#also i generally take from how he's drawn larger in his solo title bc that's my primary experience with him. there is a reason everyone

[thedevotionaltour]

Warning upfront: This post is about weight, and will therefore be focusing on weight gain and loss alongside eating habits, especially in relation to mental health and grief at certain points.

If you are like me, perhaps you also take issue with Kyle Rayner being either insanely shredded (or some skinny beanpole, depending on if you’re reading his solo title or literally anything else) from the start of his time as Green Lantern despite the following known facts: He sucked at gym class. He has a primarily sit down job as a graphic designer and artist. He did not train before Donna started helping him out. If you are also like me, perhaps you are often attempting to find ways to cope with this fact. I'm also going to say right now, this post is going to be super insanely informal, so sorry if it meanders a lot or gets confusing in some places. This is rambling I attempted to turn into coherent sentences.

Here is my personal step by step, headcanoned to hell and back rationalization as to how Kyle became the lean thing he is. Or the beefy thing he sometimes is. Again, it really does depend whether you’re reading his solo or literally any other title he’s making an appearance in. Anyways. Let’s get started!

I truly do think Kyle started off as a scrawny to averagely slim kid of sorts, all the way through middle school. His diet is pretty so-so, especially since he and his mom live on a tight budget, so the food situation isn’t necessarily spectacular for most of his life. Up and down. Maura tries her best with what she’s got.

In high school, he actually gets some meat on his bones, especially to Maura’s delight. She likes that he doesn’t look like a starving waif, as she’s put it to him a few times. Kyle doesn’t have strong feelings either way; sometimes he grumbles, sometimes he gets a small laugh out of her comments about it. They’re positive overall, and honestly, that’s all he can ask for from her. He actually keeps the weight he gets when he eats, and then some. He’s never been spectacular at sports or gym. It’s not his forte, and he doesn’t care to necessarily get better at it, either. He’s not in any physical extracurriculars. He does minimal physical activity on his own time, but nothing much. He’s too glued to his desk drawing or reading some comic book or fantasy novel. By the end of high school, he has some pudge. 

College hits, and he gets your typical freshman 15. Thank you school cafeteria and vending machines. He doesn’t really have the best concept of what to get for groceries, either. He’s got your very average college diet. He has vegetables, yes, but he doesn’t need to tell his Mom that that isn’t necessarily an everyday occurrence. Not like he’s telling her anything at all, by this time, but that’s not really the point. That, combined with how his major is pretty much all sit down work, and it’s no surprise he gains a few more pounds for the rest of his college career. Dancing at the club and walking around campus only does so much for a person. Once he leaves college, his diet and grocery shopping abilities get better and more well rounded. But the point is, this man is not really made of muscle at all. 

An important note is that, in my opinion, Kyle has no negative feelings about his weight. He’s extremely neutral on it, and it helped that his mom was vocally positive about it. To him, this is just how his He’s got the average cultural mindset of ‘Eh, probably could stand to lose some’, but it’s not a big deal to him at all. His health is otherwise fine. He still regards himself as attractive, and knows he’s attractive. People tell him. He has proof. So his weight settles out and pretty much stays where it’s at until he gets the ring in his mid-20s (sue me, I like imagining Kyle is around 25 when he gets it. Which I have no reason to share. I just want to). 

Since he’s become Green Lantern, he’s far more active than he’s been in… A while, he can admit it. But he’s just glad he doesn’t necessarily have to be super fit to wield it. He can’t remember the last time he ran a mile, and he doesn’t wanna know, either. Again, his job is a sit down job, and he’s lucky when he remembers to look up from his desk in general. However, with his new level of physical activity, it makes sense to start losing a bit. It’s not really a lot, or very noticeable at all, but he can’t help but smile when Alex points out when his arms feel a bit more firm to the touch after a month and some weeks. 

Speaking of Alex, that’s when things take a major turn for Kyle and his weight. After her death, he has some pretty drastic weight loss. Not only does depression and grief make it difficult to find the energy and will to eat, but the association of the kitchen makes it even worse. His diet becomes kind of abysmal, but he’d rather limit his interaction with certain parts of his kitchen as much as possible. He’s no stranger to a shelf stable diet. He grew up on canned goods. Snack food is food and it’s filling if you have enough of them. Pasta is boring after a while, but at least it’s quick. He makes just enough to justify getting takeout at least once every other week, or cheap fast food a few times if he really can’t bring himself to cook, but he’s still usually eating about half of it. Not because he doesn’t want it, but he just doesn’t have the mental energy for it the second he thinks he might feel full, even if he really isn’t. He does all he can for a while to avoid leftovers for some time, but he eventually becomes okay with the concept of them again. It only takes a minute to put them in and take them out. Not like he has to stare into his fridge choosing ingredients for a dinner he barely wants in the first place. I also think Kyle is someone who can just straight up forget to eat in the first place sometimes (he just gets too absorbed in stuff until his body goes, ‘hey, we’re hungry!’, and then he’s really hungry), so that doesn’t help with anything.

