Category: Opinion

Escape Pod: Ania Solo

Posted on October 8, 2013by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

Show me a good Star Wars story, and I’ll show you a character who just plain does not want to be there.

As I sit here writing this, the fifteen-second teaser for Star Wars Rebels has just showed up online, and already people’s eyes are twitching over one particular phrase: “the Jedi will rise”. Let’s be realistic here: of course there will be Jedi in Rebels. As I mentioned in our chat on the show a while back, I’m personally hoping for more of a Yoda vibe than a Luke vibe—an old, retired Master the characters occasionally seek out for advice, and maybe a handy li’l slogan for the opening titles.

But really, I doubt Lucasfilm wants that—they want a Luke, someone learning the ways of the Force that young viewers can relate to; and in all likelihood, someone with a spunky twenty-something Togruta to show them the ropes.

But why? Does Force enhancement enhance a character’s gateway potential as well?

I don’t think so. Enter Exhibit A: Ania Solo. If you haven’t been reading the new Legacy comic series, Ania is the great, great (great?) granddaughter of Han and Leia, and while she shares that common ancestry with her contemporary Cade Skywalker, the protagonist of the original Legacy, Ania is everything Cade is not.

Far from being an aloof, landed figure struggling to shoulder the weight of her family history, Legacy creators Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman took Ania Solo from “elite”, cruised straight past “everyman”, and didn’t stop until they reached “works in a junkyard”. To what extent she knows or cares about her ancestry remains to be entirely illuminated, but what’s clear is that all Ania wants is to stay out of the way; the sad little queen of a sad little hill. The series’ drama begins when the old Solo luck comes knocking and deposits an errant lightsaber at her door—thrusting her into the center a series of events she could not give less of a crap about; at least, not at first.

In my earlier article What Star Wars Can Learn From The Avatar Franchise, I pointed out that while one of that series’ highlights was its tendency to empower “the Han Solo character type”, they were only, naturally, riffing on the role that Han Solo himself perfected. When I look back on the great tapestry of characters Star Wars has offered over the years, even I am surprised by how little people seem to have appreciated what Han brought to the Original Trilogy—ironic distance. The language of Star Wars—the first one, I mean—was one of broad, sweeping archetypes and mythological melodrama, but as much as it tapped into ideas that everyone can understand, I would argue that the secret ingredient in the Star Wars formula, the thing that keeps it from collapsing under the weight of its own artificial portent, was a simple eye-roll every once in a while.

To make a good Star Wars story, someone needs to be there to tell the protagonists how exasperating this all is. While overall, I think this was one of the biggest failings of the Prequel Trilogy, note that Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan came as close as it got to a Han figure. Who, after all, was the audience-identification figure in The Phantom Menace? Qui-Gon? Anakin? Or the one guy who wondered aloud why the hell Jar Jar was sticking around?

But this problem isn’t just with the Prequels—even the Expanded Universe, especially as the years after Return of the Jedi kept ticking along, became less and less about everymen and women and more about big kings of big hills, and lately has seemed to have, well—collapsed under the weight of its own artificial portent.

Of course, to shove Ania Solo into the Escape Pod is a smidge disingenuous, as there’s likely no way for the ST to really use her without reinterpreting her as a child or grandchild of Han and Leia. But if there’s one big mistake I’m willing to lose the New Republic Era in order to correct, it’s the lack of any non-Force-sensitive Skywalker or Solo offspring.

Ironically, if Han and Leia had had a child who couldn’t become a Jedi, that character would probably have been much safer—since Star Wars mostly seems interested in telling stories about Jedi, non-Jedi tend to run up against much less life-threatening peril. That bias worked out pretty well for Ania up until the still-ongoing events of her comic, but seeing a strong, young woman with so much of the smuggler and the princess in her, yet without all the baggage that comes with Jedi indoctrination—ah, excuse me, I mean training—makes me honestly excited at the prospect of someone like her in the Sequel Trilogy. Even three or four generations removed, she’s got all the tenacity and dignity of Leia, and all the honor and resourcefulness of Han; but all the courage and ideals in the world are no match for a good facepalm every now and then.

