In case you have not been keeping track – and I most certainly have not – the STAR WARS canon has an all-new massive multilayered media and publishing project all set up and ready to go. It is called The High Republic Era, or something similar, and… well, just watch:
Go back and pay very special attention to the frame at 1:24. I took a screenshot of it for you:
OK, now look carefully. See what their priorities are?
They want DUHVERSUHTEEEEE!!!
They want it so much, in fact, that it is mentioned twice – once in the “Fiction” column, denoting what the various authors enjoy in their fiction itself, and once in the “Star Wars Writers” column, showing what those writers want to write about.
They want an actual ending. OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. The biggest problem with the Devil Mouse Trilogy was that the ending of the whole thing was utterly idiotic. It was, in fact, complete Satanic inversion. You cannot have a good ending if you end up with the direct lineal descendant of pure evil, taking the name of the direct lineal descendant of pure good.
But then they go and screw it up by saying that the “Star Wars Heart” column that they want a series that is “Not pro-war”.
Look, Devil Mouse dumbasses, we get it. War is BAAAAAAAD, mmmkay? Not that difficult a concept to grasp. Even right-wing nutcases like me can understand it – in fact, we understand it rather better than you do, because we have some idea of what real war is like. Some of us – not me, but several of my readers, certainly – have fought in wars and understand quite well how it twists the souls of the men who fight.
And all of that is before we get to the points raised about having no single main character, lots of chaos agents, river houses, and – wait for it! – dinosaurs.
If you’ve ever wondered what an intellectually and artistically bankrupt franchise looks like, this right here, is it.
The funny thing is that when it comes to creating a believable and interesting universe, STAR WARS is already extremely long in the tooth. Many of the ideas, philosophies, and design decisions that made STAR WARS so great, so original, and so interesting, have all been co-opted and enhanced by other franchises.
The most notable of these is of course the epic and brilliant Galaxy’s Edge series by authors Jason Anspach and Nick Cole – if you’ve never read any of the books in that series, essentially imagine what STAR WARS would have looked like if the Empire were the good guys, the Rebellion were the evil lunatics running around trying to destroy everything with a healthy dose of religious fanaticism thrown in, the Jedi were removed entirely, and the whole thing was told from the point of view of the grunts on the front lines fighting through it all.
The major reason why those series work, while STAR WARS has lost the plot, is because the authors and minds behind the properties that owe their very existence to George Lucas’s creation, have maintained internal consistency.
STAR WARS started out as a very subversively right-wing space opera. It stayed more or less true to those roots, despite Jabba the Lucas’s comments about how the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi were the Viet Cong and the Empire was the US military. It was the right set of ideas at exactly the right time. It was a brilliantly conceived and executed series of set pieces that stuck together in a coherent whole, with larger-than-life characters and tropes, vast playgrounds for the human imagination to move through, and genuinely heart-warming, compelling, moving storytelling.
Then the Devil Mouse came along and threw all of that straight into the shitter, and decided to start over again with a bunch of derivative nonsense that simply imitated, quite badly, what already existed, instead of taking real risks and inventing something new. By refusing to take those risks, the creative minds at the Devil Mouse actually made things worse – because STAR WARS became bland, boring, and highly derivative.
The new High Republic stuff looks to be pretty much the same, except that it will likely double down on a lot of the social justice nonsense that made the Devil Mouse Trilogy so unbearable. Everything we see right now on that board indicates that diversity, inclusion, and MUH FEEEEELZ!!! are going to take precedence over storytelling, character, and world-building.
Enough of this nonsense already. It’s well past time that STAR WARS died a thoroughly deserved death, and received its very own Viking funeral.
All of that being said… there is one good thing that has come out of the STAR WARPED canon of late:
A collaboration between THE HU and Lucasfilm? Yes please.
7 Comments
I am pretty sure that is rival houses. I think they got stuck on game of thrones.
all I could think of when I heard the phrase "High republic' was a bunch of Colorado Natives passing around a bong as they dreamed of wookies and gungans.
"And we will make…. uhh… Yoda, burn up the jedi libraries. and the republic general will be like… you know, one of thos chicks with the colored hair that fight oppression and Nazis and stuff…. 'ere."
"Duuuude… check it out, man, watch what happens when I wave this blue glowy-stick thing around…. whoa, like, DUUUUUUDE…. wait, did I just cut Billy in half? DUUUUUUDE… gimme another toke…"
Lord, but I hate hippies.
