On General Grievous

 As a heads up, we might not have a Saturday Note next week, as I will be out.

If everything goes according to plan soon I will be trying to read the Spanish edition of Eragon and I don’t know how that will go! I haven’t seriously tried Spanish reading in ages, and I will have the English edition side by side with it, so I hope it works and is a learning experience.

I am in a weird mood, thinking about mortality, the state of souls, and I’m having some more “Maybe I should be a monk” thoughts again. So let’s talk about General Grievous. This is less of a criticism entry and more of a run-through of the character’s development over time and how I feel about it.

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On General Grievous

Recently in the Book Diary I shared that I read a Star Wars comic released by Dark Horse (so before the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm) titled “General Grievous”, and I also recently rewatched the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about General Grievous.

Also this Tumblr post I made recently.

So a rundown for people new to Star Wars and General Grievous. For Revenge of the Sith George Lucas asked the team to create a new villain named “General Grievous” (because George Lucas is not subtle with names), a commander for the Droid army who kills Jedi and collects their lightsabers. This guy went through a LOT of iterations before they settled on the skeletal cyborg look. He was then slated to be featured in the Clone Wars multimedia project. His first appearance was in the final episode of Volume 1 of Clone Wars.

And how is his first appearance to fans? It’s insane, is what it is. We’re first told that he’s completely obliterated a Republic attack force, and then we see him take on six Jedi at once. Granted, it’s partly through cybernetic enhancements, and if you watch the fight he does his best to separate them as much as possible–almost every takedown he makes is done by getting one of the Jedi alone. But that doesn’t change that he’s an incredible swordsman and fighter, he’s implied to be an excellent strategist, he can hold/fight with lightsabers with prehensile feet, and he’s fast enough to dodge the Force what the fudge.

To be fair Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars is incredibly stylized in its depiction of action sequences. Each individual Jedi is depicted as basically a one-man/woman army, so of course someone who beats them has to be even more intense. So throughout his other appearances in the series, along with different comics and books, General Grievous was depicted as an absolute BEAST. In the original animated series, it’s noticeable that no one actually beats him. He’s stopped from killing Ki-Adi Mundi by the arrival of a squad of ARC Troopers (who he starts killing instead) and a gunship attack, and even then he’s not beaten as much as driven back while they grab the survivors and get out of there. The only other ones who come close are Shaak Ti (who has fought him before and survived, and so is able to anticipate his tricks better than most) and Mace Windu, who refuses to actually engage him and just Force crushes his chest.

He’s also given a sympathetic backstory. He was a war hero on his homeworld, locked in eternal conflict with another race. And then their enemy joined the Republic, and the Jedi came in and helped obliterate his side’s army. The Separatists approach him to become a leader, and he refuses, but he’s caught in a freak shipwreck (which Dooku definitely had a part in). Dooku has his body rebuilt as a cyborg, including adding chips to his brain to get him to be more aggressive. Then they add 

And then we see him in Revenge of the Sith and he’s… not. At all. At least, in comparison to his other appearances. He’s constantly coughing, his speed and strategic knowledge are absent, and while he’s an intimidating duelist, he shows nowhere near the warrior we knew him as. There are in-universe reasons for it–this scene in Clone Wars for starters, but  in short it turns out that George Lucas didn’t actually think of him as being a particularly effective villain. For him, he was just a mustache-twirling douchebag who will run at almost every challenge. He’s more serial killer than a general.

I distinctly remember the movie coming out, and all of my friends thinking he was cool because he can spin lightsabers. And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand! That’s nothing! He should be able to fight with his feet! He should be fast enough to dodge Force attacks! He’s so much better in the cartoon!”

No one believed me.

The 2008 CGI The Clone Wars series leans more towards George Lucas’s interpretation. Whereas the Tartakovsky version has a warped sense of armor, guaranteeing a “warrior’s death” to the Jedi he’s about to fight, and pretty much always killing in combat. The one time he grabs a Jedi not in combat, he doesn’t kill her, he ties her up. CGI Grievous, on the other hand, is straight-up a genocidal serial killer–he frequently kills by pulling a gun, or getting his goons to do it while enemies are distracted. His lair has a collection of Padawan braids. He straight-up tells Master Koth that he doesn’t think that killing Jedi counts as murder because Jedi are filth. 

The backstory is a bit more complicated. There’s an ad with voiceover by Ahsoka which claims that Grievous had himself made into a cyborg because he was envious of Jedi, and so wanted a way to beat them himself. The episode “Lair of Grievous” is a lot more ambiguous, and while Grievous does claim that he chose to become a cyborg, he barks it very quickly as an angry retort to his maintenance droid saying it was done to him–possibly implying that he’s very touchy about it, and doesn’t want to admit any other possibility. Dave Filoni admits that he made the episode to be ambiguous as to his origin because he knew fans felt strongly about it, and so it can be taken any way they want. That doesn’t change that Grievous is significantly Nerf’d from his original (now non-canon) appearances in the original cartoons.

So General Grievous is this very weird, fascinating character for me to think about. This happens all the time in large fiction properties with multiple writers and artists involved. Comic books are like this a lot. Very often a character will be hyped up by one writer, and then another with little interest in the character, or with a different vision, will have the character act differently. But this strikes me as one of the highest profile examples of what TV Tropes calls ‘Depending on the Writer’--a character whose traits and personality are obviously changed between one work and another.

[Snoke is also another Star Wars example–compare how he talks in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and you’ll notice that it’s pretty much a different character. But he’s so mysterious and we had so many questions that most of us didn’t notice until it’s pointed out to us.]

Here we had this awesome, cool, unstoppable villain with a complex backstory, and then it turns out that George Lucas didn’t really have much in mind for the character other than to be killed so that Obi-Wan is somewhere else while Anakin turns evil. And instead of trying to go back to that original character fans loved so much Lucasfilm doubled down on the new characterization–probably for the sake of consistency with the films rather than malice against fans. But they also haven’t really done anything with the character, despite just about everyone else getting their own spin-off comics and books. It’s frustrating and weird.

This can hardly be one of those advice Notes, like, “Don’t do this to a character!” because, well, I highly doubt that you guys have any say in multimedia projects from big companies with multiple writers. But if  you are ever to make a character that goes anywhere other than your own work, be aware that when you hand him or her off to another creator that creator may take the character in a completely different direction. You might get something like what happened to Grievous.

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