“War Leaves its Scars” – Star Wars Shows Its Age

Posted on October 23, 2015by Feature Articles

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How often does a franchise allow its characters to grow old, to mature, or even to have their characters legitimately become damaged, irreparably changed? Character development isn’t always a positive thing, necessarily. Sometimes, something develops that isn’t positive at all, and that takes a certain level of determination and daring to do. The characters that the audience loves might suddenly become the ones that they hate, or pity.

When Star Wars Rebels started ramping up promotions for the beginning of the second season, they let us know that there would be returning characters from The Clone Wars appearing, namely, three of the clones themselves. Before any footage came out, it was easy to assume that the years had been relatively kind to the trio. Wolffe, Gregor and Rex looked older, grayer, a bit heftier, but not too much worse for wear for coming through as much conflict as they did.

Of course, once footage came out and once the episodes themselves had aired, appearances turned out to be deceiving.

Gregor, who suffered from amnesia in his initial appearance, had apparently suffered some degree of brain damage either in the explosion that had seemingly killed him, or some time thereafter. He still has his inbred ability and the skills driven into him by his training, but his rational mind is a babbling, bubbly mess. The implication that such a mentally disturbed man had, at some point, returned to service under the Empire is almost as disturbing as the idea that he is conscious of his condition and doesn’t really care. Read More

The Theatrical Trailer – The First 24 Hours

Posted on October 21, 2015by , , , , , , and

Almost exactly eighteen months ago, Lucasfilm announced the reboot of the Star Wars Expanded Universe—or Legendsification, if you will. It happened on a Friday, and it was such a seismic moment for your humble nerds at Eleven-ThirtyEight that I wanted to document the days that followed as accurately as possible. The next Monday, we published Das Reboot – The First 48 Hours, a group piece that, unlike our average Not a Committee, I presented entirely in chronological order, timestamps and all—so readers could feel the sequence of emotions unfold in “real time”.

With Tuesdays being an off day, I thought it’d be fun to cover the first 24 hours after the new trailer the same way—but while the trailer technically went public at about 10pm Monday night, interest was so high that the Jedi Council Forums were down on and off for a couple hours (and then again Tuesday afternoon)! I eventually got a DM off to the gang, though, and below is what followed.

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12:14 AM – Mike: So, JFC, LOL, and TBH, that was a trailer. I’m not even going to try to be especially coherent right now, but there’s just so much to freak out about here: new character voices! A mountain range with a familiar-looking trench in it! Finn’s “oh shit” face when he sees Kylo’s lightsaber! Han and Leia being all tender and stuff! How are you guys feeling? Read More

The Secret Academy — the answer to why the Empire fell so quickly (Also: Why you should read Servants of the Empire)

Posted on October 19, 2015by Imperial Court Circular

(As ever, we will endeavor to avoid spoilers – but as usual, this piece is analysis as much as review so we’ll be discussing the plot in vague terms to make the points we’re making)

secretacademyAs the Journey to The Force Awakens campaign kicked off on September 4th, one of the many questions readers started asking was: why is the Empire falling apart so quickly? The obtuse answer is that this is what the story demands, and we’ll learn the full reasons on December 18th. But many of us thought the war would last far longer than in the Expanded Universe, where the Empire was driven out of the Core Worlds as early as five years after Return of the Jedi. Surely this time the war would truly rage on for many many years: but that’s not what happened. Suddenly, the Empire of the EU seemed a lot more solid and formidable. Folks speculated as to the reasons why, such as the collapse of central authority, the unwillingness of the Navy to waste time protecting a symbolic world like Coruscant, defections to the New Republic, etc.

The real question, though, was why nobody was bothering to fight for the Empire? Even discounting propaganda, surely folks might feel under threat by the rebels and would want to defend their way of life? The Alliance/New Republic approach to the war doubtless played no small part in the lack of widespread Imperial resistance on the part of the galactic citizenry (something that we may touch on in our next “Gray Matters” piece), but Imperial collapse signifies a widespread lack of support for the Empire. This is in marked contrast to both Revenge of the Sith – where the Empire was ushered in by thunderous applause – and the old EU, where the Empire had solid support for quite some time.

