Errol Flynn, king of the swashbucklers, in art for Captain Blood
What is swashbuckling adventure? The term conjures images of dashing heroes rescuing damsels in distress via energetic swordfights in a romantic historical setting. It should be obvious that there is some of this in Star Wars’ DNA: it is dominated by dashing, high-octane heroic adventure, and sometimes openly apes the tropes of swashbucklers. Twice, a lightsaber-armed Luke Skywalker rescues Princess Leia and escapes by swinging across a gap on a rope (it’s not real swashbuckling adventure until somebody swings from a rope, vine, or whip). At its core, Star Wars is a spiritual descendant of swashbuckling adventure, which means the genre should occupy a significant place in the Expanded Universe.
There are certain tropes that go along with the swashbuckler: elaborate fencing-centric action sequences, romance with a damsel in distress, a bold and idealistic hero fighting against oppression or cruelty, a wicked villain in a position of power (who must inevitably be defeated in a swordfight), a historical setting of approximately 1200-1800 (or a fantasy version thereof). Think Robin Hood. But fundamentally, swashbuckling adventure is about an attitude. A swashbuckler’s approach to entertainment is energetic and flamboyant: its characters are larger than life, its plot one of constant thrills and excitement, its tone exuberant. It is almost never in question that the hero will win; the point of the story is to enjoy the fun-packed journey to victory. Read More
There are very few Star Wars books that really hold up as great works of art. Many are great genre entertainment, fun and excellent by the standards of tie-in fiction or pulp space opera adventure. But few are the kind you’d care to show a snooty friend to make the case for the literary merit of the Expanded Universe. One of the few novels to pass that bar is Rogue Planet, written by multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Greg Bear, and that’s why Rogue Planet belongs among Top Shelf’s collection of the best of the EU.
When I speak of literary quality, I don’t mean that Rogue Planet is comparable with Hemingway. Rather, that it examines deep themes with maturity and sports excellent characterization and prose. It is a serious, rewarding portrait of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s relationship that explores ideas about life, morality, and responsibility in a grand, mystical science-fiction setting.
The modern-day Expanded Universe is built on one great, big, foundational mistake.
In his “A Case for Starting Over” series, Alexander has been looking at ways a new Disney-era Expanded Universe could improve the post-Return of the Jedi stories. I tend to disagree with that outlook: I don’t think that a few small mistakes or missed opportunities, many of which can simply be remedied with additional stories, call for starting over and throwing out the entire vast enterprise of the EU. But if I were to look forward to any possibilities to be found in a fresh start, correcting this glaring error would be the one.
What’s the mistake? The decision to have Han and Lando resign their commissions.
Most of the genres I’ve examined so far have been ones that the Star Wars universe can adapt and has adapted wholesale, in addition to pulling in elements of the genres for its own use. Not every genre out there, however, drops easily into the Star Wars universe. That doesn’t mean that those genres don’t still have relevance, however. The sports genre is one of them.
Sports stories are a familiar brand of fiction. The most recognizable is the uplifting sports movie, one or two of which seem to come out each year. In that formulation, the narrative follows an athlete, coach, or team through adversity on and off the field, ending with a significant victory. The action of sports livens up the personal drama of the subject, almost always an inspiring underdog. It seems almost comically formulaic, but it has worked time and time again. Rocky, Moneyball, Remember the Titans, Warrior, Seabiscuit, Hoosiers, 42 . . . the examples go on and on, covering all kinds of sports. There are other ways of making sports fiction, however. Field of Dreams examined the way baseball binds generations together, how people find meaning in the sport, and its rich emotional resonance. Films like The Hustler and Raging Bull used sports as a backdrop for examining larger issues of character and personality, and Raging Bull is additionally a good example of a sports biopic that is interested not in inspiration, but in the flaws and rise-and–fall narrative of its central figure.
Shockboxing in Fists of Ion
But in any form, it should be clear that this genre is a rather more awkward fit for Star Wars than most others. Star Wars doesn’t really have a ton of room for stories purely about space football. The only existing Star Wars works I can think of that are stories about sports are the shockboxing short story Fists of Ion and the racing video games Episode I Racer and its sequel, Racer Revenge. Both of the games are tie-ins to the most prominent sports sequence in Star Wars, the podrace from The Phantom Menace.
Say what you will about the cartoonish execution of the podrace, but the idea itself is solid. In an adventure series like Star Wars, integrating high-adrenaline sequences that happen to revolve around sporting events is a perfectly fitting diversification of the action. Whether it’s Anakin Skywalker entering illegal garbage pit races, Han Solo fighting in gladiatorial contests on Jubilar or the Wheel, Luke and Ben competing in the Dathomiri version of the Olympics, or the Solo kids racing starships at Ord Mantell or Dubrillion, sports sequences have been successfully integrated into Star Wars stories. They are an excellent way of providing fresh types of action. Sports can offer intense action and conflict in thrilling sequences without unnaturally high stakes — though as with the bets riding on Anakin’s podrace, they certainly don’t have to be low-stakes events.
