#also there are variations on the existing outfits from darth vader and then there... whatever they did in the 2024 fcbd issue

[jewishcissiekj]

wanted to put every outfit Sabé wore in visual media on her slide but the amount of variations her Darth Vader comic outfits have depending on the artist and colorist is insane so for her I'll just do the main ones

[sethnakht]

“If hope dies, what survives?” is one of the questions explicitly posed in the solicits to Star Wars #55, the last issue in the arc “Hope Dies” (x). It’s a bit of an odd question, as the main heroes have to survive, and with them, one would think, also hope. The question of survival nonetheless strikes me as a useful way to link together themes that have been playing out in the comic for a while. In addition to the question of literal survival - how do the members of the Rebellion continue to survive against the Empire? - the comic raises questions of figurative survival. For instance, what makes an idea persevere? how do we remember those who died to make our continued existence possible? what goes into making a legacy, a history, into how we relate to the past? what persisting effects do our actions have on the future, and how do we make decisions knowing the potential gravity of our choices? what about our self-understanding, what does it mean to give oneself up for a cause, what do we preserve of ourselves and give up or get over to do so?

Spoilers below.

What survives when those who have hope die? 

Luke explores this question in the grim and toxic surroundings of what remains of Jedha after the Death Star. Civilians still live there, unable or unwilling to leave their home. The Force feels strange there, wrong to Luke. The surviving Partisans are brutal, killing in situations where Luke would have shown mercy. Luke wants to learn more about the Force, and he thinks the insights he seeks can be unlocked with greater self-understanding. “I ... want to understand myself so much. But I know there are roads I can’t walk down without losing myself ...”, he says in #41.

Self-preservation, a kind of survival, is tied to goodness and heroism in this Luke-ean logic. As he puts it in #42, “it’s easy to stop being a good man” when “we lose track of ourselves, what matters”. (Hello, Darth Vader.) Luke uses Rogue One to illustrate his point. Although so many things went wrong for “Jyn and the rest of Rogue One”, they hadn’t lost track of what mattered, taking “whatever steps they needed” to improvise the “chain of sacrifice” that had ultimately ended with him “taking that shot” on the Death Star. But Luke wonders if he would have had that kind of resolve had he known about Jyn’s sacrifices beforehand (he’d only learned about them recently from the Partisans on Jedha). Would he have been able to handle "all that extra pressure”? he asks. “If I had really understood how many people had died to put me in that place, would I have done it?”

Yes, his interlocutors tell him, because “you’re a hero”. Heroism means staying focused on what matters, according to his own definition. And, as Leia defines it, it also means following a duty. In an earlier issue, #40, Leia described her father’s final words to her - the mission briefing to retrieve and take the plans to Tatooine. “Any time I stumble, I go back to that,” she tells Luke. “He trusted me to finish this. I will finish this”. When Luke responds that he feels he needs to become a Jedi, that he has no other choice, she scoffs. “I ‘feel things’ all the time,” she says. “But you know what I feel most? Duty. And knowing that I have to live up to it. We don’t all get to be dreamers.” Initially, Luke resists this advice, arguing that he will only avenge his father and Obi-Wan as a Jedi. After an encounter with cultists who insist he will fall without a guide, and being forced to kill a friend after said friend is possessed by the “madness” of the Dark Side, Luke decides to listen to Leia instead of “chasing my personal story”. Having learned more about Rogue One from the Partisans, Luke is reminded in #42 that not everything is about his own perspective. Rogue One hadn’t known Luke would be there to finish what they started, but they had hoped and “trusted someone to finish it after they were gone”. 

If that sounds a great deal like Leia’s understanding of duty, she also goes on to define that kind of trust as “what heroism is.” “I always think of Vader as he boarded the Profundity”, she adds. Instead of running - does Leia not know they had nowhere to run? - “the marines faced off against him in the dark, slowed him down with their bodies”. Heroism, as she defines it here, is choosing not to flinch when in the dark, “because one flinch can change everything”. Dying doesn’t mean that hope dies - one can die in hope, hoping others will build on what one sacrificed. Survival can be won through self-sacrifice. 

