Author: Jay Shah

Looking Back and Letting Go: When Star Wars Just Isn’t Doing it For You Anymore

Posted on July 5, 2023by

It’s not easy saying goodbye to something that’s been a significant part of your life for a significant part of your life. But sometimes, it might be the healthiest choice. No, I’m not talking about the upcoming closure of this website – although this is Eleven-ThirtyEight’s penultimate article – but instead, an all-consuming interest in Star Wars itself. Burnout is real, fatigue is real – and sometimes the best way to preserve your joy is to take a step back, at least for a while.

For most things, it’s easy. If I’m feeling let down by Marvel movies, or if a TV show feels more like a chore than something fun – it’s easy enough to drop it. For many people, that’s just what Star Wars is too: a fun thing to engage with sometimes. For people who are invested, dedicated to a “fandom” – that level of engagement might be different. The desire to read everything, watch everything, and talk about everything can be all-consuming. Usually, people do this because they love it – it’s energizing and fun. But sometimes it gets exhausting, and you need a break. Or at least, you need to re-evaluate what’s happening to you.

Breaks can be a good thing. In the years before ETE was founded, I was on a break with Star Wars. The Bantam era, New Jedi Order, and prequel trilogy were the high-water marks of my engagement with Star Wars – and there was a lethargy to the franchise in the years afterward. The books of the Legacy era irritated me more than I enjoyed them, so I made the choice to step back, and only read the books that actually excited me: a handful of amazing reference books like the Essential Atlas or Essential Guide to Warfare, or one-off books like Shadow Games. That break was very healthy for me – and I ended up fresh and energized for the new era of Star Wars storytelling that began in the fall of 2014.

The glow of the sequel era and the halcyon days of the early new canon have ended, overshadowed by incessant online toxicity and generally anemic onscreen storytelling. Publishing has always been the center of my engagement with Star Wars, but even there I feel a growing disconnect. There are still things that spark joy: Visions, Andor, Ronin, parts of The High Republic. There are still moments of magic – as much as I criticize nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, nothing will never surpass the joy I felt seeing Vivien Lyra Blair’s young Leia for the first time. There are still things I look forward to: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi is not far away, and the idea of bringing new voices and new perspectives to Star Wars has been something I’ve loved from the beginning. But other times? I’m not feeling it – and I want to talk about why.

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Eleven-ThirtyEight Looks to the Future One Last Time

Posted on June 26, 2023by , , , , and

After years of uncertainty regarding the future of Star Wars screen content (with the exception of lots and lots of The Mandalorian), a picture is beginning to take shape at last. With solid runs from The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch and a stellar showing by the first season of Andor, television content is breaking free from the iron grip of Baby Yoda at last, a process only expedited by Ahsoka, Skeleton Crew, and The Acolyte all debuting in the next year or so.

But we’ve known about all of those for years now—even if it takes a teaser these days to really believe a project is coming. The bigger question mark has been the future film slate, and only now do we finally know the name of the game there: something for everyone, with three new films announced in three disparate eras of the Star Wars timeline—one on the origins of the Jedi; one picking up Rey’s story after the sequel trilogy; and even one loosely adapting Heir to the Empire (imagine telling yourself that would happen after watching The Force Awakens!). Video games and publishing are also claiming distinct territory of their own, with The High Republic about to enter its third phase stronger and more prominent than ever; Jedi: Survivor delivering an improved continuation of Cal Kestis’s story and teeing up a likely third installment; and the newly announced open-world game Outlaws carving out a big new space during the original trilogy (hopefully) free from the entanglements of the movie characters.

With Eleven-ThirtyEight’s final days looming and the publishing schedule filling up rapidly, a group piece seemed like a good opportunity for the staff to speak their minds one last time independent of the demands of a solo article. The topic: with all these new projects on the horizon, what are you looking forward to the most? After years of uncertainty, what gives you (ugh) hope for the future of Star Wars? Here’s what they had to say.

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Emma Candon’s Ronin: A Vision of What Star Wars Could Look Like

Posted on October 25, 2021by Imperial Court Circular

Emma Mieko Candon’s novel, Star Wars Visions: Ronin, is remarkable in several ways. It’s remarkable for taking the story hinted at in the Visions short “The Duel” and turning it into a full narrative, it’s remarkable for generating its own setting unmoored (or better yet, unburdened) by existing Star Wars storytelling and continuity, it’s remarkable for LGBTQIA+ representation (thankfully something SW publishing seems to be pretty good about), and it’s remarkable for putting Star Wars squarely in a Japanese-inspired milieu and still feeling perfectly like Star Wars. As Candon put it in their author’s note, Ronin is an “iterat[ion] on an American saga that is itself an iteration on Japanese narratives.” Like the Star Wars Visions shorts themselves, it feels like Star Wars has come home to where it all began.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the influences of Star Wars, from Flash Gordon adventure serials, to the monomyth, to political commentary on Nixonian America. By now most of us know of the historical allegories about Nazi Germany, the Vietnam War, the American Revolution, and the Roman Republic’s transformation into the Roman Empire. Many of us also know that George Lucas took inspiration from Japanese, Indian, and Chinese cultures for ideas of the Jedi and the Force — and SW’s cultural influences (or depending on how you see it, appropriations) go even beyond that when we consider costuming, location design, and the ever-expanding on-screen world of Star Wars on cinema and television. You could probably write a whole book on the real-world cultural influences from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Asia on Star Wars.

