Tag: Second Look

The Expanded Universe Explains

Reboot or no reboot, this site is founded in part on the premise that the Expanded Universe, by dint of breadth and longevity, represents a master class in the Star Wars universe, and the different things that can be done within it. To that end, my series The Expanded Universe Explains is meant to serve as a chronicle of the EU’s answers to many frequently-asked questions from casual fans—many of which came straight from my friend Pearl. In the wake of the Legends announcement, latter-day entries have begun to focus on individual throwaway references in the films that the EU subsequently explained in multiple, usually contradictory, ways; earlier entries tended to jump around a lot, so for ease of navigation, I’ve included sample questions in the list below.

• Vol. I – How do lightsabers work?
• Vol. II – Where did the Millennium Falcon come from?
• Vol. III – What if Luke died or turned evil on the Death Star?
• Vol. IV – Rebels Edition – Are stormtroopers clones?
• Vol. V – What happened to the Imperials at Endor?
• Vol. VI – Did Vader let Luke go at Cloud City?
• Vol. VII – What’s Artoo-Detoo’s backstory?
• Vol. VIII – Han and Lando
• Vol. IX – The Shuttle Tydirium

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Reviews

This one is straightforward enough. The reason I have book reviews as a tag rather than a category like “Interviews” is because ideally even review are still framed more as standard editorials rather than just a rote “three out of five Hutts” kind of thing; the goal is to find something interesting about the book, good or bad, that could stand to be part of the conversation and discuss that thing—and then presumably the reviewer’s general opinion of the work will come out naturally in the course of doing that. I think we’ve been pretty successful so far.

• Kenobi Review: The Smaller The Pond, The Bigger The Ripples
• Razor’s Edge Review: A New Author Delivers
• Maul: Lockdown Review: Not For The Faint Of Heart
• Honor Among Thieves – Blueprint for the future EU?
• A New Dawn shines a light on the future of Star Wars
• On Tarkin, and the Novel as Reference Material

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History and the EU

As a history major, former Eleven-ThirtyEight contributor Tyler Williams decided early on that his focus was going to be the influence of events and motifs from antiquity on the Star Wars universe—hence his personal editorial header “This Belongs in a Museum“. While this focus pervaded most of his work here, it found its primary expression in this loose three-part series subtitled “A Long Time Ago”. In it Tyler covered three major cultures of the GFFA—the Old Republic, the Tionese (roughly, the Greece to the Old Republic’s Rome), and the Mandalorians—and the ways that they were drawn from real life.

• Senatus Populusque Res Publica Galactica: A Long Time Ago, Part 1
• Beware of Tionese Bearing Gifts: A Long Time Ago, Part 2
• Mandalorians at the Gates: A Long Time Ago, Part 3

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Every six months or so, the staff of Eleven-ThirtyEight takes a well-deserved week-long break to rejoice in not having to write about Star Wars for a minute—also there’s some sort of pine tree festival going on; not sure what the deal is there. Because I, much like Mrs. Claus, am not at liberty to leave the premises, I use these skip weeks to run a feature called Second Look, where I revisit specific pieces from the past few months that deserve another moment in the spotlight.

I’m going to do it a little differently this time, though—after eighteen months of regular publishing, we’ve amassed a pretty damn huge back catalog; with more gems than I could ever revisit adequately. So this week I’m presenting the Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer. See that “Ongoing Series” word cloud down there on the right? Think of this as a map of that territory—each weekday (yes, all five of them) I’ll list in detail a few of those recurring series, some finite and some still ongoing, talking a little about the goals of each series and what makes them interesting. Read More

One of the founding hypotheses of this website is that even in a post-reboot landscape, readers of the Expanded Universe are uniquely positioned to recognize the pitfalls and possibilities of continuing the main story of Star Wars beyond Return of the Jedi—and that understanding that landscape makes our insight valuable in the Sequel Era even if our beloved stories no longer “happened”. As staff writer Alexander Gaultier put it in the first of his six-part series A Case for Starting Over:

“…it is beyond any doubt that the galaxy far, far away will have undergone a great number of significant changes [in the thirty years since Jedi]. The Rebel Alliance will likely have restored the Galactic Republic, or at least founded a successor state of their own. Luke will have reestablished the fabled Jedi Order and begun training a new generation of Jedi Knights. Our heroes will have children, who now go on to face their own challenges. All these things have occurred at one point or another in the Expanded Universe that has been growing since the day A New Hope was released.”

Over the following several months, Alexander would break down the framework of the EU from many different angles, highlighting what worked, analyzing what didn’t, and suggesting all sorts of new avenues by which we might at arrive at even the most foregone of conclusions. He added:

“Given the complicated nature of the early development of the Expanded Universe, I don’t think its vision of the galaxy after Return of the Jedi is a bad one. I do, however, believe that we are fully capable of doing better, and that the sequel trilogy offers us the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that.”

Each part of the series can be reached below, or you can click the link at the top of this post to view the entire category.

• Part I: The Road to Coruscant
• Part II: A New Republic
• Part III: Heirs to the Empire
• Part IV: Guardians of Peace and Justice
• Part V: Passing the Torch
• Part VI: Happily Ever After