Star Wars and Genre: The Sports Story

Now this is podracing!

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, MoneyballRemember 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-andfall 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.

Luminous Beings Are We: Bodhisattvas and Force Ghosts

“Twilight is upon me, and soon night must fall.”

In my article on Vergere and Daoism, I discussed the concept of Li lines- the concept of following the natural path of one’s life, acting the role that one was born to play. From a Daoist perspective, free will exists, yet defiance of one’s Li line is seen as unnatural. Most pertinently to this discussion, the natural termination of a Li line occurs at death- indeed, the manner of one’s death may be an integral part of that Li line- as Ganner Rhysode so brilliantly demonstrated at the Well of the World Brain. If denying one’s Li line is unnatural, then it follows that defying the end of the line is similarly unnatural. The Jedi Path, which was written in the style of an in-universe Jedi text, explicitly describes death as the end of a Jedi’s life, when he or she is subsumed into the netherworld of the Force. In short, Jedi orthodoxy in the Rise of the Empire era viewed death as the end. Sith experiments to extend one’s life or cheat death were reviled by the Jedi- not just for the horrific means by which the Sith attempted these experiments, but also the selfishness it entailed. During this period prior to the Prequels, the Jedi Order by and large regarded tales of Whill Shamans being able to retain their identities after death as little more than fairy tales- at best “as metaphors for the Jedi Code’s final precept”.

“There is no death; There is the Force.”

However, the Jedi do not draw solely upon Daoist philosophy and theology. In designing and elaborating upon the Jedi, George Lucas and the rest of the writers who have contributed to Star Wars have drawn upon various Eastern religious traditions, including Buddhism. Within Buddhism exists the concept of the bodhisattva. Essentially, a bodhisattva is an individual who has attained enlightenment- achieved nirvana- yet has chosen to remain on earth and help others to achieve enlightenment. In other words, an ambition to become a Buddha, or at least a Buddha-like figure. It is a state of utter compassion for all life, and the product of a desire to help to bring about a better world even when one has found an escape from the cycle of samsara- the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The various schools of Buddhism recognize differing notions of what being a bodhisattva entails. For example, certain elements of Mahayana Buddhism recognize three distinct paths: king-like bodhisattvas, who become a buddha then guide others to enlightenment; boatman-like bodhisattvas, who wish to become buddhas alongside the rest of humanity; and shepherd-like bodhisattvas, who wish to delay their own enlightenment until the rest of humanity has achieved it. Various Buddhist traditions recognize a variety of bodhisattvas throughout history, ranging from mythical figures and Buddhist kings to semi-historical scholars such as Shantideva. So, where am I going with this discussion of the luminous beings of Buddhism?

In A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi sacrifices himself to give the intrepid protagonists a chance to escape the Death Star. As Vader attempts to establish that he is now, in fact, the master, Obi-Wan’s body disappears, shocking the Sith Lord. He then goes on to provide guidance to Luke (and briefly possess Leia during Splinter of the Mind’s Eye), appearing in the form of a Force Ghost. Just what becoming a Force Ghost entails wasn’t greatly elaborated upon until Matthew Stover penned his legendary novelization of Revenge of the Sith, and subsequent EU works elaborated upon it. Becoming a Force Ghost requires knowledge of a certain technique perfected by Whill shamans- a technique that can be passed on after death. It requires utter compassion for all life, and allows a Jedi to retain their identity after death, appearing as a luminous beingin the mortal world. Force Ghosts do not simply deny death for fun; they remain on the mortal plain in order to provide guidance to those who still dwell in the mortal coil.

Or to explain how they told the truth “from a certain point of view”.

