Author: M. Dean Cooper

Rebels Revisited: “Sounds like a Shipful of Ezras”

Posted on November 21, 2016by , and Feature Articles

rr-ironsquad

Ben: Writing teenagers is hard. It’s very easy for teens to come off as annoying, since the most common stereotypes for them are them being self-confident, rebellious or angst-ridden, and sometimes all three at once. Of course, most adult viewers won’t remember what being a teenager is like, loaded with the beginnings of emotions and understanding that will eventually give way to adulthood, typically through circumstances and time.

Rebels stepped into this minefield right away by giving us Ezra, the precocious youth with the laser slingshot and enough attitude to thumb his nose at the stormtroopers stomping around his hometown. Ezra has developed a lot over the show’s course, though, so the writers knew better than to just give us a teenager and leave him as it was for the long term. It probably helps that they had experience with Ahsoka’s character arc in The Clone Wars.

In “Iron Squadron”, we meet a crew of three teens much like Ezra when we first saw him: young, scrappy and willing to stick it to the Empire however they can. Unlike Ezra, who was on his own before being found by Kanan, the trio who make up Iron Squadron only have each other. Their leader, Mart, lost his father in the resistance, and it was likely his idea for them to take a ship and use it to fight back however they could. Unlike Ezra, who was embittered about fighting after his own parents’ death, Mart sought to follow his father’s example. Read More

How Much Technology in Star Wars is Too Much?

Posted on October 7, 2016by , , , and Not A Committee

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With the recent return of Star Wars Rebels, we’ve finally been exploring the aftermath of Kanan Jarrus’s blinding last season. Kanan’s existing doubts and fears were only amplified by his handicap, and he spent months in apparent isolation before finally learning from Bendu how to use his Force senses in place of the real one he lost.

“Warrior learns how to see without seeing” is a time-honored trope that was all but made for Star Wars, and I loved seeing Rebels‘ take on it—I see the value in telling that story, not just for its own sake, but as a means of growing Kanan as a character and opening his mind to new paths. But at the same time, I admit I have a little suspension-of-disbelief issue with it: couldn’t the guy just get new eyes? Forget the ample prosthetic limb technology that we already know exists; if they can clone an entire army of dudes and age them at double their natural rate, surely they could clone him new biological eyes?

Well, maybe, but maybe not. Post-reboot, there are far fewer examples of cyborgs in Star Wars than there used to be, and the ones that we do see often are often portrayed as faulty or not quite optimal–so it’s unclear whether a robotic eye, or a cloned one, is actually possible, as counter-intuitive as that might be. The reality is, Kanan doesn’t have new eyes because that story wouldn’t be as interesting—just like Return of the Jedi wouldn’t have been as interesting if Luke had to duel with his left hand only. Read More

Stages Within Stages: The Minority Report, Year Two

Posted on September 19, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

Finn_and_Rey_Jakku_Escape

Ever since 2009, I’ve conducted an ongoing study of diversity in Star Wars fiction—first (and still) at the Jedi Council Forums, then here at Eleven-ThirtyEight. Over time, I developed a means of “diversity scoring” various stories based on the demographics of their casts, and began looking for trends and precedents in the franchise, for good or ill. One huge thing I’ve learned from this process is that it’s very, very hard to quantify diversity in a useful way; people inclined to argue with me will often yell “Quotas! One of everything!”, which is an easy logical leap to make but hardly a solution. Not all roles and stories are created equal, so simple math is at best a limited measure of work’s value.

This became especially clear to me a year ago, when scoring the first several works of the new Star Wars canon. While at first glance these stories had established a number of remarkable things like a majority-female stormtrooper unit, a black main character for a middle-grade series, and several LGBTQ characters in a single book, these bold steps weren’t showing up in the scoring—if anything, the raw figures were slightly worse than they had been in my studies of Legends material. While the average score has ticked down a little over the last year—from 67 to 60—that feeling has mostly held up. Read More

Let’s Dispel With This Fiction That Mon Mothma Was Wrong

Posted on September 12, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

mothma-ro

Star Wars fandom, and this site in particular, have spoken at great length over the last year about the course charted by the New Republic from Endor through to the destruction of Hosnian Prime. Is the New Republic actually better than the old one? Is it different enough? Should it be different? We have an unusual frame of reference for these questions, because aside from a few hints in Aftermath, pretty much the first thing we saw the New Republic do was get blown up in The Force Awakens. Since then, both stories have gotten a lot of new elaboration and context, but we’re still debating the big question—could the destruction caused by Starkiller Base have been prevented somehow?

Way back in March, before we had either Bloodline or Life Debt to consider, Ben Crofts tackled this question head-on in his piece Fantasy Foresight—basically arguing that it would have been impossible for the New Republic to eliminate the vein of Imperialism that became the First Order without becoming just as bad as the Empire itself.

Surely they could have acted differently than they did, though, right? In last week’s guest piece What the New Republic Should Have Learned From the Old Republic, Chris Wermeskerch looked specifically at the example of Kashyyyk, whose liberation Mon Mothma argues against in Life Debt, and cites several examples where even the Old Republic, corrupt and bureaucratic as it was, managed to act in the interests of small, oppressed populations. Isn’t there a big grey area, Chris wonders, between absolute pacifism and rampant militarism? Read More

All is as the Force Wills it – Unpacking the Rogue One Trailer

Posted on August 15, 2016by , , and Aggressive Negotiations

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So many pretty new pictures! I got together over the weekend with David Schwarz, Ben Crofts, and eventually, guest contributor Nick Adams, to discuss our immediate reactions—thrills, hopes and concerns—to the new trailer for Rogue One that premiered last Thursday. That’s all there is to say—enjoy!

Mike: First topic: it’s hard to have a measured conversation about a trailer without devolving into “ohmigod that shot was so cool”, so purely from an aesthetic standpoint, what were some of your favorite images?

David: It’s hard to choose, isn’t it? That trailer was a feast!

Ben: Superlaser star destroyer eclipse, Donnie Yen = badass

Ben: The canyon sequences were damn cool.

David: I have to go with the Death Star eclipsing Jedha’s sun. There’s something primal about eclipses, I guess. Plus it made me think about what the view from Alderaan was.

Mike: I choose to think that the Death Star went out of its way to block the sun just to mess with everybody.

Ben: Eclipses are just a great homage to THAT Empire sequence with the Executor. There’s also that talk Tarkin gives in Darklighter about seeing the Death Star rise above a world.

Mike: I wonder if Alderaan could see it at all—it seems way, way closer to Jedha than it was to Alderaan. Which could have any number of implications.

David: I also loved the final shot, the “we are with you to the end”. A bunch of nobodies ready to fight the Empire. 100% Star Wars. Read More