Rebels Revisited: Not Just a Mercy Mission – the Greater Stakes of Rebellion

Posted on January 22, 2016by and Feature Articles

rr-leiaplan

Jay: This week’s Rebels episode featured an interesting twist on the now-familiar Star Wars Rebels cameo. Instead of appearing to interact with the Ghost crew and develop their arcs in certain ways, Princess Leia basically carried the episode herself. This was an interesting approach to take, and while I’m strongly disappointed that Leia and Hera never had the chance to have a conversation about politics and rebellion (I’ve long considered Hera the Leia of the Ghost crew, the true idealist and believer in the cause) I found myself very interested in how they developed Leia’s character in a general sense. In the past, I’ve been pretty opposed to small universe syndrome unless a character cameo benefits the larger Rebels story. Here, I made an exception because I am horribly biased in favor of all Leia appearances in all media but it occurs to me that they did something different and rather interesting with Leia. Rather than using Leia to tease out character growth in the main show characters, they used Leia to tease out more information about Leia and the larger galactic state of rebellion. Without ever lifting the camera from Lothal, we got a look at what things are like elsewhere in the galaxy and that’s a pretty cool thing.

See, we’re usually limited to the perspective of the Ghost crew, which is just one rebel cell among many. A lot of folks in the audience — myself included — got rather antsy over staying on Lothal too long, and while the crew is moving about they’re still just a tiny, tiny piece in a large galaxy. They’ve only attracted Lord Vader’s attention because of Ahsoka’s presence and the whole Jedi thing, but they’re not really that important on the overall stage (yet?) despite running around with Sato and Fulcrum/Ahsoka. But running into Leia allows the small Phoenix operation to intersect, however briefly, with the grand galactic state of play. Read More

Lightsaber Combat, Sequel Edition

Posted on January 20, 2016by The Holocron

Finn_duels_Kylo_RenAfter I watched The Force Awakens for the second time, one of the many things my friends and I brought up was lightsaber combat. The iconic weapon of Jedi, Sith, and many other Force-users was featured prominently, and of course I had a few feelings about just how the combat was depicted. Like pretty much every other piece about TFA, this is not spoiler-free. You have been warned.

My interest in lightsaber combat and just how realistic it is has led me to some interesting places, like the time when I tried to recreate Jaina’s pose on the cover of Invincible and fell into a bookshelf. At least once while watching the prequels and doing the usual making fun of them, I have commented on how much I love the fight choreography. And one of my first thoughts on TFA’s combat was just how much it suited each of the characters. Three viewings later, I found myself muttering about lightsaber combat and about how good fight choreography can be very good characterization.

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Unsullied: The (Utterly) Spoiler-Free The Force Awakens Experience

Posted on January 18, 2016by

finndesert

Dedicated readers of this site may be familiar with my friend Pearlann Porter, the “casual Star Wars fan”. She never really got into the Expanded Universe, but we’ve had no shortage of long conversations about the background details of the films, which ultimately led to the ETE series The Expanded Universe Explains.

Having once felt strongly as George Lucas did—that The Story ended with Return of the Jedi and nothing was worth getting into beyond that, she nevertheless decided to give The Force Awakens a go. Since she’d been so tuned out to current Star Wars output for so long (I dragged her to The Clone Wars in theaters and she’s never forgiven me), she made the decision early on to completely ignore all news relating to Episode VII; not just serious spoilers, but even who the cast was. No posters, no trailers, not a single luxury—and with almost no exceptions, she stayed that way right up until December 18th.

As rare an experience as hers was going to be, I knew I wanted to document it here. As we sat in the theater moments before the movie started, I asked her a few questions about her feelings thus far, and then a few weeks later she answered a few more looking back on the whole ordeal. She’s also working on a full review that I hope to publish here in the near future, but for now, enjoy our discussions. If you note a different feel between the two halves of the interview, that’s because the first really was conducted in the theater, and transcribed later—while the second batch was via email.

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The Symbolism of The Force Awakens

Posted on January 15, 2016by Guest Editorials

falconascent

One of the best aspects of literature is ambiguity; ambiguity that leaves important scenes up for speculation and exploration that causes discussion for years to come. At the end of the novelization of The Force Awakens, the narration tells us “Remembering, Rey reached into her pack and removed [Luke’s] lightsaber. Taking several steps forward, she held it out to him. An offer. A plea. The galaxy’s only hope.” In context, I think the narration makes it seem that Luke is the galaxy’s only hope. But how is he the galaxy’s hope? Does Rey imagine that Luke is going to bring the galaxy together under the Resistance? Does she want Luke to come out of hiding and kill Kylo? I think the direction of the plot subtly moves us into accepting a different ending: that Rey, fully trained by Luke as a Jedi, is the galaxy’s only hope.

What makes me think this? The symbolism in Star Wars. The franchise is not afraid of stretching its visuals to their furthest capacity, leading to some rich storytelling that doesn’t rely solely on the narration to tell every part of the story. But how does The Force Awakens’ symbolism specifically point to Rey as the galaxy’s only hope? It’s too easy to point out Rey’s similarities to Luke, as many have already done. No, the way forward is to look at some of the differences between the two. I think there’s an unexplored area of the movie that we should look at: the symbol of ascent. The symbol of ascent is all over the movie, as the movie starts in the night, in the middle of a desert world and ends on top of a mountainous island in the middle of the day. In many ancient worldviews, “ascension” meant many things: it symbolized a movement from death to life, it symbolized the ritual practitioner’s ascent into heaven, or maturity. Ascension was necessary in many worldviews because the ground was death: to descend was to enter Hades or Sheol, and to stay on the ground was to be tied to the material world rather than the spiritual world. Kosignas, the priest-king of a town in Greece, builds a ladder to Hera to leave the world; the prophet Jonah descends into the sea and into the fish to escape God, comparing it to living in Sheol; the Rig Veda shows the first man who died climbing mountains to show people about life after death; early Gnostics wanted to ascend to heaven to escape the evil material world. Read More

The Shadow of Anakin Part II: A Legacy of Hope

Posted on January 13, 2016by A Certain Point of View

kylo and anakin

At its heart, the Star Wars saga has always been about Anakin Skywalker in some form or another. If the prequel trilogy is about Anakin’s rise and subsequent fall, and the original trilogy is about his redemption, then the sequel trilogy is about his legacy. Though Anakin is dead, his story continues to play a key role in the narrative of a galaxy far, far away.

On Monday I discussed the differences between Vader and Kylo, both in their backgrounds and in their falls to the dark side, and what that might mean in terms of redemption arcs. If Anakin was a Jedi whose path to the dark side was paved with good intentions, Kylo (as best we can tell from The Force Awakens) willfully chose to embrace the dark and is still fighting the light inside him. Very different interpretations of dark side power. Kylo is determined to follow the Vader side of his heritage…but he would do well to remember that Vader is only part of the legacy that Anakin leaves behind.

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