Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

What Star Wars Can Learn From Game of Thrones

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

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Oh yeah, you read that right. This is happening. I’ll be getting into The Force Awakens details below, incidentally, but nothing that hasn’t been officially revealed.

A lot of the news and speculation lately has been about alignments: Kylo Ren is a big fan of Darth Vader, but he’s not a Sith. He’s part of a group called the Knights of Ren, but what are they, exactly? Are they actually Imperials in some respect, or just a cult that he went rogue from?

And then there’s the First Order—recently explained, kind of, by JJ Abrams as follows:

“That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again? What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire?”

Abrams seems to be talking about two different things, here—actual ex-Imperials seeking to get things moving again, and perhaps also a younger generation who “admired” the Empire but weren’t actually a part of it. Just going by ages, it seems logical that Phasma, General Hux, and presumably even Kylo represent the latter, because they would have been toddlers when Palpatine died—if that. Maybe they’re acting completely of their own volition, but if so, who are the retired Nazis in this analogy? Read More

“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

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

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

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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

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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

Tabula Rasa: On Adaptation and the Solo Kids

Posted on July 22, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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DISCLAIMER: while this post will be discussing major potential plot points in The Force Awakens, I have seen no real spoilers regarding the topic in question and what follows is purely speculative—and will remain equally valid even if the details don’t hold up.

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In a roundtable interview at BookCon last May, Adam Gidwitz, author of the forthcoming young-adult adaptation The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi? addressed how his fairy tale-heavy background applied to writing a Star Wars book as follows:

“The main character of every fairy tale is an empty character. They don’t have a lot of personality traits. You know, Cinderella—we know almost nothing about her. And there’s a purpose for that. The purpose is that children can put themselves into [her] shoes…and you can follow in her footsteps. So, Luke, I think, is an empty character. He’s not like Han, with a sharply-defined personality, he’s not like Leia, who’s a real powerful woman. He’s brave, and he’s kind…that’s about it.”

This insight, Gidwitz explained, is what led to his decision to write the book as if the reader themselves is Luke Skywalker—an almost literal insertion of the audience into the story. Naturally, those of us who have been steeped in the Expanded Universe for the last twenty years could cite all sorts of personality details that snuck in at the edges of Luke’s character over the years, but the fact remains that he was conceived as an audience-identification character—and the value of that as the original trilogy unfolds is that his lessons become our lessons. Read More