A Case for Starting Over, Part I: The Road to Coruscant

Posted on October 7, 2013by Pen and Paper

Imperial_center_ROTJ

Episode VI was released in 1983. Episode VII is currently set to be released in 2015. In our own world, thirty-two years will have passed between the two films. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher will be more than three decades older than they were at the end of the original trilogy. Barring any Jeff Bridges-in-Tron: Legacy digital rejuvenation, Luke, Han, and Leia will have aged accordingly. In those three intervening decades, it is beyond any doubt that the galaxy far, far away will have undergone a great number of significant changes. The Rebel Alliance will likely have restored the Galactic Republic, or at least founded a successor state of their own. Luke will have reestablished the fabled Jedi Order and begun training a new generation of Jedi Knights. Our heroes will have children, who now go on to face their own challenges. All these things have occurred at one point or another in the Expanded Universe that has been growing since the day A New Hope was released. Some hope that these stories will be respected by the sequel trilogy, and accepted in one form or another as the true history of what happened after Endor. Others feel that it is inevitable that the current continuity will be overwritten, and new stories invented to replace the old. I believe the latter will be the case, but I do not dread it – I choose, instead, to embrace the possibilities it offers us.

When Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire was published in 1991, it marked a major step forward for the franchise. Not only had the rebellion evolved from a ragtag band of revolutionaries into a legitimate government, but they now held in their possession the bright center of the universe itself – Coruscant! The story of how they came to wrest the world from Imperial control, however, was left to be told another time – more specifically, in Michael A. Stackpole’s 1995 novel X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble. Read More

Top Shelf: The Dark Empire Sourcebook

Posted on October 3, 2013by Cry Havac
The Dark Empire Sourcebook. One of its only weaknesses is the lack of original art.

Everybody knows Dark Empire. Well, not quite everybody, because, as a comic, it has the tendency to fly below the radar of newcomers to the universe — until they read something about Emperor Palpatine’s resurrection and Luke’s turn to the dark side, prompting outcries of, “Whaaaaaaaaat?” But among those fans who have graduated to familiarity with the web of the Expanded Universe, Dark Empire is among the highest-profile comics. Less familiar is the Dark Empire Sourcebook.

West End Games, the original masters of Star Wars lore, effectively built the Expanded Universe in the eighties, releasing a wealth of foundational information about the Star Wars galaxy and its many characters in their role-playing game sourcebooks. When Timothy Zahn revitalized public interest in Star Wars, he did so by building on the base of WEG’s material, which remained a crucial and ever-growing part of the fabric of the galaxy, even though its effects were mostly behind the scenes to those only reading books and comics. In response to the EU flurry of the early nineties, WEG released sourcebooks tailored to the big new novel and comic releases, providing a wealth of background information about the characters, worlds, and events of the stories for gamers to use. These resources are also invaluable to the true devotee of the Expanded Universe. Anyone interested in digging beyond the books and comics into the backstory and nitty-gritty of universe-expanding facts will find tremendous joy in WEG’s sourcebooks, and the Dark Empire Sourcebook is among the best of those releases.

Dark Empire was a seminal comic, but its timeline placement was always awkward; it was conceived as a directly post-Return of the Jedi storyline, only to run into Zahn’s trilogy during development. The comic was booted past Zahn’s trilogy, six years after the end of the films, creating some issues. Most significantly, the flourishing New Republic of Zahn’s trilogy was now a ragged Rebellion once more. Rather than dance around that issue, the sourcebook tackles the matter head-on, going into great depth to explain precisely how the resurgent Empire under Palpatine’s secret guidance drove the New Republic back before its factions split into the messy civil war seen in Dark Empire‘s opening.

That is only one aspect of the rich fabric that the Dark Empire Sourcebook weaves. Want to know the secrets of Palpatine’s recovery, about his secret machinations behind the scenes while he regained his strength, about his arcane explorations of the dark side of the Force? All there. Want to read about his mysterious throneworld Byss and learn its story, or that of the criminal warren Nar Shaddaa? They’re there. The sourcebook takes pains to set up the background of the entire New Republic era, explaining the New Republic’s rise and fall and the Empire’s fragmentation and inner workings. The treasure trove of background goes beyond that, all the way to Han’s past in the Imperial Academy and as a smuggler, the state and nature of the criminal underworld, and ancient Jedi history. If the ships appearing in the comics are your interest, there are profiles full of interesting facts. The book includes fleshed-out and poignant biographies for minor characters with tiny appearances in the comic. General Veers’s Rebel son, a New Republic soldier’s doomed college romance, a speeder thief conscripted into the Imperial motor pool, Palpatine’s personal assistant Grand Vizier Sate Pestage; all get their stories told. And let’s not forget its use of Ars Dangor, the most important yet most obscure political figure in the Empire.