Jason Fry’s Servants of the Empire books in general and The Secret Academy in particular give us the answer. This series – among many things – explores the true lengths the Empire goes to in order to inculcate loyalty in its subjects, and it shows that the Empire’s attempts at gaining the populace’s loyalty are manipulative at best and outright programmed at worst. The Empire does not inspire devotion or loyalty, it instills it by force. But The Secret Academy shows us that indoctrination through propaganda and misinformation is the gentlest of the Empire’s methods, and it has more sinister ideas in mind for the future of the galactic populace. Edge of the Galaxy already explored the Empire’s exploitation of planets, Rebel in the Ranks illustrated the brutality inherent in Imperial training, and Imperial Justice showed us the dark side of Imperial oppression: but The Secret Academy shows the existential danger posed by the Imperial system and indirectly provides the elusive answer as to why the Empire fell so quickly. Essentially, the Empire doth protest too much: the sheer lengths the Empire goes to shows that even the servants of the Empire aren’t really willing adherents of the system. Read More

It’s Not Over Yet – The Return of the Clones

Posted on October 16, 2015by , and

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Ben: Sometimes long-form storytelling doesn’t work out. For example, when The Clone Wars was canceled after five seasons on the air and a movie, it still left many plots and characters hanging. Many fans assumed that there would be no resolution to these things, and not without reason. With new movies in the post-Return of the Jedi era emerging and Rebels taking TCW’s place, a new focus on the original trilogy era seemed poised to doom characters like Ahsoka, Ventress and Rex to obscurity, perhaps not for forever, but for a very long time.

Fortunately for the legions of TCW fans out there, there has been a steady, if much slower than previously, flow of information, references and details from TCW postmortem. Starting with the “Lost Missions” from the unaired sixth season being released on Netflix, we’ve had story threads picked up by a comic series, a novel, and now in Rebels, each one giving us a few clues as to what would have happened if the show had continued into seventh or even eighth seasons.

But what about after the end of the show? Even if the show had continued, there would still have been an end, likely corresponding with the events of Revenge of the Sith. So what would become of those characters in the years after the Republic and Separatist Alliance had collapsed? Read More

Our Journey With Jason Fry, Part Two

Posted on October 14, 2015by and Interviews

jp2-cover2In part one of our latest interview with Star Wars dynamo author Jason Fry, we discussed his two recent Journey to The Force Awakens tie-in books, The Weapon of a Jedi and Moving Target (alongside Cecil Castellucci). Today we’ll move on to his most recent solo release, Servants of the Empire: The Secret Academy (expect us to have more on that next week as well), but first, we caught up on Jason’s own original series The Jupiter Pirates, whose third book, The Rise of Earth, comes out next year—and whose cover Jason was kind enough to share with us for its world premiere!

Man, that was a lot of titles for one paragraph.

 

So Jupiter Pirates is, in many ways, the age of sail in space. There are some family tensions in the second book, Curse of the Iris, and the tension mirrors the long-running argument over whether the Hashoones are pirates or privateers. The family has done and does some shady things in this book, and Tycho is sort of the audience surrogate in saying “hey wait, this isn’t right”—but his family doesn’t always see eye-to-eye about it. How do you romanticize age of sail in space without necessarily romanticizing the awful things that pirates do? And that’s leaving aside people like Mox who are just the worst, of course.

Hmm. Good question. I suppose this is a case where the built-in guardrails of writing kids’ fiction are a good thing – you’re not going to see pirates woolding someone (Google that with caution – it’s upsetting) or raping/slaughtering people. Bad things happen, but they’re mostly offscreen or implied. Which is honestly the way I prefer to work anyway.

Anyway, I think the more interesting debates in The Jupiter Pirates – for a reader of any age – are about other decisions to be made about right and wrong. What’s the right thing to do when you discover you don’t agree with a cherished family tradition? How about when you’re fighting for a larger cause that may or may not justify unsavory actions? (Which is the same question Cecil and I addressed in Moving Target, come to think of it.) Read More