Star Wars has many roots. But those aren’t the only place Star Wars belongs. It also belongs to everyone who’s engaged with it, who’s thought about it — but for so long, Star Wars had this idea that it had to look, and feel, a certain way. Star Wars Visions broke that idea for the screen just as Ronin broke it for the page. And I think that’s great.

Star Wars publishing has shown a willingness to experiment with books like From a Certain Point of View from Del Rey or The Legends of Luke Skywalker from Disney-LFL Press. They’ve hired an author pool of different backgrounds and experiences, and I’d love to see that continue going forward. I’d also love to see authors able to take their experiences and tell stories that we might not have previously thought really fit in Star Wars, but actually do. Ronin shows the way — if we can have space dreadnoughts with pavilions, gardens, and sliding wood-and-paper doors, we can have it all. We can frame our Star Wars stories in ways we never thought possible. But we can do it in an honest way, that doesn’t look like we’re pillaging from different cultures to lend our stories exotic flavor — by letting creatives engage with Star Wars in a way that’s informed by their own backgrounds and experiences.

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The Rising Storm’s Republic Fair: Concept Versus Execution

Posted on July 2, 2021by

Wave two of the High Republic series revolves around the centerpiece of the Republic Fair, modeled on the 18th-to-20th century concept of the World’s Fair. In real life, these fairs were huge expositions designed to showcase the wonders of science, technology, and the globe in an era where most of the population could only see the rest of the world through illustrations in books. Star Wars often uses the design vocabulary of real-world history and times gone past, and the world’s fair concept fits right into the idea of the Republic of yesteryear, full of innovation and optimism.

The opening wave of The High Republic showed us that despite appearances, all isn’t right with the galaxy. The second wave of novels shows us that the galaxy’s troubles are just beginning – the Republic and Jedi may blaze with light and life, but trouble is on the horizon. Cavan Scott’s The Rising Storm may just as easily have been named Before the Storm, had that name not already been taken by an existing Star Wars Legends novel.

The Rising Storm is all about the Republic Fair. Personally, I think the Republic Fair is a great concept – both in-universe and out-of-universe. In-universe, Chancellor Lina Soh has a pretty wonderful idea to unify the galaxy and showcase the benefits of the shared galactic government through a showcase of shared science and culture – but was this really the right time? Out-of-universe, putting the real-world idea of a global exposition into Star Wars was an inspired idea – but is the idea used to its full potential?

I think the answer is “mostly”, but there are some avenues I wish the story had explored to make the High Republic setting seem more interesting. The in-universe shortcomings of the fair – that it might not be the best time – are actually great for the story! But there are some ideas that aren’t raised in-universe, which makes me a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the Republic Fair is a marvelous idea and I enjoyed The Rising Storm for the most part! My excitement is just tempered slightly by roads not trodden that would have made better use of the High Republic – and I won’t beat around the bush, it has a lot to do with the fact that the real-life World’s Fairs were also in the shadow of a gilded age of industry and colonialism and we see little sign of that in The Rising Storm. Maybe that’s not the story they set out to tell – but it’s an unfortunate omission.

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Victory’s Price: Deromanticizing the War Hero

Posted on March 8, 2021by

The intro is spoiler-free, but there will be MAJOR SPOILERS after the cut.

When Alphabet Squadron was first announced, we expected it to be like the old X-Wing series from the Expanded Universe. We quickly learned that while Alexander Freed was inspired by those novels, his story would not follow the familiar pilot story arc that we had come to expect. The third and final novel in the trilogy, Victory’s Price, completes the arc of the trilogy and shows that Alexander Freed is not afraid to deromanticize the type of military sci-fi that has been part of the Star Wars DNA since the very beginning.

Though Star Wars is largely space fantasy, World War II-inspired flight sequences and especially the books and comics have drawn on swashbuckling military sci-fi themes too. Pilots are heroic rule-breakers and soldiers are valorous and noble. Even the bad guys are heroic and noble, but they’re just too darn loyal to evil politicians and wizards who misuse their talents. Freed engages with these ideas and does something different, but not just because his story subverts our expectations for the sake of surprise. No, instead, his books – especially Victory’s Price – expose traditional war story ideals to critique, delivering a more nuanced vision of war.

There are still heroes and villains, but war is brutal and traumatic. As the title makes clear: victory in war has a price, and the price is borne not just by those who didn’t make it, but by those who did. Freed isn’t the first Star Wars author to focus on the human element of warfare: the late Aaron Allston (it still hurts to write that) was exceptional at showing how characters cope with the traumas of war and deal with the personal costs of a lifetime of fighting, albeit interlaced with his trademark humor and kind storytelling. But Victory’s Price really eschews the triumphalism of space adventure, or exposes it as hollow. Many of us read the Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in school, contrasting the “noble” language of Horace’s pro-war ode with the empty horror of the first World War – Victory’s Price reminded me strongly of that poem.

As for the Empire? The honorable soldiers, long suffering under a regime unworthy of them, no longer exist. Victory’s Price is an incredibly timely novel about what it means to sell your soul in service to evil, what brings people to do these things, and what society should do about it afterwards. Alexander Freed writes about Imperials with nuance but without getting stuck in the rut of grey moral relativism. This novel doesn’t spoon-feed or preach to the reader, but instead asks them to think and engage with deep questions. There aren’t any easy answers, but the reader who engages with Victory’s Price will find that it shines with moral clarity even underneath the blood and muck of war.

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