Kyle’s weight loss doesn’t look out of place at all to others, and people probably even positively comment on it (which he finds he doesn’t care for, but he’s unsure why. Isn’t it good for him to be slimmer?), but he knows better. I don’t think he would necessarily register it as super unhealthy, but Kyle knows his body, and he has a feeling it shouldn’t be this much this fast. He’s seeing numbers close to ones he hasn’t seen since high school. But it’s not really at the forefront of his mind. Especially since he’s become a lot busier as he’s packed up and moved off to New York.

It continues like this for a few months in New York, but that’s when Kyle’s life gets back on track. It’s a big clean slate, and as he becomes more busy as Green Lantern and with life in general, his feelings on his kitchen become more a non-thought than anything. When he starts dating Donna, things especially look up. Kyle gets a lot more healthy. He gains weight again because he’s relatively happy with his life. He goes on dinner dates. Sometimes Donna cooks for the both of them, sometimes they cook together, and it gets Kyle comfortable cooking on his own again. He likes training with Donna, even if it sucks hard at first. Again, it’s hard to hate someone admiring your newfound muscle. He becomes ‘I work out with my girlfriend and I eat well’ lean instead of ‘I’m majorly depressed and my trauma is preventing me from navigating food in a healthy and normal way to me’ skinny.

This continues when he dates Jennie, too. I think Kyle would honestly gain a fair amount of happy weight when he’s with her. His life has really stabilized by then. Hell, he’s having dinner with his mom once a week when he can, and he knows she’s on a mission to make sure he keeps that weight (he rolled his eyes hard and was not a fan at all when she commented on the visible loss one time when they were first reconnecting). 

He never really gets back to the weight he was after losing Alex, but he’s certainly doing better than he was before. They’re still kinda big, but the clothes he still has from around that time aren’t as loose as before. The muscle he’s also gained as he continues to run around as GL and trains fill them out nicely, too. It pleases him.

However, when things in Kyle’s life start to go bad, his weight and eating habits are the first things to be affected. He can easily lose a pound or three when he’s feeling bad nowadays, and sometimes he misses the days when that wasn’t the case. He misses when he could gain that when he felt bad. 

He’s never quite had the drastic weight loss he did the first time around ever again, but he came a little too close for comfort to it when his mom passed. What helped Kyle with preventing that was having an actual support system around him when that happened; people who could check in on him and make him food and take him out for it, unlike when he had essentially no one to help him out or make sure he was doing okay after Alex. 

When you’re depressed, it’s not hard to fall back into old habits. Kyle only has so much energy, and to him, it’s better to put that energy towards doing good as Green Lantern than losing it to being a miserable bastard trying to make a meal he’s barely in the mood for. Who doesn’t love peanut butter and jelly twice a day for a week straight? It’s not like he didn’t live that way in college sometimes. There’s even the bonus that if he eats it enough times, he doesn’t even have to worry about storing bread in the fridge to prevent mold since it’ll be gone so quick. He doesn’t want to see his oven. He doesn’t want to see his fridge. The kitchen only has to be for cooking, really; he can store his food on the dining table.

But generally, you can sorta tell how Kyle’s doing through his weight and eating habits. It fluctuates in a small range, never super intense, but you can notice it if you pay enough attention over time. If he’s looking a little leaner than usual, it might not hurt to check on him, but if he’s looking a little bigger these days, you know life is going pretty good for Kyle Rayner.

If you made it this far, yay! Thanks for reading my post on how I can suspend my disbelief over Kyle’s weight and make it make sense over time, and how to address the visual consistency issues regarding his build across comics. 

(You will still never catch me believing in skinny Kyle Rayner, though. Make him chubby. It will never hurt him.)

