Last Shot’s Ewok Codebreaker Peekpa and How Your Stereotypes Should Make Like a Tree

Posted on April 23, 2018by Imperial Court Circular

Last Shot

Last Shot is a zany Han and Lando novel, but among all the fun there were moments that covered some pretty weighty issues. The presence alone of an Ewok slicer, Peekpa, makes us question some of the assumptions we’ve had about Star Wars aliens in and out of universe. In another scene (details below the spoiler cut), Older has an alien character discuss how their species is still stereotyped and discriminated against by humans, even though they’re all supposed to be equal. Finally, Lando’s droid, L3-37, is an advocate for droid rights and while I don’t know how much of that will show up in the Solo movie (it’s enough to warrant a mention on L3’s StarWars.com databank page), the relationship between droid and organic sentience is a major theme of the book. These are the sorts of topics that Star Wars really papers over or treats superficially, if at all.   

Before I get into the topic in full, I did want to briefly give Last Shot a straightforward review. I greatly enjoyed it. The book felt like coming back home to the old-school EU with its take on the post-Endor New Republic and the adventures of Lando and Han, or the relationship between Han and Leia (my favorite part of the book aside from the scenes below). There are some great lines and hilarious scenes, especially featuring certain droids near the beginning of the book.  

But as much as I quite enjoyed all of that, I want to focus on aliens and droids—populations in Star Wars that have to live by humanity’s rules, and who might defy human expectations if given a chance. This book does just that—it’s the little things, but Daniel José Older gives us things we have not seen in Star Wars before by treating aliens and droids with respect. They’re involved in jokes, but they are not the butt of jokes. Minor spoilers beneath the cut. 

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What Kenobi Can Learn From Kenobi

Posted on April 20, 2018by DilDev’s Diner

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Like many Star Wars fans, I think it’s high time for us to have ourselves an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie. There are so many areas worth exploring with this character, some of which had been explored and then wiped clean by the Disney buyout. I know I’d personally love to see more stories that focused on Obi-Wan and Bail, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, Obi-Wan and Satine, and Obi-Wan’s Padawan days – all stories that I’m interested for a variety of reasons.

Ultimately though, what most have been clamoring for is some Tatooine-based, post-Order 66 drama. And I cannot bring myself to disagree, especially since my two favorite pieces of Star Wars fiction take place in those years. “Twin Suns” is obviously off the potential-Kenobi-movie table, for a number of reasons, not the least of which would be the need for a digitized Alec Guinness Obi-Wan, à la Rogue One‘s Tarkin, for the entire movie. Additionally, “Twin Suns” functions first and foremost as an Ezra Bridger AdventureTM, which requires the context of Star Wars Rebels, and that’s not even getting into its deliberate parallels to previous episodes in the show or the intense symbolism from The Clone Wars.

Kenobi however…now there’s some ripe pickings for a movie.

The Legends novel by John Jackson Miller takes place shortly after Obi-Wan’s arrival on Tatooine and his delivery of Luke to the Lars homestead. While it’s only sparingly told from Obi-Wan’s perspective, the things he says and does, and the things he does not say or do, along with the parallels to other characters’ lives, all manage to paint a perfect picture of how he is coping with the aftermath of Order 66 and Anakin’s betrayal. The stakes in which he finds himself involved are on a distinctly small-scale – the internal drama of a moisture-farming community – but it all becomes a reflection of the fall of Anakin and the fall of the Republic. The pieces that we do receive from Obi-Wan’s point of view are his meditations with Qui-Gon Jinn. From there we see how he’s struggling with Anakin’s betrayal, his own failures, and the need to set aside his Jedi mantle for the time being.

While I don’t expect Lucasfilm to pluck the plot wholesale from Miller’s novel, there are core elements of the story that deserve to be realized on the silver screen. Read More

Eleven-ThirtyEight’s Star Wars Hot Takes

Posted on April 2, 2018by , , , and

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After taking the last couple April Fools’ Days off, we decided to do something a little different this year—and not just because today is April 2nd. Around Christmas, staff writer David Schwarz created the Twitter bot Star Wars Hot Takes, which does pretty much what it sounds like, tweeting an auto-generated Star Wars take/thinkpiece title once an hour—many of which you could easily imagine someone throwing together as clickbait, and some of which, I have to admit, sound very close to actual ETE articles.

