Author: M. Dean Cooper

A Republic Both New and Familiar: The First Clues from Bloodline Emerge

Posted on April 25, 2016by and Not A Committee

bloodline-posters

First, a disclaimer: while this piece won’t be getting into major plot details from Bloodline (since we haven’t read it yet), we will be dealing directly with information from the three-chapter excerpt that was released late last week by instaFreebie [1]Editor’s note–this piece mistakenly credited the release to the Playcrafting newsletter in its original form regarding the political context and background of the sequel era. If you deem that to be spoilery, proceed at your own discretion.

Mike: So Jay, you and I have spoken on and off about Leia’s founding of the Resistance as a difficult move to judge from our perspective here in the real world—on the one hand, we know the First Order is a serious threat, but in-universe, it’s very easy to see how she’d come across to the post-Endor generation as an old soldier refusing to accept peace, or worse, as a warmonger. At the beginning of Bloodline we learn that after a couple decades the New Republic senate has polarized into two factions: the Centrists, who favor a stronger leadership role for the Republic and a more aggressive military, and the Populists, who prefer more power and autonomy for individual planets. While at first glance it seems sensible that Leia would be part of the Populist faction, it’s especially interesting considering that she’s on the verge of starting her own army.

What first struck me about this backdrop, though, is how believable it felt—at least to someone used to American politics, which are nominally divided into “federal” people and “state” people. Something you’ve brought up here multiple times is the danger of haphazardly translating contemporary political issues into Star Wars’ fantastical setting, when they don’t really apply. Not only does Centrists/Populists feel to me like an artful distillation of real political divisions, it feels like a very appropriate division for the GFFA to have at this point, when so many of its members would be ex-Imperials and ex-Separatists alike. It takes the sort of generic sense of “corruption” we already knew was coming (and which appeared to varying degrees of success in the Expanded Universe) and grounds it in the known history of the galaxy—just like I’ve been hoping for all along. Did you get a similar real-world feeling from it? Read More

 

References
↑1 Editor’s note–this piece mistakenly credited the release to the Playcrafting newsletter in its original form

Let’s Hear It for the Boy – In Defense of Ezra

Posted on April 18, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

rr-ezravizago

I’m a big fan of metafiction—stories that incorporate, either directly or through themes and subtext, their own artificiality into their narratives. In the Expanded Universe, this manifested itself in Luke, Han and Leia’s increasing weariness as the years dragged on and they lost more and more of their loved ones (and debatably, their souls) due to an endless series of galactic conflicts. As early as 1999, Han’s reaction to Chewbacca’s death in Vector Prime was framed in overtly out-of-universe fashion as the evaporation of a perceived bubble of safety around the core group of characters.

While that particular safety bubble was handily popped in The Force Awakens, it manifests in a different way on Star Wars Rebels. While the Disney XD animated series hasn’t shied away from killing any number of Imperials, as the stakes have increased over the past two seasons it’s become increasingly hard for many to believe that no one from its core group of protagonists has died. Personally, I think fans—older ones, at least—get way too wrapped up in life and death being the only stakes that matter in a story; not only is it perhaps unrealistic to expect Whedonesque fatalities among the heroes of a cartoon, but doing so makes it harder to become invested in the stories the show is telling, hence the common complaints that this episode or that is “filler”.

As such, I neither expect nor desire any deaths from the Ghost crew in the near future—by the end of the series, maybe, but not soon. More than that, I’m actively rooting for Hera and Sabine to survive into the original trilogy and beyond. But what’s very interesting to me from a meta perspective is the tension between Kanan and Ezra’s story and the very real pressures both in- and out-of-universe forcing them inch by inch toward the grave. As someone who survived for years on the fringes of the Empire, and who has now endured a handicap that could limit his ability to be a true threat to Palpatine, I can imagine any number of second-tier fates for Kanan that don’t involve his death. Ultimately, though, Rebels is no more his story than A New Hope is Obi-Wan’s—it’s about Ezra. Kanan’s function in the story is to take a dumb, self-centered kid and facilitate his transcendence into a higher plateau of importance, one where he could be a force for great good, unthinkable evil, or purely for himself. Read More

Portrait of a Professional

Posted on April 15, 2016by Interviews

geller1I began my interview series Better Know a Fan almost exactly one year ago as a method of engaging directly with Star Wars fans who had very different backgrounds and points of view than myself; people whom I respected but couldn’t quite get my head around without a little extra work. If you follow this site on Twitter, you’ll know that there’s no one I struggle with more often than Eric Geller, current writer and editor for the Daily Dot news website, and like myself an evacuee of TheForce.net.