[narkinafive]

essay update~!

inching ever closer to the right word and page count!! mobile users, i apologize if the read more function doesn’t work bc this one is a doozy

as always, PLEASE don’t hesitate to read and critique, bc i need that sweet sweet criticism babey

Few franchises can match the breadth of Star Wars, and fewer still can claim to be as iconic. Not only have the characters, dialogues, settings, and aesthetics been directly referenced and lovingly parodied across all genres, so too has John Williams’ music. Yet Williams’ music is perhaps most referenced, riffed on, and remixed within the franchise itself; it is difficult to find a piece of Star Wars media which does not contain any number of Williams’ leitmotifs, such as the bombastic “Main Title” fanfare, the sweeping majesty of the Force theme, or the foreboding, villainous “Imperial March.” Within the many, many Star Wars related properties that require the use of music, composers for the franchise’s “lower tier” [properties], i.e. any property outside of the nine-film “Skywalker Saga,” are presented with a difficult challenge: how does one emulate and reference Williams’ original, titanic score, keeping a coherent sonic aesthetic, without copying him directly, and allowing space for the composer’s own musical language? 

By the 1950s and 60s, the practice of using Romantic music to accompany films was dying out; music by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, or Leonard Bernstein was slowly being replaced by popular music of the era, or, as was the case with many science fiction films, electro-acoustic music. For example, Bernard Hermann in The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise, 1951) used electronic instruments for the bulk of his orchestra, along with innovative techniques in overdubbing and tape-reversal. Five years later, Bebe Barron, alongside husband Louis Barron, would write one of the first entirely electronic scores for Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred Wilcox, 1956). Outside the realm of science fiction, films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) or The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967) used popular music partly for aesthetic purposes, and partly to exploit the songs’ commercial success outside of the films. Lucas himself elected for the use of a completely pop soundtrack for his film American Graffiti (dir. Lucas, 1973). Stanley Kubrick’s decision to use classical music for 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Kubrick, 1960) was unique in film at the time; his use of 19th and 20th century music even more so. 

“Traditionally, music for the sci-fi genre would use a language inspired by twentieth-century musical modernism-atonalism, twelve-tone technique, aleatoric music, and so forth-or would use electronic instruments, timbres, or even musique concrete to provide the musical equivalent of futuristic or hyper technological worlds… Stanley Kubrick in [2001: A Space Odyssey] chose to combine images of deep space and unseen worlds with a compilation of repertoire orchestral pieces--after having rudely rejected Alex North’s original score [commissioned specifically for the film]. The selection spanned from classic pieces like Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, op. 30, 1896) and Johann Strauss Jr.’s The Blue Danube (An der schonen blauen Donau, op. 314, 1866) to contemporary art music like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966), Atmospheres (1961), Requiem (1963-65), and Adventures (1962)... Yet Kubrick’s choice was also the consequence of a lack of trust in film composers. ‘However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brhams. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music from the past and from our own time?’ Lucas rejected the modernist and electronic options and chose Kubrick’s approach. He wrote the script while listening to the late romantic symphony repertoire…”

Jonathan Rinzler recalls Lucas’ choice of a more traditional, Romantic sonic language as being entirely deliberate, in order to help ease the audience into the extremely unfamiliar fictional world with the use of familiar music. “[Lucas] didn’t want, for example, electronic music, he didn’t want futuristic cliché, outer space noises. He felt that since the picture was so highly different in all of its physical orientations – with the different creatures, places unseen, sights unseen, and noises unheard – that the music should be on fairly familiar emotional ground.” 

The larger Star Wars chronology can be broken into three general eras: the Original Trilogy era (OT), which focuses on the time represented by the films A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Rogue One, the Sequel Trilogy era (ST), which is comprised of the films The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, as well as the TV series Star Wars: Resistance, and the Prequel Trilogy era (PT), as represented by the films The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and Solo, as well as the TV series The Clone Wars. Of these properties, Williams has obviously scored the lion’s share of the films; Rogue One’s soundtrack was composed by Michael Giacchino, Resistance by Michael Tavera, Solo by John Powell, and The Clone Wars by Kevin Kiner. Kiner’s other work for Star Wars was the score of another TV series, Star Wars Rebels. Rebels occupies an interesting place within the greater Star Wars chronology, qualifying as a prequel due to taking place before the events of A New Hope, yet both aesthetically and narratively more aligned with the OT, rather than the PT. Though Rebels is nominally a prequel, Kiner’s musical language sets it firmly within the OT era, with frequent sonic callbacks to Williams’ score, with each aesthetic connection serving not only to link the viewer to the OT era, but also, through its absences and deviations, highlight the narrative differences between Rebels and the original films. This is particularly exemplified in the parallels and contrasts between the heroes of Rebels and the OT, Ezra Bridger, and Luke Skywalker.

