Author: Jay Shah

Tsar Wars: Once Upon a Time in a Galaxy Far Far Away

Posted on August 10, 2015by Aggressive Negotiations, Imperial Court Circular

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In case you hadn’t noticed, I have a pretty strong interest in royalty and in politics. My passion is shared by my old friend, Bria LaVorgna. Bria and I have decided to co-write a piece on monarchy in Star Wars, presented alternatingly on the sites we write for: Eleven-ThirtyEight and Tosche Station. We think that the close connection Star Wars has to monarchy is pretty unusual and worth examining in detail. We’ll start out with a brief survey of monarchy in Star Wars, before moving on to an examination of how monarchy works on three prominent Star Wars planets.

(Programming note: I’ll update this intro post with links to each piece on Tosche Station and Eleven-ThirtyEight as they go up this week. Look for a new piece each day from now through Thursday!)

Part II: A New Naboo (Tosche Station)
Part III: The Hapans Strike Back (Eleven-ThirtyEight)

 

 

c6256992fe890afeb7825666927b7f0d[1]Unusually among science fiction franchises, Star Wars has a strong attachment to monarchy. This is partly due to the nature of Star Wars as space opera rather than pure science fiction, but it’s not really a genre issue. Monarchy is part of the DNA of Star Wars and always has been. Initially, Princess Leia served as the princess figure in the fairy tale conception of Star Wars (one of many inspirations for Star Wars, including myth, serial adventures, etc.) and Leia proves in the very first film that she’s not merely a damsel in distress. But fairy tale inspirations only get us part of the way — monarchy is a persistent and pervasive part of Star Wars, reflected in the Naboo of the prequel trilogy, Hapes of the Expanded Universe, and a myriad of monarchies in the Clone Wars. In fact, The Clone Wars made such a use of monarchies that worlds that the EU had established as democracies (Mon Calamari) ended up becoming monarchies. George Lucas had a pretty direct hand in The Clone Wars, and he obviously crafted the story of the saga, so monarchy is just a part of his political conception of Star Wars. But the question is — why? Why does a story about the struggle between light and dark, between democracy and tyranny, feature monarchies so centrally?

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The Pitch – Space Travel is For Suckers

Posted on July 27, 2015by , , , and

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Alongside the now-confirmed Han Solo movie and the still-theoretical Boba Fett movie, one of the most perennially-rumored spinoff films is one (or three!) centering on Obi-Wan Kenobi. While such a movie could conceivably be set during the Clone Wars thanks to Ewan McGregor’s annoying eternal youthfulness, speculation generally assumes the movie would be set during his exile on Tatooine (for the record, Ewan is currently 44, which in Obi years puts him at about six years after Revenge of the Sith). Speculation also tends to assume, at least when I’ve seen it, that the story would involve some sort of dire mission pulling him away from Tatooine for a brief time.

Leaving aside the conceit that anything could be important enough to pull him away from Luke, and leaving aside the fact that rather than twiddling his thumbs, the one thing we know for sure is that Obi-Wan spent that time communing with Qui-Gon and Yoda and learning how to transcend death (which was still a distant second on his list of priorities after safeguarding Luke), it bugs me when people take for granted the idea that an Obi-Wan movie would automatically require him to leave Tatooine, because for all its ostensible overuse in the film saga, Tatooine is really interesting.

Look no further than John Jackson Miller’s Kenobi, a book dealing with that selfsame period that manages to restrict its action not just to the one planet, but to an area small enough to fit on a handy-dandy map. Kenobi, the first novel whose release Eleven-ThirtyEight had the privilege of covering, was a rousing and heartrending adventure story with more shades of the traditional western than A New Hope could’ve, ah, hoped to squeeze into its running time—and not for one second does the reader find themselves wondering “yeah, but what’s going on on Coruscant right now?” Read More

Imperial Justice – Cold Truth of Fascism

Posted on July 15, 2015by Imperial Court Circular

Servants_of_the_Empire_Imperial_Justice[1]In what’s becoming a regular feature on this site, we’re publishing yet another rave review of a Jason Fry novel. It’s not our fault – Jason has a tendency to release high-quality novels at an impressive pace, so blame him for the lack of variety. Although that’s pretty unfair, because the best thing about Jason’s novels is that each of them are good for different reasons and allow us to focus on different aspects of the Star Wars universe. His original books have plenty to discuss, while his two Servants of the Empire books highlight the very compelling awakening of political consciousness and the dynamics of teamwork and personal perspective. Rebel in the Ranks developed the plot threads of Edge of the Galaxy, but Imperial Justice is where the early investments in character and setting really pay off. The events of the book are more meaningful because of what we know about Zare, Merei, and the other characters that populate Lothal.