What survives when those who have hope die? For Leia, it’s arguably her sense of duty, compelling her towards future action. For Luke, it’s perhaps a sense of a legacy, of indebtedness to a past. “I wish I knew every dead Rebel’s name”, he says in #45. In #52, entering a dogfight, he tells Wedge, “if we’re acting like Jyn Erso,” “it is time for sentiment”, using that memory to pump up his team by giving them a new name - Rogue Squadron.

But the question of what survives is more complicated for Leia. The question asked of Luke is past-oriented, whether he would have been able to handle the burden of knowing how many people had already sacrificed their lives. Leia is faced with a significantly more troubling variation of the same question, namely a version having to do with the future. “If you knew what would have happened to Alderaan, would you still have rebelled?” The question comes to her in #44 from the regent of Mon Cala. Mon Cala has already lost Admiral Raddus, who died in the events of Rogue One after successfully copying the plans so Leia could escape with them. Fears that his world will be next in the long line of sacrifices - Jedha, Scarif, Alderaan - leave the regent unwilling to meet Leia’s request to outfit the Rebellion with the fleet she wants to build so the Rebellion can continue disrupting the Imperial war machine. “Our hopes lay with my people,” Ackbar says after this apparent setback, “there is no hope ...”

Luke gets to work through the burdens of past legacy by honoring it. Leia ends up repeating the same choice she made on the Death Star, thereby answering the question posed to her through her actions.

That is to say, Leia chooses to rebel, to trust, not knowing what will happen to the Rebellion because her trust was misplaced. Not one for pessimism, she privately reaches out to Queen Trios for aid in a move that will prove fateful some issues later. Even before she experiences those consequences, the comic sets up the lesson. “Optimism is good. We wouldn’t be Rebels if we weren’t optimistic,” Dodonna tells her in #45, but “it’s worth being occasionally pessimistic so we can continue to rebel”. After Leia apologizes for critiquing his pessimism, Dodonna adds, “We’re all wrong occasionally. There’s no shame in it. It’s only a problem when we don’t realize it”. Ironically, Leia seems to be moved by these words to think about someone she is very wrong about, namely Trios. That is to say, Leia’s next move is to reveal to Dodonna an entire plan based on information from Trios, whose identity she keeps secret and whom she clearly trusts with her life.

Leia’s reliance on Trios is notable because it depends on a story concerning Alderaan. After murdering her family and installing her upon the throne, Trios tells Leia back in #43, Vader gave her a hunk of the destroyed planet to teach her "what happens to those who oppose the Empire”. The lesson had an unintended effect, Trios claims - instead of cementing her loyalty to the Empire, it strengthened her loyalty to her own planet. Then and there, she resolved to never let Shu-Torun become another Alderaan. Trios is being quite forthcoming here - her goals are to protect her culture at all costs - but the best lies also are built on truths. When Trios says she is sabotaging the Imperial kyber-mining mission on Jedha, this is true; what she doesn’t say is that she is also doing so because Vader gave her that order. Unsuspecting, Leia hears what she is meant to hear, concluding that Trios, like her, is willing to put her people at risk to oppose the Empire - indeed, that she is willing to take on risk because she personally trusts Leia to keep her identity secret. Leia trusts Trios because she thinks Trios trusts Leia.

This trust pays off in the short-term. Trios gives Leia information to reach King Lee-Char in his underwater prison. In an action sequence on the way to the prison from #47, Luke, Chewie, and Han get to figure the unflinching light of hope in the darkness. Chased by a giant fish attracted to the lights of their ship, Luke asks Han to turn off those lights. “What difference is that going to make?” Han asks, only to watch as Luke uses his lightsaber to lure the fish, with Chewie’s direction, to its death (Han has to translate those directions for Luke in the meantime, saving their lives in the process). One bright light in the darkness, made possible through teamwork, ensures their continued survival. “You have no hope,” the heroes are told shortly after escaping being literally swallowed in the dark. “Hope is what you’ll never take from us,” Leia responds.