“Fat, drunk, and blowing up moons is no way to go through life, son.”

The Dark Empire Sourcebook offers more than pure information drops, too. It reprints a New Republic proclamation explaining why it continues to battle the Empire in its darkest days, complete with signatures from senior officials. There is a personal letter between New Republic historians. The sourcebook contains Ackbar’s inner thoughts about the struggle against the Empire and the rebuilding of his homeworld after the attacks shown in Dark Empire. There is a transcript of expulsion proceedings against Han’s Academy friend Mako Spince (featuring a “Dean Wyrmyr”) for blowing up a moon during a prank gone wrong, and an extract from a book by Palpatine. Vignettes tell short stories, including one about Boba Fett’s escape from the sarlacc. And that is only a sampling of the in-universe and narrative delights available nowhere else.

Richly packed with all kinds of fascinating and obscure information, laying out crucial background for the entire setting, and offering all kinds of curiosities for the dedicated fan, the Dark Empire Sourcebook is a must-read. Even among the many excellent West End Games sourcebooks, it stands out for its ambition, scope, and excellent job tying together and setting down the foundation for the then-infant New Republic era. It makes the comic itself a far more rewarding and intriguing read, meshing it into the rest of the stories around it. Any fan interested in the nitty-gritty of the universe owes it to him- or herself to look into the WEG sourcebooks, and the Dark Empire Sourcebook is among the first ones to seek out.

Star Wars and Genre: Mystery

Posted on October 1, 2013by Cry Havac
Yeah, Sherlock Holmes would be the iconic image to use here . . . but hardboiled detective stories always get so much cooler covers

The term “genre” generally suggests a creative niche — a specific type of art that is for some people, but not for everyone. Science fiction and fantasy, horror, romance — they’re all seen as being for specific audiences, not broad-spectrum stories with universal appeal. Mystery, on the other hand, is a wildly popular genre. From Sherlock Holmes to CSI, mysteries are among the most well-known, widely consumed, and, to a lesser extent, acclaimed books, TV shows, and films out there. It seems like it would make sense to fuse Star Wars with such a booming genre, wouldn’t it? Heck, how could Star Wars escape dipping into such a prolific and fundamental genre now and then?

It’s easy to understand how mysteries can be so popular. The genre is based around the investigation of some type of mystery, usually a crime, creating a clear narrative and providing ample avenues for conflict, suspense, action, and revelation. Mystery provides all the fundamentals of a thrilling story in a neat package.

As with any mammoth genre, there are countless varieties of mystery story. Some are focused on creating complex puzzles for their heroes, and implicitly the reader, to solve, as in the classic locked-room murder. Others, in a trend started by hard-boiled detective fiction, are less interested in the intricacy of their solution, and emphasize the action and atmosphere of a criminal case. A mystery may save its solution until the last moment, or give away the perpetrator early in order to focus the story not on the answer, but on the protagonist’s pursuit of the truth and/or the suspect. Some follow police investigators, some private eyes, some lawyers, some ordinary civilians sucked into a case. And that’s barely getting into the variety of forms and tones mysteries can take. Some of these forms may be more easily adaptable to Star Wars than others, but all are worth thinking about in this context.

Of course, there are many Star Wars stories that have revolved around some kind of mystery — so many stories of all kinds do. If I started listing all the stories with some kind of mystery element, I could start with the Thrawn trilogy’s Delta Source and keep going all night.

So instead, I’ll simply state that I think this is something that could be played up even more. When information simply drops into characters’ laps, or disseminates instantaneously without effort, it’s boring. When they have to work to discover something, when there is an actual process of investigation, it better exploits the story potential of any mystery, and adds excitement to the process. To pass over the mystery aspect ignores the narrative potential of one type of drama — the investigation — in favor of solely focusing on action sequences and getting to that drama faster. Variety is the spice of life, not twenty-four lightsaber fights one after another.

Obi-Wan as detective: the best part of Episode II

There are some Star Wars stories that have been entirely structured as mysteries, though fewer than you might think. It’s worth noting that a significant chunk of Attack of the Clones was a mystery plotline — Obi-Wan investigated the case of Senator Amidala’s attempted assassination, in the process stumbling upon yet another enigma, the secret clone army, in classic mystery fashion.

