Star Wars Musings

 Dracula Daily’s started, so I’m getting that along with Dante Weekly and letters from Watson. I also signed up for a Three Musketeers thing, I think? That hasn’t started yet.

I don’t want to always dunk on modern Star Wars, but this week includes Star Wars Day, and today is Revenge of the Sixth. So it kind of makes sense to do a SW-themed Saturday Note. I think I touched a little on this in another essay. I did also think about doing a Note about the Dark Side but I don’t know if I have enough material to work with. It would amount to, “The Dark Side sucks, good guys shouldn’t use it,” if you’re curious.

Star Wars Musings

Oh, man, Star Wars is in a rough place right now. After season two of critical and fan darling The Mandalorian ended with a perfect, poignant finale that re-establishes the status quo, they immediately undid it because, let’s be real, Disney realized that Grogu sells way too many toys to write out of the show. Lucasfilm keeps announcing new movies by the truckload developed by promising directors and writers only to quietly cancel most of them after a couple of years.

Honestly, it’s a bit of a miracle that Andor got made at all. When they announced they were doing a prequel television series to Rogue One, it sounded a bit farfetched, and in light of everything else that Lucasfilm has canceled, including movies about the Rogue Squadron and the origin of the Jedi Order, I’m wondering how this made the cut. That’s not a complaint (though I can’t say that it was really my jam), just an observation that I don’t think the show would have gotten made if it was announced a couple of years later than it was.

It’s quite obvious that Star Wars doesn’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t known what they were doing since they’ve been bought by Disney. They’re throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that something sticks, and when it does, the strategy is to copy it to death because that’s how stupid corporations work.

Ugh.

Here’s the thing: something I’ve noticed lately is that major Star Wars media right now is really reluctant to really dip into the mysticism and fantastical elements of the setting. It’s not absent–the High Republic line of books and comics is mostly about the Jedi “at their height” (which is apparently only two hundred years before the Skywalker Saga), but, like. C’mon. Try harder, and do it with your shows and movies.

There’s a lament that I think exists in the wider world but I’m only remembering from a Zero Punctuation video on Dragon Age which says something like, “How is it that ‘standard fantasy setting’ is a thing that exists? That we’ve managed to find a way to make fantasy, the genre of fantastical things that don’t exist, into something mundane?” Star Wars has this problem–it’s become so obsessed with trying to copy what has worked for it before, that it doesn’t even try to branch out. Hence we get a movie trilogy that can’t decide if it wants to remake or awkwardly deconstruct classic Star Wars.

The Galaxy Far, Far Away has thousands of years of history, and the people responsible for telling stories in the setting are refusing to really move away from one period of time. The farthest they’ve gone is two hundred years previously, a time frame that I don’t think they really understand. The characters in Jedi Survivor, for instance, keep referring to the events of the High Republic as “centuries ago”, which is technically true, but that’s a bit like if all Europeans constantly refer to the Napoleonic War as “centuries ago.” That phrase implies a lot more chronological distance.

The Star Wars story can be set thousands of years in the past, or in the future. Or heck, given that the galaxy has a giant blank space on the map called the Unknown Regions which the writers keep pulling problems out of, you would think they’d set something there, away from the storyline of the movies. You could tell ANY story you wanted to in the setting, and instead they’re talking about fighting the Empire over and over again.

That’s one of the things I loved about the first season of Star Wars: Visions–it’s creative stories that are all over the map, with no regards to the canon. Anyone who tries to fit those stories into the canon are missing the point.

Star Wars is fantasy. It can be any kind of fantasy. Right now though, it’s just treading water because it thinks that’s what you all want to see. They could be doing all kinds of crazy things. It absolutely should be doing all kinds of crazy things. You’ve got an order of wizard knights with laser swords traveling through space! Why the fudge do you want to waste time with, “Hey, what if we gave you another scrappy hero fighting the Empire?” 

—