Their "creative team" may as well have written "I WANT A PONY" for nearly every point on their lists, by which I mean an actual pony and not the dosh.
"Actual ending" presumably means "hopelessly convoluted yet linear narrative doesn't shit itself after being rewritten upon the demands of focus groups".
But "Dinosaurs!" definitely means "I WANT A PONY" …
And so does "Complicated monsters". 🙂
But there's been a bigger problem with Star Wars for a long time now.
The way that Lucas took the original trilogy and ran it through so many production laundries so it could be "improved" with silly CGI edits and post-production sound changes wound up inverting the storytelling experience.
The customary and established way of telling stories; they're written, then they're published, and then perhaps there might be the publishing of a "more raw" version that includes stuff the editor took out, but the story mostly stays the same.
That way the readers of a story, or the viewers of a screenplay, get to play around with it in their minds while the story itself stays fixed.
Authors say this all the time, that once they're done with a story, they are well and truly done with a story, and it's now up to the people who enjoy it to "own" in the sense of imagining where it could go.
What Lucas did was to show that he controlled the story to such a ludicrous extent that he could in fact apply "retroactive continuity" to story elements, essentially applying the same thing to the viewers who remember scenes and dialogue a certain way.
It ceased to be a story for the viewers to re-interpret after the fact and became this sort of experience you'd have to live through again just to see what Lucas and company have fucked with this particular time.
And so if I have to come to Star Wars from the perspective that it's this changing blob of experience shit that means I haven't seen it "from a certain point of view" again, I may as well go find something that's actually new.
There's really a lot less of that actually new sort of thing than you'd hope for.
Their "creative team" may as well have written "I WANT A PONY" for nearly every point on their lists, by which I mean an actual pony and not the dosh.
Well, there was some sort of ridiculous horse-riding scene in The Last Straw, and apparently an even more ridiculous one involving a cavalry charge over the surface of a Star Destroyer, while in high atmosphere, in The Fall of Skywalker.
Just goes to show that the Devil Mouse can easily screw up "I WANT A PONY" too.
What Lucas did was to show that he controlled the story to such a ludicrous extent that he could in fact apply "retroactive continuity" to story elements, essentially applying the same thing to the viewers who remember scenes and dialogue a certain way.
That's because Jabba the Lucas always maintained that films are never really finished – he's on the record saying this in the interviews for the 1997 remastered trilogy release. He basically said that films are never completed, they are merely released and can always be improved.
And, unfortunately, he has no problem living by that very philosophy and going back and screwing up his own continuity whenever he wants to.
It ceased to be a story for the viewers to re-interpret after the fact and became this sort of experience you'd have to live through again just to see what Lucas and company have fucked with this particular time.
Yeah, man. One of the best jokes from The Big Bang Theory involved the guys waiting to play STAR WARS on Blu-Ray – "hurry up and start the movie already, before George Lucas changes it again!".
I wonder whether it's a symptom of something else …
If you are out of new ideas, or people are so used to your old stuff that you think they don't want your new ideas, then it might be very tempting to think that you can continue to riff on something.
But written works and visual works aren't like Neal Peart getting up on stage and giving the local audience a little extra effort.
At some point, writers and film makers are just trying too damned hard, trying to be too sincere, trying to make this perfect thing that never was going to be perfect.
But life imitates art, and so now we have a literal political candidate in America who has answered the call of "I WANT A PONY" …
John McAfee has bailed out of the US Presidential race.
He has now joined the campaign of Vermin Supreme who, according to John McAfee, has "beyond a doubt the most profoundly simple and effective of anyone’s".
"It’s based on one principle — a free pony for every American. Now who can fucking argue with that?"
I can! Send my free pony now to the creative team at Disney! 🙂
One last bit … I know who Lucas really is in his Star Wars films.
Girth Evader: "I have altered the film — pray I don't alter it any further."
Lardo Calorissian: "This film's getting worse all the time!"
Maybe he's right, but with a twist: Spaceballs would have been even funnier if they'd have made George Lucas himself the bad guy in the spirit of Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers series. 🙂
So from that perspective, Lucas did these weird self-parody or fan-fic things that aren't even funny.
Girth Evader: "Now I am the bastard!"
Bun Adobo: "Only a dark bastard of fan exploitation, Girth!"
Yeah, and then Keenan Ivory Wayans can do "I'm Gonna Git You Vader" …
"Why's that muthafukka always surrounded by white guys?"
🙂