Within the Expanded Universe, Survivor’s Quest stands out as a mystery. Not only does the question of Outbound Flight‘s fate hang over the story (to be answered not within, but via prequel), but more importantly, the story is structured as a classic closed-environment, who’s-the-killer mystery. Luke and Mara travel aboard a starship with an expedition featuring personnel from multiple factions; when sabotage starts occurring and it becomes clear that someone must be secretly undermining the mission, they must figure out who. The book is a good example of how a story need not be strictly a murder-case-style professional-detective story to function as a mystery within the Star Wars universe.

Scourge, recently, featured a Jedi investigating the death of his apprentice. Millennium Falcon used twin investigations to uncover the ship’s history, riffing on The Maltese Falcon in the process. Twilight built a mystery around the amnesiac Jedi Quinlan Vos. Star Wars mysteries are out there.

Coruscant Nights: not quite the noir this cover promised

Overall, however, stories about characters puzzling out mysteries are rare, especially as mystery elements usually take a backseat to action-adventure. Coruscant Nights was sold on the concept that it was a film noir-inspired trilogy about a Jedi on the run working as a private detective. As it turned out, there was a Jedi on the run, but he wasn’t really a private detective, and aside from the cover art, the story never bothered to be particularly noir. In one book, the protagonists were handed a murder case, but the book never truly functioned as a mystery. The story instead revolved around the characters’ other, Jedi-on-the-run/proto-Rebellion concerns, largely ignoring the murder case, until an outside character showed up at the end of the book to hand them the solution on a silver platter. Mystery plotting can be hard for authors without expertise.

Yet a few more straight Star Wars mysteries are an avenue the Expanded Universe really should pursue. Mystery is a popular genre that scads of people are willing to read. It is full of fairly talented authors who would be willing to write a tie-in for the exposure and payday. And most of all, it’s a great way to add distinct variety in the types of stories the universe is telling and sources of drama it’s using (which are growing increasingly repetitive) in a way that could avoid being a niche story type that would carry only a limited group of readers with it or not be sustainable as a significant segment of the storytelling.

Corran Horn and partner Iella Wessiri, Star Wars detectives just waiting for a story

It’s not inconceivable that a classic detective story could fit into the Star Wars setting. One of the most popular and significant figures in the EU, Corran Horn, has a past as a police detective, a setting that could draw many fans. Jedi can also be used as investigators on relatively traditional cases. Corran investigating high-profile murders or thefts as a Jedi could be just as intriguing. Ben Skywalker, trained in police techniques during his teenage years in the Galactic Alliance Guard, would likewise prove a potent protagonist in Jedi-starring detective fiction. Have him liaise with a police unit on Coruscant for a few years, getting readers invested in a larger cast of ordinary cops, and you could have the X-wing of police series on your hands. The partnership of Jedi Nejaa Halcyon and CorSec officer Rostek Horn, fighting crime on the streets of Corellia, could be great story material that would move beyond a solely Jedi-centric storyline.

And those are just existing characters with strong detective hooks; there is nothing stopping authors from writing about Luke, Jaina and Zekk, or Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan tracking down jewel thieves, assassins, or serial killers. Or from creating a comic about Han vowing to find the murderer of an old smuggling buddy in the shady depths of Nar Shaddaa, or a novel about Lando Calrissian gambling aboard a luxury spaceliner when a prominent passenger is killed and he’s caught up in the mystery. That doesn’t even touch on new characters.

A professional thief in the big (big, big, big) city. Let’s see some stories about the heroes trying to catch her.

Beyond the most recognizable traditional detection setups, there are yet more stories available. Stories about characters tracking down piracy or smuggling rings’ secretive operations and mysterious, powerful backers would revolve around the same mystery elements if the story focused on the process of acquiring and following clues. A Rebel cell figuring out which of its members is an Imperial mole could be structured as a mystery. So could the hunts for an assassin lurking on Coruscant before he strikes the Galactic Alliance’s chief of state, a saboteur threatening a Republic base, or a spy who has stolen crucial New Republic data.

The opportunities mystery stories offer the Expanded Universe are virtually endless, and the genre is in prime position to be exploited. Fewer galactic wars and more mysteries could keep the galaxy far, far away just as exciting, but with much fresher and more diverse storytelling.

Vive La Difference? Non!

Posted on September 30, 2013by Obiwomble's Outlook

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has this killer statistic:

“contains approximately 100–400 billion stars”

At least according to its wiki page and, all things considered, there’s no reason to think that estimate is inaccurate.  Or, to put it another way, in far more succinct and famous fashion, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy has this:

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

And it is more than likely the galaxy that is home to Star Wars is similar; even if it was a quarter of the size of the Milky Way that’s still 25 billion stars, all with planetary systems of one kind or another.