So far, the Expanded Universe has generally focused on universal, easily translatable sports concepts like racing and gladiatorial combat. While Star Wars analogues to popular spectator sports along the lines of American football/rugby, basketball, golf, and soccer have been created, they tend to be used as background detail, not played out in the course of the narrative, due to the difficulty of fully selling a made-up space version of modern spectator sports with their fiendishly complex rules. This is not an insurmountable obstacle, however, and a great variety of sporting action is possible.
Swoop racing. Star Wars has a lot of different racing.
One can imagine many ways to integrate sporting events into tales. In Return to Ord Mantell and Vector Prime, sporting competitions were recreational diversions, undertaken as part of the setup for the story or killing a little time before the story kicked in for the competing characters. Like the technique of putting the characters at a sporting event as spectators and describing the action they witness, this is a way of building in sports that doesn’t rely on tying the event deeply into the plot, but it does depend on the characters being at leisure to use their recreational time in such a way. So while there could be a few stories with Chewbacca entering a wrestling match to make a little money while waiting for a smuggling job, X-wing pilots playing limmie in their downtime, or spies making a handoff at a smashball game, it isn’t a device that could be used too heavily.
More integrated to the story are scenarios in which the protagonists are forced to compete by the larger plot. A captured character might be entered against his will in gladiatorial games. Characters facing hostile aliens or attempting to enlist their aid might have to beat them at a rough-and-tumble local version of rugby where they may not know all the rules. An undercover Jedi Knight might enter an underground shockboxing tournament to get close to an assassin who competes in his spare time. Han Solo might compete in a swoop race to get the money to repair the Millennium Falcon while stranded in the middle of a smuggling operation. In a story set at the Jedi Praxeum or Imperial Academy, students may participate in extracurricular sports, in much the way Quidditch is integrated into the Harry Potter novels.
Soontir Fel, Carida Academy grav-ball star back in the day
Including scenes of sporting action, however, is not the only way to integrate elements of the sports genre into Star Wars. Giving characters backgrounds in sports, or even making them current athletes, can inform their characterization and bring in story elements from sports without requiring sporting events on the page. A military character might be defined by his past as a standout athlete at the academy, or by his continuing dominance in battalion grav-ball tournaments. A smuggler character could have a past as a down-and-out shockboxer, providing a possible entry point for former competitors, ex-promoters, and match-fixing mobsters to weave their way into a scoundrel’s story. An espionage story might feature a popular wegsphere player who is secretly a Rebel spy, able to travel from world to world to pass messages along. Perhaps a Jedi Knight is a great sports enthusiast, but his partner on a mission roots for the rival team.
There are lots of ways that sports — such a staple of modern life, and such a staple of storytelling — can be used to add color to the universe, even if the opportunities for straight sports tales are few.
Yesterday, we offered the first lesson and sublessons Star Wars could take from Assassin’s Creed. Today, we conclude with lessons two and three.
Lesson #2: Develop character arcs for every story
You wouldn’t think this would need to be a lesson . . . but can anyone tell me what the character arc of any major hero, besides Ben, has been since The New Jedi Order? The Expanded Universe hasn’t always been very good about making sure that its stories feature heroes going through arcs and receiving character development, rather than just pushing their way through another series of events.
Desmond wasn’t even in the games that much. Didn’t stop him from having an arc.
One of the reasons I have enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series is that its games have always avoided the temptation to be simple sequences of action setpieces. Storytelling has always mattered. Each of the series’ heroes has received an arc in each game. Desmond’s arc, stretched across his games, was to train as an Assassin, uncover the information he was searching for, and come to accept his place among the Assassins. Every game made sure to push that forward and add some new element, and even though his arc was the weakest of the leads’, the ultimate progression from bartender who had rejected his childhood as an Assassin to unwilling participant in the Assassin-Templar war to committed Assassin who ultimately sacrificed his life to protect the world based on his philosophical understanding of Assassin tenets was satisfying.
Altaïr, meanwhile, had a subtly revealed arc taking him from arrogant and dismissive of Assassin philosophy to philosophically engaged, humble, and respectful of others. He also had a nicely complex journey from dismissive of authority to respect of authority and ultimately to questioning of authority, a more subtle shift that did not move along a binary slider but involved changing his motivations, self-regard, and intellectual depth. Altaïr was later featured in flashbacks in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, which made sure to give his life an arc of duty and sacrifice as he struggled to realize how to lead the Assassins and recover from crippling personal setbacks.