From the outset, several contrasts and parallels can be drawn between Ezra Bridger and Luke Skywalker: both are orphans from provincial areas of the galaxy, both are accidentally caught up in insurrectionist rebel activity against the Empire, and both discover that they can wield the powers of the Force. They are even roughly the same age, born within days of each other. Contrasts do abound, however. Ezra receives several years of Jedi training from a former Jedi, while Luke receives very little; Ezra is actively involved with the Rebellion from the beginning, while Luke steps in at the last second to secure one of the Alliance’s largest victories; Ezra’s primary motif is connected to the twin moons of his home planet of Lothal - this, in contrast to the famous scene of Luke Skywalker gazing into the twin sunset of his planet of Tatooine; and so on. Even their character designs are oppositional; Luke is quite white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, a country farmer from a family of farmers, kind but naive, whereas Ezra is coded as Jewish or Middle Eastern (his parents’ names are Ephraim and Mira, a name likely derived from Myra, Miriam, or Maryam--this, coupled with his physical features, points to a certain ethnic origin. Mira, in flashbacks, even wears a headscarf, and is one of the few human women in the larger Star Wars universe to do so), with dark hair and darker skin, a homeless city orphan who is more than well-acquainted with the Empire’s atrocities. When it comes to their roles in the Rebellion, though, both Luke and Ezra initially start their adventures with the promise of Jedi training, and find themselves drawn in to the major political and martial action of the Galactic Civil War. 

Set five years before the events of A New Hope, the backdrop of Rebels depicts the formal declaration of the Galactic Alliance, the establishment of the famous rebel base on the planet of Yavin IV, and numerous references to the secret construction of the Death Star, alongside several integral character cameos, including Lando Calrissian, Princess Leia, and Obi-wan Kenobi, while the main thrust of the story centers on the crew of the Ghost, an early rebel cell, and the journey of its newest crew member, Ezra Bridger. Described by Dave Filoni, Executive Producer and creator of Rebels, as a con artist, and Taylor Gray, the character’s actor, as “very street smart, he’s a pickpocket, he’s a little thief,” Ezra happens upon the crew of the Ghost as they commit a minor act of terrorism against the Galactic Empire, stealing several crates of supplies. Rather than pick a side in the conflict, Ezra elects to steal a crate of the same supplies for himself, outrunning the comedically incompetent Imperial police force, and dodging the members of the Ghost crew as they try to get the supplies back, until Ezra is forced to seek refuge on the Ghost to escape the marginally more competent TIE figher pilots. After helping the crew in distributing the supplies - namely, food - to a nearby refugee camp, Ezra is convinced by the Ghost’s pilot and leader, Hera Syndulla, to assist in a rescue mission. Despite his initial capture and subsequent escape from Imperial custody, Ezra chooses to see the rescue mission through to the end, and witnesses the Ghost’s second-in-command, Kanan Jarrus, wield a lightsaber, revealing himself as a survivor of the presumed-extinct and quasi-legendary Jedi Order. Recognizing that Ezra has the same gift as him, Kanan offers to train him to wield the Force in order to continue fighting against the Empire, dispelling any notion that the Jedi are gone with a triumphant declaration, “Not all of us.” Ezra agrees, and thus begins their partnership which will last for the next four years, as Kanan, who never technically made it past the rank of apprentice, passes on his fragmented training, and they both become more and more deeply entwined with the Rebellion. 

Luke’s introduction to the Rebel Alliance appears to be as coincidental as the above, though one can argue that it was ordained by the Force, or some kind of similar higher power. When his uncle and adoptive father Owen purchases a pair of droids for the farm, Luke discovers a secret message hidden within one of them: Princess Leia’s plea to a mysterious Obi-wan Kenobi for aid. Luke’s first instinct is to help her, seeking out the reclusive loner Ben Kenobi for more information--with the added gratification of disobeying his uncle, who is currently keeping him tied to the family farm, and will not let him leave the planet. When the Empire, inevitably, comes looking for its stolen property--stolen Imperial secrets hidden within one of the droids--Luke is too late to warn his aunt and uncle, and finds his homestead burned to the ground. Grief stricken and alone, Luke begs Obi-wan to take him with him to Alderaan, in order to learn how to be a Jedi like his mysterious father. After hiring smuggler Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, they instead find the Death Star, and Luke convinces Han to mount a daring, ill-planned rescue of the Princess. While they do rescue Leia, they lose Obi-wan as he stalls the Imperials, buying them time to escape. Thoughts of becoming a Jedi are pushed to the background as Luke volunteers to be a part of the attack on the Death Star, despite Han’s insistence that he should take his cut of their reward money and run. Up against an implausible and unbelievable behemoth of a killing machine, a massive weapon capable of genocide on an unimaginable scale, it is Luke and his superhuman abilities which allow him to fire the shot which destroys the Death Star and everybody on it, immediately cementing him as not only a hero, but the hero, from both a Doylist and a Watsonian perspective. 