Not knowing what will happen does not keep Leia from hoping, from rebelling. She continually makes that choice for herself. But can - should - she make that choice for others? Were the people of Alderaan given a choice? “It is not your decision to risk our lives,” the Mon Cala regent tells her in #48, taking away from her the recording she had made of King Lee-Char in his final moments. Desperate to win the Mon Cala fleet for the Rebellion, Leia had planned on broadcasting the king’s last words - on using the king to side-step the regent - to incite the Mon Calamari into revolt. If Leia had been able to make that decision, would that decision have been the right one? Ultimately, any messy consequences are avoided when the regent himself chooses to broadcast the recording. The king backs her actions indirectly by imploring his listeners to think of the future and the legacy they could still leave behind: “how do we wish to live the time we have? What kind of life do we wish to leave for those who follow us?” As the Mon Calamari begin to revolt, the regent reaches out to Leia. He has thought over his initial question to her about Alderaan and reached an answer for himself. “I would rebel ... if it could make a difference,” he tells her in #49. “It’ll make a difference. I’ll make sure of it,” she responds shortly before he dies, “we all will.” And for a few months, she seems to be right - the Rebels can build a fleet that makes Luke think “The Empire doesn’t stand a chance!” in #50. 

That “we” in Leia’s “we all will” to the regent isn’t gratuitous. The galaxy came together, she tells Trios in #50, instead of succumbing to fear: “this is the fleet that hope built”. When Trios tells Leia “you did this”, Leia corrects her with a “we did this”, naming all the people and worlds that came together to realize her vision. Leia trusts Trios - but Trios does not trust Leia, not to keep her planet from turning to ash. She completes her mission, signaling to Vader that he can attack the newly-formed fleet. Alone, untrusting, dropping the glass of celebratory fizzy drink to the floor, Trios watches the first cruiser burn and tells herself, “and I did this”. To ensure the survival of her world, to keep that culture - that legacy, that form of transmission - alive, she is willing to watch another legacy burn, arguing that the Rebellion is not a culture or a legacy but a vain illusion that gets people killed. “I will not make your hubristic mistake that puts vain idealism above the lives of those who depend on us. Shu-Torun will never be another Alderaan,” she tells Leia at last - alone in an escape pod, having told her men to cover her escape for the glory of their culture, the last link in a chain of sacrifice. Leia’s rebuttal is unusually weak. “You’ll pay for this,” she responds. From “we” to “I” and “you” - the hope built as a we is fragmenting.

Does hope die as a result? Vader certainly thinks he can kill hope by replacing it with terror, panic, fear. Giving the Rebels a fleet to hope with and then annihilating most of that very same fleet during what had begun as a hopeful, celebratory event might indeed be considered a very effective form of psychological warfare. Although many die hopeless, and others who have hope die, something nonetheless survives. “Being useful where we can. Sometimes it’s all we can do,” says one of the Rebel crew-members, a woman named Meorti, a name that means hope. 

Leia survives too, and as a leader, but she also goes through hell to get there. In an earlier issue, she defined heroism as the choice not to flinch in the dark, to keep hoping even when sacrificing oneself. She gets to both witness and play out that definition in the comic when she leads a mission - posing initially as Trios - together with General Draven onto the Executor. The plan is to find the code needed to send the remaining fleet into hyperspace, then escape. Things go sour when Vader begins to chase her team down. Citing Jyn Erso as a model in #54, Draven notes that “every second we buy can save the day”, and even though “we don’t know if we’ll make a difference”, “we die hoping we do.” Having decided that Leia will be the one to escape with the code, Draven remains behind with the chain of sacrifice formed to give her time to escape. He uses his last breath to proclaim his hope aloud: “We ... win. All we ... had to do ... was ... slow ... you .. down”. Draven doesn’t know at this point whether Leia will escape, but he trusts that she will and that the fleet will escape with her. Naturally, she succeeds. But for this to happen, Draven has to first acknowledge that sacrifice can be meaningful - that Jyn’s sacrifices were meaningful, even though he dismissed her at the time. That legacy survives, moreover, because Leia survives to tell of it. Leia, for her part, has to acknowledge herself responsible for what has happened in the now, and promise Draven she’ll do something about it. Draven writes history with self-sacrifice, his trust that his story will not end with his death. Leia survives with the intellectual and psychological burden of personally witnessing people give their lives for her own survival, dying while hoping and trusting her to do what needs to be done. Armed with new duties, she is left to carry that legacy into the future - to lead in the darkness. At what cost? one might ask.