This book was released at the perfect time, as we were looking to write a series of articles on the theme of morality among heroes and villains in the new canon (how the Imperials and Rebels have been portrayed in the new canon and how they should be portrayed, what worked and what hasn’t). In 2013, we wrote a series of pieces on Politics and the Expanded Universe showing where the now-Legends EU had succeeded and where it had failed in convincingly portraying the good guy and bad guy factions in Star Wars. A similar piece about how the sexism of the Galactic Empire never made in-universe sense also reflected on the nature of villainy in Star Wars, and how an effective villain was not merely a series of evil checkboxes but reflected something that the heroes would actively fight against and challenge.

Imperial Justice showcases villainy, but in a more compelling and active way. Instead of providing a menace or a threat that the heroes must react to, the influence of the Empire is pervasive throughout the course of the novel. To be certain, the Empire takes a hard tack from the benign neglect / colonialist exploitation of the first novel towards police state tactics in Imperial Justice. It’s not the suppression of liberty or the paranoid, informant-centric mindset that best highlights Imperial evil though: it’s what the influence of the Empire’s darkness does to the heroes that really shows the danger of fascism. Evil is not just tyrannical, and it is not merely seductive. Evil corrupts peoples and societies, including those who are out to fight evil. It’s not a coincidence that our long-standing favorite novel of the new canon, A New Dawn, both established the pre-ANH era and set the thematic tone for the rising corruption of evil and the heroism that is spawned in response to it. Jason Fry takes up that thread and runs with it. In showing this thoughtful and nuanced take on evil, his Imperial Justice justifiably claim to be the most thematically impressive – and best overall – novel of the new canon to date.

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Just how good a pilot is Vader? Our “Siege of Lothal” sim on X-Wing Alliance

Posted on July 8, 2015by Imperial Court Circular

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So, most folks who’ve seen the TV movie “Siege of Lothal” that opened the second season of Star Wars Rebels were astonished by Darth Vader’s piloting skills. What people disagreed on is whether Vader’s performance finally showed him as the greatest pilot in the galaxy, or if he was over-powered to the point of incredulity. Then some people took the middle line: Vader should’ve been shown as the best pilot in the galaxy, but the faceless “redshirt” opposition he faced robbed the moment of the impact it needed (unlike his saber skirmish with the Ghost crew). Those are legitimate differences of opinion, and we think that there are good criticisms raised despite our view that this was the best Rebels episode to date.

Our thought when we first saw that sequence? “…you know, I wonder if I [we] could pull off that stunt in TIE Fighter.” After all, we’re a veteran player of those flight sims and know all the tricks to the game. So – we decided to do it! We decided to use X-wing Alliance because of the ease of its in-game skirmish generator. Though it would have been a relatively simple matter to use tools like “TIE Fighter Workshop” to generate new missions in TIE Fighter, XWA has a better game engine with a more challenging AI. More helpfully, it also has Vader’s TIE Advanced x-1 available thanks to the “XWA Upgrade” craft patches.

So we set up a skirmish fitting the parameters of the show as best we could. We set a TIE Advanced x1 for ourself, no missiles or special bonuses. The enemy had eight A-wings, five Corellian Corvettes, and a bulk cruiser (to approximate the converted freighter/frigate used as the Rebel command ship). We didn’t have enough craft slots to add in a ship approximating the Ghost, or we would’ve chosen a YT-2000 like the Otana. We figured it if were too easy, we could add the ship in later using a more sophisticated mission editor like “AlliED” and have it launch on a timer (update: we did that very thing after drafting most of this article, see the end of this article for how the Ghost affects things).

Oh, and by the way: click the screenshots to view them at full-size, using AlliED let us add some details you might not want to miss. We had perhaps a little too much fun with the mission editor. 🙂

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Consequences – The Fate of Those Who Rebel

Posted on June 22, 2015by and Feature Articles

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Ben: A number of TV shows, especially the successful ones, have a problem with the status quo. Once a show is established, the easiest thing to do is leave things as they are, repeating a successful formula ad nauseam until the ratings stop coming in. This is especially true about typical kid’s cartoons, where the stakes are microscopically low and conflict is played for laughs. A list of examples would take up most of this page. But right from the beginning of Season Two, Star Wars Rebels proves that it is not one of those shows.

“Siege of Lothal” is an intense and dramatic story about the consequences of the actions taken and done through the show’s first season. The heroes thought that they had won, if not a war, at least a very great battle. They had defeated Grand Moff Tarkin, destroyed his flagship, saved Kanan’s life and united with a larger rebellion than any of them had known even existed. But the realities of what little good their action had actually done, how little they had accomplished, came crashing back down on them throughout the events of the hour-long season opener.

How willing Rebels is to shake up and alter its own status quo has been subtly working its way through the first season, with neither characters nor plots staying stagnant. But there has not been a point where more has changed in such a short time as this two-parter. The foremost agent of these changes is, of course, Darth Vader, a foe far above and beyond anything that the Ghost’s crew has ever faced. He wipes out their allies, destroys their hiding places, and sends them on the run to somewhere, anywhere that is not Lothal. There is nothing they can do to stop him, or even slow him down, they can only run for their lives and hope that he does not follow. Read More