These parallels are further underscored by their respective musical motifs. Consider Luke’s theme, the “Main Title” fanfare. In the words of Williams himself, from the liner notes of the original 1977 LP release: 

When I thought of a theme for Luke and his adventures, I composed a melody that reflected the brassy, bold, masculine, and noble qualities I saw in the character. When the theme is played softly, I tended towards a softer brass sound. But I used fanfarish horns for the more heraldic passages. This theme, in particular, brings out the full glow of the glorious brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Comprised primarily of perfect intervals, the theme begins with an ascending fifth, an opening salvo so famous that music students everywhere, yours truly included, use it to identify perfect fifths in other contexts. As Lucas notes, the principal instrumentation is in the brass section, immediately conferring an old-world heroic air to Luke. “[The Main Title theme] conveys the heroism at the heart of the saga with the economy of its opening fifth (reaching upward), descending triplet (gathering strength for another try), and triumphant lift to an octave above the opening note (attainment of the goal).” Peter Nickalls compares this to the “perfect rising fifth” of “Siegfried’s Horn Call” from Wagner’s Ring Cycle as emblematic of many heroic melodies.

[insert sheet music here, recap] 

As a theme, it is punchy, energetic, intrinsically tied up in the “Rebel Fanfare,” and generally underscores moments of onscreen heroism and stylistically valiant acts. 

By contrast, while Ezra’s theme is also played by the horns, they are muted, thinner, ringing out more softly over shimmering, sustained strings. [insert sheet music here, recap] Ezra’s theme mostly serves to underscore the character’s moments of emotional reflection, rather than his superhuman action, which is usually accompanied by the “Force” theme, the “Rebel Fanfare,” or the Ghost’s musical motif. 

Luke’s theme in its first non-diegetic appearance, that is, its first appearance outside of the main titles, is a little different than one would expect; the melody is still a solo, but played in the horns, implicitly sonically identifying Luke as the protagonist, according to Nickalls, and with a much tamer underlying harmonization. Instead of an alternating pattern of quarter notes and triplets, underscoring the martial aspect of the narrative to come, the “Wars” part of the saga, the harmonic rhythm here is much simpler, with gentle, almost sweet chord bursts on the second and fourth beats. Steven Galipeau, in his analysis of Luke Skywalker as a modern myth, writes of this narrative moment, “We meet [Luke] as a discouraged, frustrated young man stuck on his uncle’s farm, dreaming of going to the galaxy space academy with many of his friends. As he goes with his uncle to meet the Jawa sand trawler and the droids they bring, his aunt calls out his name: ‘Luke! Luke!’ The music and sequence immediately set him apart.” Simple, full of youthful energy, this moment is an aural demonstration of Luke at the beginning of his journey. He is not yet the hero of the Rebellion, nor the famed last of the Jedi; he is simply Luke, whose primary goal at this moment in the narrative is to leave his little hometown, by any means possible. Furthermore, beyond being the first narrative iteration of the title fanfare, it is the first recognizable melody in quite some time. While the audience is treated to several recognizable motifs in the opening sequence, such as Princess Leia’s theme, the Rebel Fanfare, and the original theme for Darth Vader and the Empire (the Imperial March would not be introduced until the next film in the sequence, Empire Strikes Back), the music of the sequence of the droids wandering across the desert is highly reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; Lucas even used Stravinsky as a temporary score during the editing process. Famous for inciting a riot in the streets of Paris at its premiere, the Rite of Spring, and by extension, Williams’ scoring of this scene, is strange and almost frightening, meandering and unmoored--perfect for representing the precarious journey of the droids, but difficult to recognize as a melody in the traditional sense. The return to standard melodic form also functions as an auditory notice, as it were, to the audience, politely calling attention to the arrival of the protagonist. 