In becoming a Force Ghost, a Jedi is making a choice to deny, for a time, his or her own eternal enlightenment, and the peace of death. He or she is choosing to temporarily forego a state of eternal rest and enlightenment in order to remain on the mortal plane and pass on knowledge to those who remain. In short, by becoming a Force Ghost, a Jedi is, on some level, choosing to act as a sort of bodhisattva. The Force Ghost does not easily fit into any of the three paths to bodhisattva-hood mentioned earlier, yet it does dovetail with elements of the first and last paths. To become a Force Ghost requires knowledge of the Whill techniques (which have never really been detailed)- in other words, a Force Ghost must have attained a certain quality of enlightenment. At the same time, a Force Ghost is delaying his or her entry into the netherworld for a time (or taking a vacation from it, in the case of Qui-Gon Jinn)- similar to the shepherd-like bodhisattva, who denies his own nascent buddhahood in order to enlighten the world first.

The specific goals that Force Ghosts have had in mind have varied throughout the canon. Obi-Wan remained on the mortal plane for years to continue to instruct Luke Skywalker, the last hope of the Jedi. Whether it was to provide him with direct information (Zahn has Obi-Wan reveal a keycode to Luke in Allegiance), attempt to provide spiritual guidance to the young Jedi Knight, share military intelligence (warning Luke of the Ssi-Ruuk attack on Bakura), or justify misleading Luke about the true nature of Darth Vader, Obi-Wan was able to guide Luke up until the Thrawn crisis, seeing his pupil as the best hope for a galaxy ravaged by war and the Sith. Anakin Skywalker utilized the technique to seek his daughter’s forgiveness- forgiveness Leia would refuse him for decades. He arguably appeared to his descendant Cade to warn him of the perils of flirting with the dark side, although Cade’s altered state of mind at the time makes this appearance ambiguous. Luke Skywalker remained as a Force Ghost for an unknown duration (given that his death date has never been detailed), and spent much of that time providing advice to Cade Skywalker and urging him to clean up his life, regardless of how little Cade appreciated the help. Indeed, Cade was positively hounded by Skywalker ghosts- Luke, Anakin and Mara (depending on how drugged out Cade was), and Kol Skywalker all appeared to him at various points in his checkered career. Several other Jedi, such as Vergere, Arca Jeth, Qu Rahn, Yoda, and Halagad Ventor transcended their flesh upon death. The common thread between these ghosts is the desire to remain behind after one’s death in order to bring enlightenment, share wisdom, or make amends with those still among the living.

Luke Skywalker exhibiting an incredible amount of patience with his wayward great-great grandson.

In the end, a bodhisattva will eventually move on. Likewise, sooner or later a Force Ghost must bend to the will of the Force and move on to the great beyond. While they can influence the living, it is those in the mortal world who must make their choices and act upon them. a bodhisattva may guide one along the path of enlightenment, but it is the individual who must actual take those steps to achieve nirvana. Likewise, Luke Skywalker could try to steer Cade away from a path of self-destruction, and Obi-Wan Kenobi could try to warn Luke of the dangers of facing Darth Vader without completing his training, but in the end Cade and Luke had to make their own decisions. As Vergere put it:

“Choose, and act.”

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. IV – Rebels Edition

I’m going to do this round a tiny bit differently—while question 9 was indeed directly submitted to me for this series (by my co-worker Peter Zappas), question 8 is more about addressing what I see as a common misconception. Both relate, either directly or indirectly, to topics that will be (or at least appear to be) raised by the forthcoming Star Wars Rebels TV series, so I thought it would be handy to pair them up in one shot.

8. Why would the Inquisitor in Rebels be an alien if the Empire is xenophobic?

This is something that comes up every so often when someone like Thrawn, or Mas Amedda, or the Pau’an Inquisitor previewed a few weeks back, is shown to be flourishing, or even vital, within Palpatine’s Empire.

While I’ll admit it’s not quite as black and white as I’d like it to be, the fact is there’s no direct evidence whatsoever that Palpatine himself had any anti-alien bias, and a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he didn’t.

