Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

Intrinsic to the premise of a sequel trilogy—obviously—is the notion that Return of the Jedi was not, in fact, the end of the Star Wars story. Proceeding from that, there are two basic strategies with which to approach further material; the Bantam-era Expanded Universe tried one in which the characters lived more or less happily ever after, and The Story would therefore concern itself only with minor trials and tribulations; speedbumps instead of true pitfalls. Eventually that approach turned off enough people that the Del Rey-era EU took the second road: one along which things could really go horribly wrong.

But let’s not get into all that again. The thing is, the missteps of late Legends notwithstanding, you can’t do a true follow-up to the original trilogy without Big Things Going Wrong. It wouldn’t be as interesting for new audiences who weren’t desperate for as much Big Three material as they could get, and it certainly wouldn’t have been interesting enough to drag all three original actors back into their respective robes, hair buns, and stripey pants.

Proceeding from that, then, is the unpleasant fact that getting new movies means our beloved Big Three had to fuck some things up. Read More

I’m a big fan of metafiction—stories that incorporate, either directly or through themes and subtext, their own artificiality into their narratives. In the Expanded Universe, this manifested itself in Luke, Han and Leia’s increasing weariness as the years dragged on and they lost more and more of their loved ones (and debatably, their souls) due to an endless series of galactic conflicts. As early as 1999, Han’s reaction to Chewbacca’s death in Vector Prime was framed in overtly out-of-universe fashion as the evaporation of a perceived bubble of safety around the core group of characters.

While that particular safety bubble was handily popped in The Force Awakens, it manifests in a different way on Star Wars Rebels. While the Disney XD animated series hasn’t shied away from killing any number of Imperials, as the stakes have increased over the past two seasons it’s become increasingly hard for many to believe that no one from its core group of protagonists has died. Personally, I think fans—older ones, at least—get way too wrapped up in life and death being the only stakes that matter in a story; not only is it perhaps unrealistic to expect Whedonesque fatalities among the heroes of a cartoon, but doing so makes it harder to become invested in the stories the show is telling, hence the common complaints that this episode or that is “filler”.

As such, I neither expect nor desire any deaths from the Ghost crew in the near future—by the end of the series, maybe, but not soon. More than that, I’m actively rooting for Hera and Sabine to survive into the original trilogy and beyond. But what’s very interesting to me from a meta perspective is the tension between Kanan and Ezra’s story and the very real pressures both in- and out-of-universe forcing them inch by inch toward the grave. As someone who survived for years on the fringes of the Empire, and who has now endured a handicap that could limit his ability to be a true threat to Palpatine, I can imagine any number of second-tier fates for Kanan that don’t involve his death. Ultimately, though, Rebels is no more his story than A New Hope is Obi-Wan’s—it’s about Ezra. Kanan’s function in the story is to take a dumb, self-centered kid and facilitate his transcendence into a higher plateau of importance, one where he could be a force for great good, unthinkable evil, or purely for himself. Read More

“When you’re directing a scene on the Millennium Falcon, it doesn’t make the scene good. Now it’s bitchin’ that it’s on the Millennium Falcon. You want a scene on the Millennium—if I could make a suggestion, direct scenes on the Millennium Falcon, cause it’s hugely helpful. But it doesn’t make the scene automatically good.”

–JJ Abrams at San Diego Comic-Con, July 2015

One of the major recurring topics of Star Wars fandom over the last few years has been the notion that this is, in some fundamental way, a movie franchise. At face value that may seem obvious, but there’s more to it than there might seem right away. For a lot of fans, especially nineties kids like myself, far more of our formative years was spent reading Star Wars books, comics, Essential Guides, and so on than watching the films. Even once the prequel trilogy was coming out, and causing occasional headaches for the Expanded Universe, there was always an understanding that the film aspect of the franchise was not just finite but distinctly limited—they were a storm we just had to weather before the EU took over again. Just like there was never going to be an Episode VII, nor would there be a III.V, or a Zero, or a Negative Twenty. The films were Anakin’s life story, and if that wasn’t the major draw for you, no big deal. If you liked harder military science fiction, Star Wars was a novel franchise about the continuing war with the Empire. If you liked Jedi melodrama, the comics of John Ostrander and Jan Duursema were your Star Wars. If you were a gamer, Star Wars was Dark Forces or X-Wing Alliance or The Force Unleashed.

And yeah, one of the coolest things about it was that all those different pocket universes intersected and fed off of each other—at least in theory—so even if you mostly kept in one or two lanes yourself you still got to feel like part of this grand tapestry of SW fandom. Things are different now, and frankly I don’t blame some people for still not being okay with that, but it is what it is. Movies are once again steering the ship, and will be for the foreseeable future no matter what part of the timeline you’re into; that doesn’t ruin Star Wars, in my opinion, but it does necessitate a degree of realignment. What role should supplemental material—which is what the books are now, supplements—play in a movies-first franchise? What role can they play best? Read More

A fun game I’ve played once or twice since the release of The Force Awakens is to try and pinpoint a moment in time where you could tip the post-Endor timeline, Back to the Future-style, from the Expanded Universe’s version to the sequel trilogy’s version. As I recall, the best idea I could come up with was Leia getting pregnant with Ben immediately—like, “the night of the Endor celebration” immediately. The impending child not only accelerates her coming to terms with her heritage (and motivates her and Han to marry sooner) but gives her a huge extra reason to end the war with the Empire as soon as possible. Sure enough, Leia taking an even more aggressive role in the military campaign brings about a swifter military victory, and perhaps even further motivates complacent core worlders to rally behind her as a post-Empire figurehead. This has all sorts of random ripple effects, too—different people come to lead the Imperial Remnant, Luke perhaps founds his new Jedi Temple sooner, and so on.

Of course, while a fun thought experiment, this is complete nonsense. The truth of the matter is that the sum total of the “Legends-verse”, as many are inclined to think of it, is under no circumstances a single coherent timeline that could be switched on or off like a light bulb. Lucasfilm’s efforts to keep it consistent over the years were herculean and admirable, but I’ve come to believe that a more accurate way of looking at Legends is as a plethora of “pocket universes”, which fit together more nominally than absolutely. Read More