The first iteration of Ezra’s theme plays as he assists the crew of the Ghost handing out food supplies to a group of poverty-stricken refugees who live in a small cluster of ramshackle tents, named “Tarkintown” in universe, a clear reference to the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. One refugee thanks Ezra directly for his efforts, putting a hand on his shoulder, but walks off before Ezra can weakly admit that he actually had no part in this, apart from physically walking the crate from the ship to the town. Deeply affected by this refugee’s actions, he retreats out of the village, and watches the Ghost crew and the villagers from afar. The day’s events have overturned his entire world view, and he is taking time to process them all; rather than abscond with the supplies stolen from Imperials, the crew of the Ghost chooses to give most of them away, an action which is clearly baffling to him (though, as the audience sees, a crate of weapons will be sold by the crew to a shady businessman for income), particularly as Ezra’s first instinct had been to sell them himself, to any number of the black market dealers with which he has become familiar growing up. At this moment, Ezra is struggling with a great many mysteries, chiefly the question of why the crew had even offered him refuge on their ship. Surely, if they were like any other thief or smuggler, they would have left him behind to be killed by the TIE Fighter pilot, either as a punishment for stealing the crates in the first place, or simply to get him out of the way. (Later, he will be even more shocked that they turn around to rescue him from an Imperial Star Destroyer, one of the Empire’s largest and most heavily guarded space vessels, despite having accidentally left him behind earlier in their haste to escape.) “Who are you people?” he will ask later, befuddled by their seemingly conflicting acts as they alternately help and, to his mind, hinder him. “I mean, you’re not thieves, exactly.” Now, however, this emotional confusion, coupled with a handy tug from the Force, compels him to sneak aboard the Ghost and snoop, where he stumbles on Kanan’s lightsaber and holocron, a treasure trove of Jedi information that only Jedi can open, which he promptly steals. 

Similarly to the film example above, this moment cements Ezra’s place as the protagonist of the series. It arrives more than fifteen minutes into the episode, the bulk of which had been taken up by reworkings of Williams’ motifs; the Imperial March, the TIE Fighter theme, and the Rebel Fanfare are quite prominent, while Kiner’s most incorporated theme is his theme for the Ghost crew, which chiefly plays as its old members size up its eventual new one. Nestled in a flurry of exciting musical moments that recall the thrilling spaceflight chases of the OT, the slowness and pensiveness of Ezra’s theme, in contrast to the previous fifteen minutes of music, also brings the audience’s attention to the forefront. The musical change signals a similar change in mood, content, and focus, from heroic action to emotional reflection. Indeed, this is the first truly character driven moment of the series, and the first moment of an onscreen character struggle, as Ezra tries to reconcile the altruism he has just seen with the cynicism he has known for his entire life. 

[better setup] During their grand escape from the Death Star, Luke and Leia, separated from Han and Obi-wan and on the run from a pack of Stormtroopers, nearly run off the edge of a platform into a bottomless pit. With a sequence lifted right from the screen of a mid-century swashbuckling pirate film, Luke throws a rope across and swings him and Leia to the safety of the other ledge of the hallway, before proceeding with the rest of their escape. The accompanying motif is appropriately heroic, 

Ezra was born on “Empire Day,” the day that the Clone Wars were ended and the Galactic Empire was declared by Palpatine, formerly Senator, then Chancellor, and now Emperor. (It was that same day that the Emperor launched his assault on the Jedi Order, wiping nearly all of them out in one overwhelming blow. Incidentally, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa were born two days later.) For Ezra, Empire Day comes with its own baggage--this day is also the anniversary of his parents’ arrest for treason, which left him homeless and alone. This Empire Day, however, Ezra is not alone, but instead has joined up with a rebel cell determined to cause some mayhem and headaches for the Imperial occupiers. With Imperials distracted by preparations for a local parade, and their search for a particular Imperial data-worker named Tseebo, Ezra and the rebels happily ruin the parade, and, while hiding in the abandoned apartment which used to be Ezra’s childhood home, discover Tseebo already there. Tseebo was, by Ezra’s admission, a friend of his parents, though Ezra himself wants nothing to do with Tseebo now, who “went to work for the Empire, after they took my parents away.” In the years since, Tseebo has allowed himself to be implanted with cybernetic enhancements by the Empire in order to increase his productivity, before downloading several caches of Imperial secrets, and attempting to flee. With all of the information in his head, Tseebo is little more than catatonic, able to walk and spout random information, but not truly understanding what is going on around him--until some turbulence aboard the Ghost appears to knock him back into consciousness. Seeing and recognizing Ezra, and perhaps knowing that he has a limited amount of time, Tseebo frantically tries to tell Ezra that he knows what happened to his parents, who he had presumed to be dead all this time. Sadly, Tseebo cannot remain lucid for very long, and Ezra must go and help draw the pursuing Imperials off of their tail, in order to get Tseebo to Hera’s rebel operative, the mysterious Fulcrum. Ezra will not discover the true fate of his parents for some time; at this point, however, he claims it is merely a moot point, telling crewmate Sabine, “I've been on my own since I was seven, okay? If I'd let myself believe my folks were alive, if I let myself believe they'd come back and save me, I'd never have learned how to survive.” 