Ultimately, Palpatine was a Sith Lord first, a politician second. When one seriously examines his plans and worldviews as related in the books and reference material, you get the distinct impression that Palpatine viewed essentially all living beings as slaves waiting to happen. Per the last volume of The EU Explains, Palpatine’s endgame was to personally rule the galaxy for eternity, and his efforts to stamp out free will and individual autonomy and initiative were a big part of the reason that things fell apart so completely after he died. To suggest that he had special animus for nonhumans, then, is to believe that humans would’ve been in any way better off in his ideal society—when in reality all beings would have been equal in their total subservience and submission to his will.

So why the clear anti-alien bias in the Empire? Well, humans were by a wide margin the dominant race in the galaxy, and exploiting their baser prejudices was a convenient means to an end. Palpatine’s slew of nonhuman attendants in the prequels demonstrates that even if he did find other species distasteful on some level, he was perfectly happy to use them when handy—and in the case of Mas Amedda, even bring them into the fold regarding his true plans for the galaxy.

Palpatine’s real genius, after all, was in using whatever materials were available to his maximum advantage. On one side he had entrenched and influential human families in the Core like the Tarkins and the Tagges, and on the other he had overgrown corporate powers like the Trade Federation and the Techno Union, all owned and populated by aliens. The former were only too happy to help him bring the latter under heel on the assumption that that was all he really wanted—which, of course, was far from the truth.

And then there’s the Inquisitor. The Inquisitorius was conceived as something like Palpatine’s NSA; their existence was known, but their operational details—hunting down the remaining Jedi—were in the dark to almost everybody. If a Pau’an Inquisitor was forced to interact with some bigoted Admiral or Moff during the course of a mission, there’s half a chance he’d have done so without even revealing his status as an Imperial agent. And even if knowledge of a Pau’an Inquisitor somehow got into the hands of an Imperial highly-placed enough to cause Palpatine some degree of embarrassment (though that’s a vanishingly small list, especially by the time period of Rebels), like with the NSA, he’d still have plausible deniability—“Pau’an? What Pau’an? I would never!”

Further Reading: Darth Plagueis, The Dark Lord Trilogy, The Dark Empire Sourcebook

9. Are the stormtroopers in the Original Trilogy still Jango clones, or a mix of clones and recruits?

Well, for one, when the Original Trilogy was coming out, it didn’t really occur to anyone that stormtroopers might have been clones. While evidence can be found if one wants to find it (“a little short for a stormtrooper”, after all, implies a certain biological uniformity), and, hilariously, a low-rent magazine called the Star Wars Poster Monthly published an article about that very subject around the time of A New Hope‘s release, no one officially knew about it. The Marvel comics of the time even had a handful of one-off stormtrooper characters with distinct names and personalities, on the assumption that they were normal recruits similar to those seen in the Rebellion.

This assumption carried on into the “modern” EU of the nineties, with the notable exception of the Thrawn Trilogy—which addressed the subject of clone armies head-on, while not quite lining up with the picture painted by the prequels. Clone soldiers in those books were distinctly not run-of-the-mill stormtroopers; they had different Force presences from regular people, and were largely blank mental slates, if not outright unstable.

Once Attack of the Clones introduced the Grand Army of the Republic, the EU began making slow, deliberate steps toward reconciling the recruit idea (to say nothing of that “Academy” Luke was so keen on joining) with the strong implication that these were the people who eventually became stormtroopers.

For starters, you have to keep in mind the Jango clones’ accelerated aging—by Revenge of the Sith, the original batch was biologically twenty-six; by ANH, they’d have been sixty-four. Hardly fighting trim, right? AotC mentions the Kaminoans keeping Jango around, because they needed fresh samples in order to keep producing high-quality clones; once Jango died at Geonosis, that ship had sailed. So even assuming they started a fresh batch right before the Clone Wars broke out, those clones still would’ve been forty-four by ANH, and probably not fit for the front lines. That’s not to say these guys didn’t stick around (official word is that about a third of the stormtrooper corps were Fetts as of ANH), but it’s likely that they took on more and more leadership roles at time went on—or at least training positions, in the likely event of anti-clone prejudice.

