command once and for all and they planned to turn Commander Nebula into one of his undead slave. Nebula is a hardened military leader who was first introduced into the book during this story arc but Laminton wrote as if we were supposed to know who he was the entire time. At the last second X-R comes to his senses and turns against his master barely stoping the attack in time. Nebula loses his leg in the battle that ensues but keeps his soul. X-Rs i brought back into the fold of stars command. The ever present connection he has to NOS 4 A-2 still haunts him and many in stars command question his presence among the ranks. This would be a common theme throught the rest of the series.

          “Stars like to Watch” the next in the series takes a huge departure from the tone of the other books. Taking place during a stakeout at a remote Empire Base it seems to serve entirely to develop the characters and create dramatic situations. Apparently the immediate doom represented by the strengthening of Zurg and the rise of NOS 4A2 can wait Bustre’s character is finally given development and Mira develops a special bond with him. Connecting with his rage from the pain and revenge in her own heart in a scene that reaches a depth never seen in a Stars Command book before, and rarely even in literature in general Bustre and Mira have hot hot space sex.

          The Darkside Rangers as they call themselves all of a sudden, are now a larger team. New to the series are the characters Petra Hamerhold who can make any scene hot through the magma that constantly runs through her veins. She is described as a “lover of women” and has arguably the most impressive and hardest to control power of the team. Also joing the crew is Warp Darkmatter, an adrenaline junky who had his arm replaced following a reckless training accident and took to the liberty of having the doctors add a few other “improvements.” Sometimes he presents as much of a danger to his own team as he does to the enemy. While there was some action and about two dozen more powers given to Mira (She now has the ability to create temporary clones of herself and “zip” from one place to another in the blink of an eye,) this book is mainly about sex. In fact there is one pretty jaw dropping scene involving Ty, Petra, Mira and about 4 of her clones. The entire book borders on the pornographic and is more campy than any of it’s predesesors. The powers and the characters become increasingly exaggerated and the plot situations are so contrived that at times they become laugh at loud funny. By the end of it the book gets so weird that you halfway expect Ty to get turned into a werewolf.

          In the following book “Stars by moonlight” Ty is bitten by NOS 4 A-2 during a battle on a radioactive moon and is turned into a werewolf. From there the book gets really weird. Mira’s skin turns blue as the result of a power-up, Warp Darkmatter becomes a bad guy and XR’s brother is recruited by Zurg and turned into an evil cyborg replicate. There really isn’t much more to further the plot, just a lot of wacky character hijinks. You have to keep in mind that at this point in her career Karol H. Laminton had become one of her own uberfans she was appearing with her skin “Mira blue” and wearing a dark side ranger uniform to book signings and conventions. She had started to make journalists and even friends and family refer to her as Commander Laminton.

          Her fan-base has stayed fiercly loyal throughout all of the books since. There was “Stars Scream” in which X-R is dramatically altered by Stars Command scientists and given the ability to transform into a jet. And of course “Stars Dust” when the team has to travel back in time to the 1970’s to protect the glam rock star who’s decendant will eventually found Stars Command. And on it goes, The 11th book in the Stars Command Series is due out this fall and you can bet that somewhere “Comander Laminton” is sitting on her basement floor playing with her Stars Command dolls and getting inspiration for her next underground hit. Who knows what adventures await our heroes, will they be transported to the “Real World?” Will characters switch bodies? Will they get a talking dog? No one can know for sure.

          To try to avoid any embarassment for its watered down “Buzz Lightyear” franshise, Disney has done its best to keep the public in the dark about these literary treasures. Therefore, unless you have a really good local bookstore or happen to attend a Stars Command Convention these books can be pretty scarce. Despite all of that, I have to recommend to all of the Coo Coo Cola Cult members out there that you go find yourself a copy of one of the earlier Mira novels. While I enjoy gratuitous sex and violence as much as the next guy (or much much more) the later books arent for everyone. The plots are nothing short of wacky and the characters become so goofy and embarrassing that they might as well be in some childrens show. Oh wait. They are.

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