Truthfully, I think the term “hot take” is a little overblown as a criticism; it’s a category people use to reflexively dismiss big swaths of content they don’t like without much regard for the thought put into it. The key difference between a good piece and a “hot take”, in my opinion, isn’t the point of view expressed but how thoughtfully it’s presented—and I absolutely go out of my way to highlight takes on ETE that are distinct and outside the norm (even when I don’t necessarily agree with them) so that they can be given a thoughtful and balanced airing.

With that said, another important principle of this site is to not take ourselves too seriously—it’s just Star Wars, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that everyone’s opinions can get a little overblown once in a while. So in the spirit of taking just a little air out of our sails this April Fools’, I challenged the staff to pick a Star Wars Hot Take tweet and develop it into a “serious” mini-editorial. Here’s what they came up with. Read More

Jason Fry and Fixing Up the New Star Wars Canon

Posted on March 19, 2018by Obiwomble's Outlook

It is just over three months on from the detonation of the bomb that was The Last Jedi. The fires of controversy are indeed still burning and show no sign of diminishing. In the wake of all that, those flames also very recently got a hefty dose of oxygen with the release of the film novelization. Does the novel salvage the film for me? No, that’s demanding far too much of it, especially as it has to work with the plot of the film which causes so many problems in the first place. And then there was the effect it had on the wider Star Wars universe. Um, how to put it? Where’s that very appropriate GIF? Ah yes, here it is:

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Yes, whatever hopes I had for how the film might improve on the success of Rogue One‘s masterpiece of coordination the year before were pretty much dashed. And so it was on the books – Phasma gave some quite interesting info on how the First Order actually operates, The Legends of Luke Skywalker remains a great set of Luke tales, but the film followed through on both in the most mundane way possible.

So then, what can Mr. Fry actually do with one book in the wake of all this cavalier destruction? Quite a bit as it happens.

His previous work has been on books like the Essential Atlas or the Essential Guide to Warfare – books that are all about trying to make it all work. Or bringing a new take to material you might consider humdrum. In this respect the books Moving Target and The Weapon of a Jedi are each based around what seems a blindingly obvious character observation. In Moving Target’s case, a consideration of how the revelation of the second Death Star had a devastating effect on Leia. How could it not? Yet no one had spun that story into being.  Similarly, bereft of anyone to teach him, how does Luke even start to work out how to use the Force?  He had done it on the Death Star run but he did not know how he had.  Again, seems so easy, so obvious, but when I read Weapon of a Jedi, the story felt new. Read More

Nobodies: How the Jedi Have Always Come From Nothing

Posted on March 16, 2018by Guest Editorials

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“They were filthy junk traders. Sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead in a pauper’s grave in the Jakku desert. You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me.”

When many heard these words in The Last Jedi, they saw a turning point in the Star Wars saga. No longer was it a tale of legacy, of “mighty Skywalker blood”, but instead a story of how the Force could be found to belong to all, and even a “nothing” like Rey could be attuned powerfully to the Force. It was a sentiment that stirred many people jaded with Star Wars.

It was a sentiment that has been present in many parts of Star Wars, both canon and Legends, both recent and old. Today I come to praise two oft-derided things, the Jedi Academy trilogy and The Phantom Menace. Rey, though a great example of a Jedi and a great counterpoint to Kylo Ren, was far from the first Jedi whom Ben Solo might have called “nothing”.

In the Jedi Academy trilogy, when Luke Skywalker seeks out those Force-sensitive people who have not been purged by the Empire, he goes to faraway and obscure places to find them. Although Luke does initially frame this as looking for Jedi descendants, he also states that he seeks those known as miracle workers, or the incredibly lucky. He later explains:

“Everyone can use the Force to some extent, but a few have a stronger innate talent.”

He also says:

“Reach out and feel your mind, feel your body, feel the universe surrounding you. The Force stretches around and through everything. Everything is a part of everything else.” Read More