I’ve never told Eric this, but part of the reason I mix it up with him so often is because he reminds me of myself at his age—restless, hyperopinionated, and as he would say, thirsty—except I didn’t have anything approaching the microphone your average young and excitable Star Wars fan has now thanks to the ubiquity of social media. Eric’s already gone much further as a real journalist than I have as a fake one (he met BB-8, for god’s sake), and while I feel compelled to impart upon him some of the humility and composure I’ve picked up in the last ten years, the fact is I’m also just a teensy bit jealous. Nevertheless, he indulged me with this interview. Read More

To Ship, or Not to Ship—Is that the Question?

Posted on April 8, 2016by , , , and Not A Committee

hanleia-valentine

Last February, Claudia Gray, author of Lost Stars and the imminent (and hotly anticipated) Bloodline, dropped a bomb into the Star Wars shipping community when she declared her affection for Reylo—in other words, the notion of a romance between Rey and Kylo Ren. While Reylo is a divisive prospect for a number of reasons, in particular the characters’ potential family ties and the overtones of sexual assault in Kylo’s mental torture of Rey in The Force Awakens, the reactions of many of her fans on social media was, well, staggering to me.

While likely a small number in the grand scheme of things, numerous people were appalled, declaring they no longer planned to purchase Bloodline, and even attacking Gray’s character. She spent the next day or so tweeting at length on the subject, responding generally and to several specific individuals, and to my mind, made a lot of great points both on Reylo and on shipping in general.

To be clear, I can’t get my head around Reylo myself. Nor am I particularly into Kylux [1]Kylo and Hux or Stormpilot [2]Finn and Poe (though Poe is one hundred percent not straight). But I have latched onto certain Star Wars couples over the years, both actual (Tycho and Winter) and prospective (Jacen and Danni Quee), and one thing I do know from experience is that you can’t always explain what appeals to you and why. Like Grey said, it’s complex stuff full of emotional baggage from real life—that’s why people can feel so strongly about it. But you certainly can’t draw a straight line from somebody’s ship to their real character or values; what’s therapeutic for one person can be triggering for someone else. Two people with similar backgrounds can have completely opposite reactions to, well, any story beat or overtone, romantic or otherwise. What I love the most about Star Wars is how one thing can attract such a huge amount of fans for so many varied reasons, and a ship is a microcosm of that—saying “Reylo fans condone abuse” is like saying Han Solo fans condone drug running. Read More

 

References
↑1 Kylo and Hux
↑2 Finn and Poe

Rebels Revisited: For a Few Rebels More

Posted on April 4, 2016by and Feature Articles

rr-maulezratrustme

Mike: With everything that went down on Wednesday’s Star Wars Rebels season finale, I wanted us to have an opportunity to get a few more thoughts in without feeling rushed. So consider this part two of Friday’s piece—what did you think, Jay? Will Kanan remain blind, or get super-cool laser eyes? Is Ahsoka dead, alive and well, or a bird? As I’m writing this, Pablo Hidalgo is doing a poll on Twitter that puts an interesting spin on the question—does Vader think she’s dead? Personally, I have a hard time seeing him abandoning the fight unless he’s convinced it’s truly over. Like Filoni has said in interviews for a while now, she represents everything he gave up to become what he is now, and he won’t just let that be; especially after she stared him down like that.

Something else I’ve been thinking about is the notion that Ezra was too gullible for trusting Maul as long as he did. Aside from the fact that Ezra has never been the king of sensible ideas (and that he never completely trusts him), I think fandom tends to lean too hard on the idea that Darth Maul looks to people in the Galaxy Far, Far Away the way he does to us. Here on Earth, if you’re in a dark alley and you come upon a guy covered in red and black with horns on his head your mind is going to jump right to all sorts of evil religious imagery that just doesn’t exist in Star Wars—hell, Maul isn’t even the most devil-looking species out there.

Completely vital to the premise of GFFA culture is the idea that a human being could walk into the Mos Eisley cantina or Maz Kanata’s castle and not find anything particularly terrifying about it—rather, these are the kinds of beings you see around all the time. Maul’s tattoos may differentiate him from the average Zabrak, but are they so unusual as to scream “villain”? What about Savage Opress–he has basically the same look, but does replacing the red with yellow make him seem less evil? And if you’re automatically scared of Savage it doesn’t seem like much of a jump to saying that all Zabraks just look evil—which in a GFFA context would be racist for sure, but really, just seems implausible when there are so many nuttier-looking things walking around. Read More