Author: David Schwarz

Second Look: The Continuity Trap: Could The High Republic Signal a Creative Rebirth for Star Wars?

Posted on July 29, 2020by

Second Look is Eleven-ThirtyEight’s biannual tradition of highlighting some of our most interesting pieces from recent months. Every day this week you’ll find a different older piece back on our front page for another moment in the spotlight. – Mike, EIC

We all love lore. I think we can safely say that, right? No matter what angle of Star Wars tickles our fancies, be it the arrangement of the fleets of the Confederacy of Independent Systems or the hobbies and personalities of Padmé’s handmaidens, we all like uncovering new and unexpected details about the universe. But adding new lore—new continuity—to a shared universe like Star Wars is not a simple task. A well-intentioned author who loves Star Wars lore as much as we do can write what he thinks will be a fun detail: that all Mandalorian generals don green pauldrons in honor of the first mythosaur hunt, for example. Then a couple of years later, a Mandalorian general will appear in a movie or TV show, and the lead designer will have to give them red pauldrons to avoid interfering with the green screen. Was the author wrong in setting that detail in stone? Should the director have respected that choice even if it meant altering the shot?

There’s no easy answer here. The line to walk is tenuous and sometimes blurry. It’s common sense that the creators behind Star Wars should always aim to keep a certain level of consistency and plausibility. At the same time, it’s a bad idea to tie the hands of future authors just because of a self-indulgent need to classify and taxonomize every single item in the universe. Star Wars has walked this edge since its very beginning. It even rebooted a few years ago, partly because of how deep its lore has become. But how have things changed since the reboot? Have things become more accessible? Does accessibility also make things blander? And could a publishing program like the recently-announced The High Republic be the way to both have the cake and eat it?

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The Continuity Trap: Could The High Republic Signal a Creative Rebirth for Star Wars?

Posted on March 30, 2020by Six on the Wild Die

We all love lore. I think we can safely say that, right? No matter what angle of Star Wars tickles our fancies, be it the arrangement of the fleets of the Confederacy of Independent Systems or the hobbies and personalities of Padmé’s handmaidens, we all like uncovering new and unexpected details about the universe. But adding new lore—new continuity—to a shared universe like Star Wars is not a simple task. A well-intentioned author who loves Star Wars lore as much as we do can write what he thinks will be a fun detail: that all Mandalorian generals don green pauldrons in honor of the first mythosaur hunt, for example. Then a couple of years later, a Mandalorian general will appear in a movie or TV show, and the lead designer will have to give them red pauldrons to avoid interfering with the green screen. Was the author wrong in setting that detail in stone? Should the director have respected that choice even if it meant altering the shot?

There’s no easy answer here. The line to walk is tenuous and sometimes blurry. It’s common sense that the creators behind Star Wars should always aim to keep a certain level of consistency and plausibility. At the same time, it’s a bad idea to tie the hands of future authors just because of a self-indulgent need to classify and taxonomize every single item in the universe. Star Wars has walked this edge since its very beginning. It even rebooted a few years ago, partly because of how deep its lore has become. But how have things changed since the reboot? Have things become more accessible? Does accessibility also make things blander? And could a publishing program like the recently-announced The High Republic be the way to both have the cake and eat it?

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The Pitch: Rey’s To-Do List

Posted on February 10, 2020by , , , and Not A Committee

The Rise of Skywalker happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.

So, what now? Rumors abound, but outside of season two of The Mandalorian and a slate of books and comics that looks pretty similar to last year’s (at least until they spill the details on Project Luminous), exactly what form mainline Star Wars content will take remains an open question. The Old Republic, or maybe the Even Older Republic, seems to be the most likely next step, if only to give the sequel cast some time to breathe and perhaps age up a little.

But the galaxy didn’t end just because the Skywalker saga did; the story of those characters will go on, first in fanfic and almost certainly in officially-licensed material of some sort, someday. Let’s dwell for a moment on what that day might look like.

Rey may be the last Jedi, but even the relatively tight confines of the sequel films have established at least two other Force-sensitives in Finn and Temiri Blagg, better known as Broom Boy. Potentially even Jannah’s entire company of former stormtroopers depending on how strictly you want to interpret ROS’s nudges–imagine for a moment a new Jedi Order whose first class is composed almost entirely of First Order stormtroopers! It’s a hell of a thing. Between that and Rey’s own training seeming to have come at least as much from the original Jedi texts as from the Skywalker twins, you’ve got a recipe for a very different Jedi Order.