Where Rebels may play into this topic is the possibility of including A) regular recruits, and B) other clone templates. Offhand statements from George Lucas suggest that in his view, once the war was over and the clones were needed less for active combat and more for general peacekeeping, the process of selecting clone templates became politicized, with individuals being selected less for their aptitude and more for knowing the right people. The EU has gotten into this a little bit, but only in the immediate aftermath of RotS, so what exactly things were like fourteen years later (when the show starts) is hard to say. What we can say is that this circumstance, combined with the decreasing effectiveness of the Jango clones and the introduction of the first genuine recuits to the stormtrooper ranks, serves to make the overall lousiness of the Original Trilogy stormies a lot more understandable.

Further reading: Order 66In His Image, When the Desert Wind Turns: The Stormtrooper’s Tale, the Thrawn Trilogy

A Case for Starting Over, Part III: Heirs to the Empire

Harder_to_Breathe_TERC
Save the lightsaber, there are few elements of Star Wars more iconic than the Star Destroyer and the faceless legions of the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps. Every conflict requires its threat and every hero their villain, and there exist few adversaries in fiction as memorable and infamous as the many and varied minions of the Galactic Empire. For an entity so inseparable from the fundamental image of Star Wars, one would logically assume that it would continue to be a major obstacle for our protagonists and play a significant role in the future of the universe well beyond the setbacks it suffered in Return of the Jedi.

Alas, the Expanded Universe had other ideas. The surviving Imperial forces provided little more than a superficial backstory for the comically evil mustache-twirling warlord-of-the-week and generic lightsaber fodder for our heroes to cut and shoot their way through. The likes of Grand Admiral Thrawn, Trioculus, mad Admiral Daala, the warlord Zsinj, Hethrir, and Ysanne Isard all made use of Imperial resources in their battles against the victorious rebels and the New Republic, but remarkably little attention has ever been paid to the Empire’s perspective in all of this – their leaders visible to us only when plotting some diabolical new scheme, otherwise existing only as a menace for our heroes to vanquish. Read More

That First Abandonment – When Star Wars Gets Next-Level

cave-face

Let’s face it: Star Wars is a simple story. The first movie, I mean—though where the franchise as a whole is concerned, “simple” is probably charitable compared to the words some people would use. The Empire Strikes Back and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Return of the Jedi worked as well as they did by upping the stakes not just practically, but also philosophically; they took an age-old story with the thematic complexity of Super Mario Bros and made it About Things. Not huge things, granted, but the simple act of making Luke Darth Vader’s son took the OT from a black and white story of pure hearts and wicked ones and introduced a universe of ambiguity, calling into question fans’ assumptions about how bad Vader was, and how good Obi-Wan was, and just what exactly they all wanted to happen at the end of the story.

One of my favorite things about Star Wars is how well it supports these abrupt shifts—changeovers, as Fight Club might call them—where suddenly there’s more going on in the story than you’d realized, thanks in part to that superficial simplicity. At its best, Star Wars is simply a broad, brightly-colored palette with which a writer can paint some surprisingly complicated stories; and while I’d be lying if I said it was common, you never know when someone’s going to really tap into some next-level shit. Allow me to highlight some examples.

Knights of the Old Republic

I don’t mean to suggest that “next-level” moments are by definition plot twists; quite the opposite, in fact. But KOTOR has the distinction not only of providing the only twist in the entire Expanded Universe on the level of “I am your father”, but of also, in my opinion, taking the thematic underpinnings of that moment and elevating them even further. Darth Revan, you are told at the game’s outset, is the Big Bad of this story—you barely escaped your last confrontation with him, alongside your Jedi companion Bastila Shan, and lost many of your memories in the process.

Anyone who’s played role-playing games (most video games, really) is very familiar with that kind of conceit—there’s always a learning curve at the start of a game, so the story will account for that by making the player character either a rookie learning the ropes, or an old veteran who’s taken some time off and needs a refresher course. Lost memories are just par for the course.
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