Evidence of Absence: Jedi in the Dark Times

rr-training

“Maybe it’s a good thing the old religion died.”

Ben: What sort of galaxy would there be without the Jedi? Without its foremost peacekeepers, its moral compass? What if the guardians of justice for generations simply vanished overnight? What if the ones to replace them sought to sow fear where the Jedi had sown hope, to control and dictate where the Jedi had let the Force and life take its course?

When the Emperor ordered the Jedi exterminated, he instantly turned the galaxy-wide war against the Separatists into a sideshow and brought the entire Republic under his personal dominion, to be shaped as he saw fit. Everything changed. The galaxy became a darker, more materialistic place. The Force became a forgotten term for an outdated and mocked religion. The Jedi were whispered about in the dark for a time, then slowly forgotten. What few Jedi survived the purge live a lie, hiding in such deep, dark places from which they might never emerge. An entire generation of beings emerged who were raised in a galaxy without its brightest light. Read More

What Star Wars Can Learn From Marvel’s Secret Wars 2015

Announced at the recent New York Comic Con, Secret Wars will be Marvel’s big 2015-16 event. Marvel have followed that up in over the last fortnight with a barrage of teasers for even more events for summer 2015. What does it all mean? For right now, two things are obvious: If you are on the inside of Marvel’s continuity and have been following it for a while, this will look like the most ambitious undertaking ever. If you are on the outside, having kicked the habit and stayed off the books in the main, it will look entirely incomprehensible!

So, what’s the problem with it? The problem with Secret Wars 2015 is it will be a line-wide event, now with an array of satellites, which appear to be specific to each group of titles, but also eras too. The problem is nothing gets to avoid it! The Ultimate books? It is going to cover those too! If you buy into the idea for the event, it sounds great, it sounds like something you want to read. If you do not buy into it? Too bad, you’re going to have to if you keep reading the books up to a certain point in 2015. That’s the problem. This is practically polarizing consumer interest into two directions – towards or away from Marvel’s entire line for a year or longer. (Plus, once you are out of touch with Marvel superheroes for that kind of duration, you may not hop back on-board.) Read More

Skyhoppers, Hovertrains, and Landspeeders

Boonta_Eve_Podracers

In Star Wars, even something as mundane as simply getting around is a visibly futuristic process. Cars are replaced with landspeeders that glide smoothly over even the roughest terrain without needing a single wheel to touch the nonexistent roads. Their governments must save a fortune on infrastructure upkeep. Skyhoppers and airspeeders are more like flying cars (or what flying cars would be like, if we had them) than planes, complete with being totaled by thrill-seeking young drivers.

A speeder bike is something like a motorcycle, only about a dozen times faster, with no wheels, and an even worse safety record when it comes to crashing headlong into inconvenient obstacles like trees. Crossing the great void between the stars to new worlds is as simple as booking passage on a vessel headed in the right direction, the galaxy’s denizens having long ago circumvented that troublesome little matter of the light barrier that’s been keeping us from our round trip to Alpha Centauri all these years.

With casual interstellar travel being so accessible to the general public, one can safely assume that travel time between cities or continents on the same world would be all but nonexistent in the vast majority of cases. War machines are regularly produced in bipedal and quadrupedal configurations and deployed to great effectiveness, despite the obvious limitations and weaknesses of the design. Clearly, someone has an extreme aversion to wheels and tank treads (to the disappointment of car chase enthusiasts everywhere).

It’s easy to dismiss these things as being nothing more than irrelevant bits of background information and lore; the means by which our heroes hop, skip, and jump between their interstellar adventures. Flavor for something that would be otherwise stale, of interest only to the most overzealous of pedants. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Character Building and the Art of Filler

rr-zebezra

“You did all this…for fruit?” “No! …okay, maybe a little!”

When a TV show is written, the staff has a choice to make: How will the show find its balance between character development and the plot? The Clone Wars was a show where the events of an episode held precedence over characters. Not that there were no character moments or any development, but the story came first, especially early on when summaries of episodes could be “Godzilla IN SPACE” or “the Seven Samurai WITH BOUNTY HUNTERS”. Whatever concept the TCW writers wanted to put on screen, they put there, regardless of whether it was a good fit for the characters drafted into various roles. While there were episodes that got away from this, it’s a tendency that colored the show’s entire run.

Another decision, one more specific to action-oriented media, is the stakes of a given story. From episode to episode, something or other may be at risk or hanging in the balance. Is it the fate of a world, or merely the well-being of a few people? TCW tended toward the dramatic side, where the stakes were high, be it to save hundreds of lives, catch a dangerous fugitive or stop a superweapon. While there were some low-stake episodes that focused less on the action and more on character interaction, they became fewer and fewer as the show moved into its later seasons and more driven, multi-part stories took over. Read More

The Star Wars Expanded Universe: The Pithy Reader’s Companion Vol. IV

Longtime readers may remember my three-part Pithy Reader’s Companion series from early in this site’s existence; for the unfamiliar, it worked like this: over on the Jedi Council Forums, I ran an ongoing thread called One Sentence or Less, wherein participants would summarize assorted works from the Expanded Universe in one sentence—the “or less” part was half joke, half gentle nudge toward brevity, but it didn’t always work out that way; ETE staffer Lucas Jackson’s synopsis of The Swarm War actually held the record (until now, that is) at 242 words, all still technically one sentence.

Anyway, readers would vote for their favorites via the forum’s “like” system, and after two days or so, whoever had the most likes won the round. After about a year, I compiled all the winners into the three-volume Pithy Companion, and there was much mirth to be had. The thread went on under the guidance of my fellow poster known as @instantdeath, and while activity has sadly waned in recent months, enough new winners emerged that I thought I’d use the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the original series of articles to catch back up with it, in Volume IV of the Pithy Companion. While each part of the original series focused on a third of the Star Wars timeline, this time I’ll cover basically the whole shebang, within the loose confines of “stuff I didn’t get around to in the first year”. Highlights include the the Knights of the Old Republic games, Fate of the Jedi, and the entire—yes, entireJedi Prince series, perhaps best known for its first book, The Glove of Darth Vader. Enjoy!

 


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