And they’ll have their work cut out for them. Another side effect of the saga’s tight-focus ending is a lot of lingering threads and unanswered injustices in the galaxy: slavery, both biological and mechanical; a newly-familiarized Unknown Regions with untold mysteries and threats, the ignorance of which allowed the First Order to rise in the first place; and even within the quote-unquote civilized galaxy, political divisions have been exposed that make the Empire look positively centrist. Not only are the possibilities endless, but it strikes me that they’re uniquely interesting in their potential to underline the ways in which the old Jedi let the galaxy down in the name of holding it together, and the lessons Rey might have learned from them.

So with that in mind, what’s an established, persisting injustice in the GFFA that you think an ideal NJO should take on? If you’re Grand Master Rey, what would you do in your first hundred days?

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The 20 Most Memorable Moments of the New Star Wars Canon, Part II

Posted on May 29, 2019by , , , , , , and

Welcome to Part II of our Memorable Moments feature–Part I can be found here! This thing is long enough already so let’s get right to it…

sloaneposter13. Admiral Sloane Orders the Retreat, “The Levers of Power” (Jay Shah)

Initially, my entire list of favorite moments consisted of key events from RAE SLOANE’s story across different media and throughout the timeline of novels in which we’ve seen her. That would have been a little silly for a list of moments, even though I believe RAE SLOANE’s journey through the new canon has been the most remarkable and every moment we saw her in another context was a surprise and a sheer delight. But if I had to pick a single moment, I would choose her appearance at the Battle of Endor in the short story “The Levers of Power” — it’s the pivot point around which her whole career orients and changes.

Before the Battle of Endor, RAE SLOANE is a dutiful Imperial true believer who does the right thing as she sees it but is unable to rise as far as she merits due to the Empire’s internal politics and her unwillingness to play those games. After the Battle of Endor, RAE SLOANE is one of the most powerful forces in the Empire and becomes the very face of its surviving military as a grand admiral (literally, in the case of propaganda posters).

“The Levers of Power” shows Admiral RAE SLOANE on the precipice, just as her Empire is. It is a harrowing story. The Battle of Endor felt like it could go either way, until disaster mounted on disaster and it couldn’t. We see all the classic hallmarks of RAE SLOANE: her tactical skill, her dislike for power games (exemplified by a particularly odious ISB loyalty officer), and her ability to cut through the expected to get things done. She does not suffer the loyalty officer’s second-guessing as she leads as ably as any Imperial officer could. More than that: when she has to make the key decisive call that the battle is lost and duty requires the fleet to be preserved, she shoots the loyalty officer dead and gives the order to retreat. She has to. Read More

The 20 Most Memorable Moments of the New Star Wars Canon, Part I

Posted on May 27, 2019by , , , , and Feature Articles

While Eleven-ThirtyEight was founded in 2013, the earliest piece of writing hosted here is much, much older. In the summer of 2005, soon after Revenge of the Sith “completed” the saga, Star Wars Insider magazine published a feature by Abel G. Peña and Enrique Guerrero entitled “The 20 Most Memorable Moments of the Expanded Universe”. The piece concluded with a prompt for readers to share their own lists, and that was just the excuse I needed to begin a new blog at StarWars.com, which was a thing they let people do in those days.

The final product was my first major piece of Star Wars writing outside of TheForce.Net, and while I didn’t end up doing much else over there, I remained pretty fond of it, so with the official blogs long since defunct I took the opportunity of ETE’s birth to port the thing over here, where it has lived happily in seclusion ever since.

While I’m normally not a fan of “listicles” (gag) or retrospectives on content long past, that “memorable moments” concept has always stuck with me as one of the more acceptable ways of approaching both things—so with the five-year anniversary of the Star Wars continuity reboot last month I decided this would be a good opportunity for us to stop and look around a bit.

While the ranking that follows is of course despicably subjective, it is the result of an obnoxiously elaborate ranked-choice voting system: each of our nine regular contributors offered their own list of ten moments, with everyone’s top choice counting for ten points, their second choice counting for nine points, and so on. That left us with sixty-two distinct “moments” and several ties, which we then voted on until arriving at a conclusive top twenty.

With no further ado, enjoy, and be sure to check back on Wednesday for Part II! – Mike Read More