Entertainment Weekly has just announced that Titan Books will be exploring the past of Aliens’ Private Vasquez in an upcoming novel from author V. Castro that will not only explore Vasquez’s history, but the family she left behind.
Aliens: Vasquez is set to explore the canonical background of Vasquez, as well as the story of the children she was forced to leave behind. Even before the doomed mission to Hadley’s Hope on LV-426, Jenette Vasquez had to fight to survive. Born to an immigrant family with a long military tradition, she looked up to the stars, but life pulled her back down to Earth — first into a street gang, then prison. The Colonial Marines proved to be Vasquez’s way out — a way that forced her to give up her twin children.
Raised by Jenette’s sister, those children, Leticia and Ramon, had to discover their own ways to survive. Leticia by following her mother’s path into the military, Ramon by entering the corporate hierarchy of Weyland-Yutani. Their paths converge on an unnamed planet which some see as a potential utopia, while others would use it for highly secretive research. Whatever humans have planned for it, however, Xenomorphs will turn it into a living hell.
Vasquez’s heritage and family has been explored several times within the expanded universe, most recently with Marvel’s Aliens: Aftermath featuring her nephew who was in search of answers regarding his aunt’s disappearance. In the 1990s Dark Horse’s Aliens: Colonial Marines featured Vasquez’s younger sister, Carmen, as a primary character.
While this will be V. Castro’s first foray into the Alien series, she is an established horror writer whose most recent work is Goddess of Filth and The Queen of the Cicadas. Aliens: Vasquez is currently scheduled to release later this year on the 25th of October.
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Only now getting around to listening this one. Jenette brings some great insights of her character which is especially interesting in the light of this book coming out
Agreed, I was on the fence about Amanda Ripley but the game atleast gave her a fairly decent reason for her to bump into the Aliens.
I can't say it will be the same here.
This just seems like it'll play out very similarly to the reception of the recent Boba Fett series. Stripping away the mystery of a character just to capitalise on creative bankruptcy.
For Christ sake two pages of this thread were dedicated to discussing Vasquez' sexuality. We never cared about that when we grew up watching her character, it was her heart and grit that we grew to love and the fact that she was a truly ultimate badass that never faltered when facing certain death.
I hope I'm wrong and the book is a success but it's near impossible to ignore the warning signs presented.
This!!
https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/04/26/vasquez-is-universal-jenette-goldstein-looks-back-on-her-unforgettable-aliens-marine/
Also, another good article with info relevant to this thread:
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/interview-with-jenette-goldstein-1987/
Maybe it will touch on her relationship with Drake some. Maybe they go back further. Maybe it actually turns out well written and is enjoyable in a vacuum. Maybe her kids get some good character development.
I mean....most of us enjoyed the book where the Avatar style synthetic sucked off a facehugger lmao. I doubt Vazquez being a mother is stranger. I mean.....the movie that spawned her was about motherhood and family bonds fighting against a twisted version of that.
.....get outta here
Men can have kids too. Some even have daughters.
Yeah but he's a guy...a dude....a man....
And he's a POC. Go, someone write that book.
I didn't think about it from that angle:
Than it should be that she just doesn't care about other kids. I feel like can't be uncommon
She might just not be a great mother, or just doesn't care about other ppl's kids. Or she might be a mother but didn't want to be. I actually think these would be interesting to explore
Canon.
The whole concept behind this book sounded bad as soon as I heard about it, because I could not put Vasquez and motherhood together, but I couldn't figure exactly why.
This is why.
Holy shit, case closed.
Completely fair and valid points. All I can say is that sometimes I think that we put too much pressure on our fictional universes to be realistic. Obviously we all have different thresholds for suspending our disbelief and that ultimately factors into how much one will enjoy these types of stories. My recommendation (that I do with all new content): Hope for the best but expect the worse.
When was the canon and character ever hers to now be "reclaimed"?
They're going down the Disney Star Wars route here of shrinking the universe and basically admitting creative bankruptcy by taking original characters that are already widely loved and making these related offspring/copies of them to basically rehash the same story over again.