The arrest of his parents was clearly a traumatic event for Ezra, one he, truthfully, hasn’t processed until the events of this episode. Part of a Jedi’s training is learning to deal with one’s emotions in a healthy manner; Ezra, who refused to believe the possibility that his parents were alive, finds himself blocked, unable to tap into or use the Force beyond small bursts of instinctual panic, until he tearfully admits his fear that they may still be out there, and have been for all these years, to Kanan. Open to the Force, in battle with the Imperials, Ezra demonstrates the beginnings of his remarkable skill in connection, particularly with animals and other creatures, until, backed into a corner, he uses the Dark Side in order to summon a monster. With the Imperials beaten back, and Tseebo safely in the hands of the rebels, Sabine finds Ezra ruminating over the days’ events in one of the ship’s turrets, events which have shifted the galaxy on its axis, upping the stakes and changing the characters’ views of each other permanently. Sabine, who had previously treated Ezra as something of an irritating stranger with a misplaced crush, finds a kindred spirit in him as someone who has had their family torn apart by the Empire. For his belated birthday present, she gives him a data-disc which she had picked up while hiding in his childhood home; on it, amidst all the other corrupted data, is an old family photo of his. Too grateful for words, Ezra barely even notices her leave, his attention fixed on the image, as the camera exits the ship, zooming away as the Ghost heads off towards parts unknown, and his musical motif resounding in a full, stately, horn chorus. [insert sheet music]

In a pair of episodes chock full of this motif, [insert count here], this iteration in particular stands out from the rest. Firstly, it is clear that this final iteration is meant to be louder than the others, at least a mezzo-forte rather than a mezzo-piano; secondly, all the voices are working together in a moment of greater homophony, instead of a single voice over an aesthetic accompaniment; and thirdly, the top, melodic line arcs upwards, rather than downwards. These changes, in part, reflect Ezra’s newfound awareness of his own feelings regarding the disappearance of his parents. Rather than shame, which causes him to hide and suppress his emotions as he has done his entire life, he admits his fear and overcomes it, and he lets his joy and happiness at seeing the photo come out fully, rather than trying to save face in front of his peers and continue to keep playing the part of carefree, scrappy, ne’er-do-weller. It is a turning point in several ways, both narratively and musically; from this moment on, Ezra will begin making leaps and bounds in his Jedi education, going on to construct his own lightsaber in the next episode, a ritual which, in universe, historically marks the transition to a proper apprenticeship. Concurrently, instances of Ezra’s theme decrease dramatically. 

[Luke example - death star run?]

[fix this part lmao] Sadly, Ezra’s quest to find his parents ends in tragedy. When a Force-inspired dream pushes him [find his parents again?], Kanan and Hera reveal that they have been trying to do the same for months. Ezra’s parents, according to Tseebo, were arrested and taken to an Imperial prison--one of thousands--somewhere in the galaxy, though soon after, news comes from the Rebel leadership of a prison break; guided by the Force, Ezra is certain that the prison break was orchestrated by his parents. Brimming with excitement and pursuing this new lead with a mildly alarming doggedness, Ezra returns to Lothal to find Ryder Azadi, the former governor of the planet, and friend of his parents. Azadi, a Rebel sympathizer, allowed the Bridgers to make their anti-Imperial broadcasts, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned with them. Ezra, again, perhaps guided by the Force, seems to know what has happened before it is even said; though Mira and Ephraim did orchestrate the prison break, they perished in the attempt. His mourning spills into the next episode, where he and Kanan have to devise a way to get new supplies to the Rebellion without alerting the Empire to their covert benefactor’s identity--who is none other than Leia Organa, in a cameo appearance. Leia finds Ezra quietly crying over the photo of his parents that Sabine had saved for him. His musical motif this time is in the strings, not the horns, and loops repeatedly. 

[Ezra’s journey from start to finish recap] Initially, Ezra joins the Rebellion not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is convenient to him at the time; the Ghost functions as a roof over his head, its crew members as a new set of parents and siblings, and its missions as a source of food and income, along with the added bonus of learning how to use an incredibly powerful, specialized weapon, despite the target it paints on his back. Filoni himself states [need src] that Ezra decides to join the Ghost not only to learn how to use a lightsaber, but because he is in need of a family, having lost his own parents at the age of seven, when they were arrested for their underground, anti-establishment radio broadcasts. Ezra’s larger journey over the course of Rebels is re-learning how to think beyond himself, regaining his trust and faith in others after having it completely shattered at a very young age, and following through with what he needs to do for the greater good of this fight against tyranny to which he has dedicated himself, not just the good of his family and friends--but, as one would expect, at the very beginning of his story, he is far more selfish than selfless. It is more than halfway into the first season before Ezra begins to truly understand and act on the Jedi lessons Kanan has attempted to teach him, beyond lifting rocks with his mind, as he finally admits and begins to face his fears while in the middle of a vision quest (presided over by the disembodied voice of Master Yoda). Over the course of the series, Ezra has frequent, deep brushes with the “Dark Side” of the Force, becoming more and more inclined to fight, hurt, or even kill in the name of pragmatism, earning victories for the Rebel Alliance through dubious and increasingly terroristic means, before the desolation of his homeworld and the loss of his mentor wrench him firmly back on the heroic path. 

