Category: Opinion

Star Wars and Genre: Superhero Fiction

Posted on April 3, 2014by
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, coming soon to theaters near you, unless it's already there
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, coming soon to theaters near you, unless it’s already there

With Captain America: The Winter Soldier coming out tomorrow (in America, the nation that is in the name of the damn movie yet somehow getting it last), it’s timely to address Star Wars’ relationship with the superhero genre. Thanks to the Jedi’s powers and its expansive continuity, it has more than a little in common with superhero universes, but less has been done with those similarities than you might think.

The superhero genre, long restricted primarily to primacy in comics but now becoming the dominant form of movie blockbuster as well, is best understood as stories about outstanding heroes endowed with superhuman or unrealistically optimal abilities who make careers of fighting evil under a distinct identity. The tropes of the genre — secret identities, costumes, supervillain rogue’s galleries, superhero teams, origin stories, interlocking shared universes, fuzzy continuity, sliding timelines, temporary deaths — should be familiar to most of the general public, let alone the geek community.

Star Wars lacks a lot of those tropes. Its heroes operate in the open, not hidden behind masks and nicknames. They tend to face villains sequentially and beat them, rather than constantly matching wits against the same pool of bad guys. Star Wars’ continuity is, in principle and usually in practice, sharp and its timeline immobile, its deaths mostly permanent. But there are similarities worth noting.

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What Star Wars Can Learn From Glee

Posted on April 1, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

As we’ve said over and over on this site, D-Day didn’t just mean more Star Wars movies—it meant a new paradigm entirely for the franchise. The old ways of attracting new fans are slowly but surely producing diminishing returns. It’s time, I believe, for Star Wars to expand its horizons, and take lessons not just from other successful “geek” franchises, but from all sorts of broadly popular media, so as to attract new generations of people who aren’t already lining up for Comic-Con every year.

One great example of a franchise that’s phenomenally successful, critically beloved, and primed for crossover pollenation with Star Wars is, of course, the TV series Glee. Allow me to extrapolate. Read More

Star Wars: for all ages, all of the time?

Posted on March 28, 2014by

Star Wars is meant for kids. George Lucas agreeing to take the rights to sell T-shirts and lunchboxes and plastic snowtroopers in lieu of a pay hike is proof of that. Star Wars has always been meant for kids. But it was its ability to draw in everyone else that made it one of the most commercially successful films in history. Adjusted for inflation, only Avatar and Gone with the Wind fare better. Despite its monolithic cultural influence, no other Star Wars movie comes close to beating A New Hope.

Far more intelligent people than I have tried to explain why the prequels were seen by so many as a disappointment, but it was never really the children that it disappointed. There’s a complicated discussion to be had about whether that’s because kids will accept anything as long as it’s shiny or whether adults are just cynical and greedy, but I think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that the prequels focused more sharply on that younger demographic. The Phantom Menace, in particular, set the tone, with its Roger-Roger tin-can comedy bad guys, a nine-year old protagonist and everything to do with the Gungans. But even Revenge of the Sith, the only movie in the trilogy not to be granted a fully family-friendly rating, spends its opening see-sawing between Artoo’s slapstick cargo bay antics and Anakin’s adventures in dismemberment and beheading. Read More

The Future Lies in the Past: Returning to the KOTOR Era

Posted on March 27, 2014by Cry Havac
The Knights of the Old Republic games — successful, beloved, generally awesome

The current state of the Expanded Universe is unsettled, at best. A cursory look at the upcoming publishing schedules for just about any type of media reveals little on the horizon, as the franchise seems to hold its breath for the sequel trilogy’s arrival. It’s not clear that the Expanded Universe we have come to know will survive. The recent revelation that the films will be set about thirty years after the original trilogy suggest that at least some of the post-Return of the Jedi EU will be lost.

It’s general consensus that the material set before Return of the Jedi is likeliest to survive, because there’s less probability of the sequels contradicting it. Perhaps the least likely sources to be contradicted are those set well before any of the films and essentially unconnected to them. This suggests that the Expanded Universe should be concentrating its efforts there if it doesn’t want them wasted.

Currently, The Old Republic, EA’s massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, is set in the Republic’s distant past, thousands of years before the films. It looks likely to continue on as an important segment of the franchise for the next several years, and it likely can get by due to its setting.

The obvious tack for this article, then, would be to suggest concentrating EU resources on the era of The Old Republic. But that argument pretty much writes itself without my spending any further time on it, and I’d rather make a little bolder suggestion: revive the era of Knights of the Old Republic.

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“You Don’t Know the Power of the Dark Side!” How does it work?

Posted on March 25, 2014by Obiwomble's Outlook

Star Wars has a strange relationship with the Dark Side of the Force. It flits from being full-on satanic influence to distilled psychopathy depending on the story, but there is one common factor – the idea that the dark side lulls the wielder in, that however constructed, it’s always a Faustian bargain at best.

Does this render the dark side power wielding nutcase that invariably results free from any kind of responsibility? Short of outright possession – which has happened – the answer has to be no. What is of interest here is that those few dark side wielding maniacs that have kicked the habit have never played the “dark side made me do it” card that fandom is fond of invoking.

I propose to look at four case studies in how the dark side operates and how the individual responded to it: Quinlan Vos, Anakin Skywalker, Kyp Durron and Cade Skywalker. Each represents a different dark side opening as it were.

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