Author: M. Dean Cooper

“What If”, But For Real—Let’s Recontextualize the OT

Posted on August 19, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

sanacoverWay back at the beginning of June, issue #6 of Jason Aaron’s Star Wars comic series ended with a bombshell: the apparent bounty hunter tracking Han and Leia for three issues or so finally caught up with them, only to claim that she was Sana Solo, Han’s wife.

By the time you read these words, Star Wars #8 will have been released, and we may well know the truth of Sana’s claim (though probably not). But back in June, this made for a big news story; the comics are canon now, after all, so if Han has a wife in them, then he’s got a wife in A New Hope! Isn’t that a big deal?

Well, yes and no. For starters, there are all sorts of possibilities here. Even if Sana’s not just stark-raving mad (or, y’know, lying), she could in fact be his ex-wife, or they could still be legally married but estranged—and said estrangement could be for reasons that make Han look like a million credits and make Sana look like the devil, or vice-versa. As of this writing, we just don’t know. Read More

Portrait of an Oldbie

Posted on August 14, 2015by

ventress-sideshowIn my interview series Better Know a Fan, I find people I know outside of the Eleven-ThirtyEight staff who I nevertheless find interesting—either for their unique point of view, their tone, or their overall personality. My subject this time, Tracy Gentile, has already made her stamp on ETE in the form of last year’s guest piece The Case Against Mara Jade Skywalker.

While that piece was without a doubt one of the most controversial things I’ve ever run here, Tracy justified my faith in her both in the article itself and her patient engagement with the intense feedback. To those of us who know her at the Jedi Council Forums as anakinfansince1983, she’s a lively debater whose opinions are nothing if not intense themselves, but like my last two interviewees, I’ve never seen her take an honest disagreement personally or blow it out of proportion. As a member of the original Star Wars generation, after all, Tracy’s got nothing if not an abundance of perspective. Read More

The Parity Problem, or Why Padmé is the Best Character in the Prequels

Posted on August 3, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

padmekneel

With the dawn of the sequel trilogy less than a year away, 2015 has been a year of relitigation: new and old segments of Star Wars fandom, maybe even subconsciously, attempting to settle old scores and nail down our history one way or another so what we might all move forward together into whatever the hell The Force Awakens ends up being.

Most recently, this could be seen in last month’s brouhaha over two “Slave Leia” stories: first, a parent taking issue with the character’s presence in the toy aisle, where she was discovered by his young daughter. Then, just a couple days later, the new issue of GQ magazine featured a cover and photo spread with Amy Schumer involving the slave bikini, the droids, and pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Some people loved it, some were offended, and some (hi) just found it boring.

That was a couple weeks ago and people are still talking about Slave—excuse me, Huttslayer Leia and whether that scene was good, bad, or just plain unnecessary. For my money, Tricia Barr covered all the right bases and then some. But way before Leia ended up in the news again, 2015 began with the relitigation of, perhaps, an even more controversial element of Star Wars: the death of Padmé in Revenge of the Sith. Read More

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. XI – The Bounty Hunters of Ord Mantell

Posted on July 31, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

scoundrels-luck

After a nice long break to recover from the insanity of the Death Star plans (which I recently adapted into a short video for Star Wars Minute), we now return to our regularly-scheduled program, wherein I explicate the handful of offhand references in the original trilogy that the Expanded Universe couldn’t help but explain multiple times over. This time around:

22. What happened with the bounty hunter Han “ran into” on Ord Mantell?

By my count (and one thing I learned from the Death Star piece is that there’s a fair chance I’m missing someone), there are seven different encounters on Ord Mantell between Han and at least one bounty hunter between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. In researching this piece, one interesting thing I noticed is that, counterintuitively, about half of these weren’t even directly the result of Jabba’s bounty, but were instead brought on by Han’s position in the Rebellion. This is neat because it sort of contradicts the context of Han’s line in Empire but at the same time reinforces the idea that he’s ready to move on. Like lots of stuff in this period, some of the dating is fuzzy, but I’m going to attempt to run through them all chronologically, starting with… Read More

The Pitch – Space Travel is For Suckers

Posted on July 27, 2015by , , , and

coronet

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