This is not to say that Kiner never chooses to use Ezra’s theme in a heroic context. Most notably, in the series finale, his theme plays triumphantly over his great sacrifice, as Ezra summons enormous, semi-legendary whale creatures called the Purrgil, to destroy the Imperial blockade over Lothal, and spirit away the remaining ships beyond the edge of the known galaxy, with both Thrawn, the series’ chief antagonist, and Ezra still on board. From an in-universe, narrative perspective, Ezra, of course, would have to sacrifice himself in some manner in order to explain his absence in the events of the original trilogy; Yoda on his deathbed tells Luke, “When gone am I, the last of the Jedi you will be,” leaving, unfortunately, no room for any other Jedi left in the galaxy, lest the entire narrative of the OT fall apart. It was inevitable that both Kanan and Ezra would have to vanish, though while Kanan died, Ezra merely disappeared, with Filoni confirming that both he and Thrawn are alive, somewhere off the edge of the map. It’s a fitting moment, then, for his theme to return in full force here; a far cry from his introduction as a scrappy street rat, Ezra has fully come into his own as a Jedi in his own right, and understands the role that he plays, both in-universe as it pertains to the fate of the Rebel Alliance, and in a meta-sense, as both precursor and herald to Luke Skywalker. Happily and willingly, he chooses to sacrifice himself in order to save his planet, and the hundreds of civilians who live on it, and the victorious music confirms this. Four years earlier, he stubbornly declared that he would never risk his life in this manner for people he didn’t know: “You know, this whole [rescue] mission thing is nuts. I'm not against sticking it to the Empire, but there's no way I'd stick my neck out this far. Who does that?” Hera, in reply, simply declares, “We do.” His journey with the crew of the Ghost, his apprenticeship with Kanan, and his role in the Rebel Alliance has transformed him, and his music, from shy, unsure, and sorrowful to confident, powerful, and determined, though the core of his music, and by extension, his character, remains the same; this heroism was within him all along. 

In the latter half of 2019, several new Star Wars properties are set to launch, including the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, the seventh season of the revived Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated show, and, of course, the ninth and final film in the so-called “Skywalker Saga,” Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Each of the listed properties’ accompanying trailers, with music scored by Gordy Haab, Stephen Barton, and BLAKUS, composers for the video game Star Wars: Battlefront II, Kiner, and Williams, respectively, have one unexpected thing in common: the “Main Fanfare” theme is nowhere to be found. In the trailer for Jedi: Fallen Order, Haab’s score is much more reminiscent of Alan Silvestri’s Marvel’s Avengers in its melody and harmony than anything else. Though there are two instances of Williams’ themes in the trailer score, they are both short and incomplete; we hear a somber and foreboding four notes of “The Imperial March” as the protagonist gazes anxiously at his broken weapon, and we hear just the beginnings of the Force theme as the title of the game is revealed, though the theme is reharmonized in order to blend with what will doubtless become the protagonist’s own leitmotif. Similarly, in the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, Williams chooses to only incorporate one of his themes, “Princess Leia’s Theme,” with splendid, yearning sixth intervals over long, drawn out horn and percussion crashes, partially as an homage to the late Carrie Fisher, and partially due to Leia Organa’s rumored key role in the film itself. For The Clone Wars season seven trailer, Kiner does not use any of Williams’ original score; instead, the trailer begins with the theme he created for the breakout character of the show, Ahsoka Tano, before moving into entirely his own new material. 

Though the so-called “Skywalker Saga” is ending, Disney has planned nearly another decade’s worth of Star Wars content in the form of spin-off titles, television series, games, books, comics - any and every medium imaginable, and there are currently no signs that production is slowing down. Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that all traces of Luke Skywalker, visual, narrative, and musical, are disappearing from the greater Star Wars landscape as the universe continues to expand and include new protagonists and stories. Die-hard fans will of course decry this as an attack on a precious childhood memory, as they do for any piece of Star Wars media released after 1998. [Kiner demonstrates it’s possible to have the best of both worlds]