If someone was really interested in doing a Vasquez backstory you could write a really good one set on Earth about her younger years and joining the Marines with no hint of the alien at all.
She could also be a lesbian who chose to have children. Lesbian and gay couples start families of their own too.
The book isn't out yet, and we have no idea how the author has portrayed her sexuality. But ultimately, Vasquez's sexuality isn't I thing I see any issues with, personally. I just don't think the scenario described in the synopsis, that Vasquez had children, jives with what we know about her as a character and her personality.
I am happy to see the author chosen is a hispanic female. That sort of representation does matter. I really just wish it was an all new character rather than someone related to a pre-existing character. There's been way too much of that already. It's stale, boring, and outlandish imo. I like to joke that if "alien" was supposed to be "jaws in space" then "alien: sea of sorrows" is "jaws: the revenge in space." Isolation was great, but pretty much everything related to Amanda ripley since then has been subpar. Other stories featuring Vasquez's family have already been done too. How many times are we going to see this family-relation angle pop up?
She could easily just be bi. My high school's populace was majority Mexican and there were quite a few girls who got pregnant and then never dated a guy again.
I'm actually mixed (Mexican on my Mom's side and Irish on my Dad's side) so I'm just glad a Latina author is writing this story as representation absolutely matters.
Also shouts to Titan for continuing to step up the cover art!
At the end of the day we all die the same when we run into an acid bleeding monstrosity so... yeah. I'll gladly be proven wrong though in that it might end up as an amazing "must-read" Alien novel but so far I'm not really jumping up and down with excitement.
But even with that I do not think it is my place to say "you can't do this" as overall I do get the logic behind the idea, even if I think the execution's more than questionable both in terms of making Vasquez retroactively a mother, and with the combination of focusing on another daughter to go fight Aliens just feels like the most boneheaded trite way of doing this.
I'm not in disagreement, really. Just merely pointing out that there's room for interpretation on that front, but there's plenty of other issues that still makes it a bad idea.
I always took that as mockery 🤷♂️
Who is Snow White ?
If anything, create a whole new character and throw whatever you want them to be in it.
(I'll still get the book though)
When?!
...while remarking on how pretty Ripley is. lol
jesus.
she's making remarks on how Ripley is pretty and she's full on eyeing Ripley up and down at the start. c'mon.
At the very least she's bi, but making the active choice to go with [oh she had kids] kind of shows how this book is going to go with any queerness.
by making the gay character straight and doing mommy fanfic with her.
"this is important"
it's actually gross but sure, ok.
It's a story connected to a beloved character, but at that character's expense rather than that character's benefit.
It's a cash grab.
Thank you
Things like this just make the galaxy seem so small:
"our new lead characters are RELATED to those classic characters you LOVE! and EVERYONE MEETS THE ALIEN!"
...and.... are you really telling me that Vasquez was ever attracted to men?
Claiming Vasquez for "the straights" just feels like the exact opposite of how "representation" ought to work but.... whatever.
(Alien Isolation is good DESPITE Amanda being related to Ripley btw)
exactly. There's no art here. It's just top to bottom fanfic tier stuff.
The back-story given to Vasquez, as jenette Goldstein describes it in older interviews, does not jive well with what the author is trying to do here imo. Vasquez was a great character, But her history is not all that heroic. She was in gangs and committed murder as a juvenile (hence the teardrop tattoo). She had a life sentence in prison and joined the marines as an alternative to prison, but she was still a lifer serving in the marines. She always took point in her squad because she didn't care if she died. None of this sounds like a woman who had children and/or is anxious to get back to her family. All that aside, even if she did have children, going to prison at such a young age doesn't exactly allow for her to develop a meaningful relationship with her children so that they'd go searching for what happened to her when they grow up.
I hate to be a downer, but this is probably the least interesting novel Titan has come up with so far, and I really don't see how this is going to work in a way the feels as natural as isolation did...