Now add in time – the Milky Way is thought to be 13.2 billion years old, the Star Wars galaxy is similar and we have stories set across 35-37 millennia! 35-37,000 years!  In but a couple of millennia civilizations of all kinds have risen and fallen, Star Wars is no different – yet you wouldn’t know it from the way its stories have been told for the last few years.

We have this wide, expansive, incredibly old yet, in galactic terms, probably still young galaxy, but Star Wars has taken a reduction route.  It’s boiled its galaxy down to a number of set patterns, with little in the way of difference being tolerated.  When something does step out of line, corrective action is taken to get it back into line and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Jedi.  You would think, logically, there would be many different Jedi orders across the centuries, with unique structures.  You would be wrong.

Despite setting up Luke Skywalker to restore the Jedi, in a way distinct from its destroyed predecessor, the Expanded Universe just can’t seem to help itself with having Luke apply terms like Padawan to the revived order in the New Jedi Order to later reviving the Jedi Council.  Why do this when those ideas were found wanting?  Because it’s got to be the same!

There are numerous accounts of why Anakin Solo had to die in the New Jedi Order, all agree on one point: the idea was that the audience would be confused by the name similarity to Anakin Skywalker! Really? Seriously? Apparently so. This does not bode well because if it is thought that the audience will be confused by similar names then what of different iterations of the Jedi, Sith and Empire?

Yet, it isn’t just in the New Jedi Order arc that this happens. Nope, for all its brilliance, the Knights of the Old Republic game went and added a Jedi Council to the Tales of the Jedi era. The comics produced 1993-1998 had the Jedi as operating more informally, with gatherings of Jedi being a rare event. Yet, a handful of decades later, there’s a Jedi Council structure in place. In all likelihood, this was done to reflect the Prequels’ structure, as it was The Phantom Menace in 1999 that showed us the Jedi Council and the KOTOR game came out 2003. Even the recent story, Dawn of the Jedi, set millennia earlier still has a Council present, it’s as if an idea present in one era must be present in all eras!

Nor is the Empire immune – as the recent The Old Republic shows – here, despite being set millennia before the films, there’s some remarkably similar aesthetics being displayed! TIE fighters? Star Destroyers? What the hell are they doing there? At least in the Legacy comics there is a clear historical continuity, with the Empire there being the one from the films roughly a century on. So, you have a reason for the designs being next generation TIEs and Star Destroyers. Featuring them much earlier just doesn’t work at all.

And the Sith…. Ah, the Sith must be feeling like a nice Single Malt whiskey that’s had a measure of ice to shot that’s about 500%! If you did this, you would end up with something little more than water, all that made it whiskey would have been diluted out! So it has become with the Sith – you want an army of red lightsaber swinging bad dudes? Easy, there’s loads of them hanging around the place – just entirely forgotten about.To be fair Legacy‘s Sith, in the comics, have a fair amount of variance, but The Old Republic? It’s an army headed by an Emperor type, KOTOR has but two Sith Lords, clearly echoing the prequels’ notion. Vader? Well, as an enforcement heavy, Darth Malak does look the part.

Yet why is this strange monomania in place at all? If it truly is due to the expectation that the audience will be confused by a lack of consistency, then Star Wars is in a dire mess. This is a world where Marvel have spun a story line across five movies, brought it to a resounding conclusion in Avengers and are now on Act 2. They didn’t do that by having low expectations of the audience. Instead they assumed a level of intelligence and that was rewarded. It’s a world where the big successful TV series are spinning labyrinthine plots, with large casts of very well-realized characters, across multiple series.

It might be said that this is an attempt to create a consistency that is familiar to the audience who have only seen the films. True, some consistency is expected, but when the story is set far earlier than the films surely the consistency expected will be more thematic than literal transplanting? Go too far from the films and the story loses that which makes it a Star Wars property, but don’t depart at all and you get a carbon copy that can surprise and intrigue no one.

Will Disney’s takeover see a change? It’s very hard to say.  My own suspicion is that, given fan response across the internet to some stories, Disney’s response will be to be more careful and conservative so there will be less room for experimentation and innovation.  Still, perhaps I’ll be mistaken and Disney does decide to really run with the property they’ve got – a story that can be told on a galactic scale across millennia!