#his color scheme and character role work soooo well!!!!!

[berryblu-soda]

Seedling is such an interesting little story that i love, but i´d be lying if it wasnt almost completely sprouted (hehe) from the visual of those character duos that are a small child + big scary looking creature who acts as their guard, top tier trope frfr

(also huge shoutout to @ashrayus for hearing me out and adding onto the rambles so long ago, bestie the robot story wasnt working, we got plants now 🌱)

[das-roog]

Star Wars Thing

So I love Star Wars. Big surprise, I know. I have a shrine to the original trilogy in my closet, rage-vomit when I think about the prequels and I’m very happy with the trajectory the movies seem to be taking recently, with “The Force Awakens” and, more recently “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, both feeling like a return to form in a galaxy I feel more at home in than the one I’m actually from.

As such, I like to keep reasonably informed about what’s happening with it without spoiling myself silly. It’s a delicate balancing act, especially on the internet, which tends to be a spoiler minefield. Even trailers are becoming increasingly reliant on showing too much. 

Movie posters, however, are a completely different matter. They’re juicy morsels of information, tantalizingly promising space adventure without actually telling you anything; you can indulge as much as you want because they have little substance to them. 

I, like many of you, salivated over the newest little nugget released a little bit ago concerning Episode VIII: “The Last Jedi”. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the banner that was recently revealed: 

Cool, right? That looks pretty badass and it’s got me pretty pumped. There’s not a lot of information to glean from this piece, considering it’s kind of just our three heroes in action poses, but it still gets me excited. So, I’m going to talk about it and make some observations. 

Overall Presentation

I like how sleek this looks. It’s designed really well and the eye is really naturally drawn from Poe, past Rey and along her lightsaber to Finn. I like the warm color scheme of the poster, with the reds, browns, tans and blacks. It contrasts really well with the stark white background, which I also really like. It gives this a cleaner sort of look. Not the sort of sterile feeling I get when I watch Star Trek, but clean as in the design is simple, smooth and strong. Star Wars promos and posters tend to be really busy and epic, and I’m sure the final poster for “The Last Jedi” will be also, but this image really works for me. The weird red fragments in the background are strange, but it feels like it’s part of a larger design, so I don’t have a problem ignoring it, for the most part. 

The Characters

The banner features our three heroes from “Force Awakens”: ace pilot Poe Dameron, Jedi-in-training Rey and ex-Stormtrooper Finn. The banner is effective in communicating their basic characteristics; they look ready for action and each communicated pretty effectively their roles. Poe is pretty clearly a pilot, Rey’s obviously a Jedi. Finn’s has the least to communicate in that regard but it’s okay; he’s still got an action pose, though it does look like he’s the only person concerned with whatever’s going on to the left of them. 

A few things to take away and, warning, this is going into speculation territory and I’m 100% about to drop some spoilers about “The Force Awakens” so, uh...you know, if you haven’t seen that movie yet, turn back now. Abandon all hope (of avoiding spoilers) ye who enter here. 

Poe’s presence as one of the three characters featured on such early promotional material suggests that he’s going to play a bigger part in Episode VIII. Now, as a guy who ranks Wedge Antilles in his top 3 Star Wars characters of all time (he’s #2 if you’re wondering; Han Solo is #1, obviously), this is nothing but good news; Poe was probably my favorite character in Episode VII and more of him in the next episode can only be a good thing. Thankfully, it appears his capacity as a badass pilot seems to be intact and hopefully we can expect more X-Wing awesomeness. Also preserved, I hope, is the buddy-dynamic between Poe and Finn, which was one of the more enjoyable aspects of “The Force Awakens”, at least in the early parts. 

Finn is still wearing his jacket, which is good because that jacket is rad and I want one in real life. Again, his pose is the least telling of the three. I’ve seen it said that the shirt he’s wearing in the picture looks like a Jedi robe, but it actually looks more like Han Solo’s shirt from “The Empire Strikes Back” (pictured below). 

It’d be cool if that suggested his turn as a sort of psuedo-Han smuggler in the wake of Solo’s death at the end of Episode VII but I doubt it. I mean, it’s probably just a shirt. I’m all for nitpicking the tiny details to make outlandish claims but it’s only a shirt. Not much to glean there, I think.  

Rey, though, looks absolutely radical. I love her hair style change. I’m not a hair guy so I can’t tell you why it works, but I can tell you that I like it a lot. Her pose is confident and powerful. She’s got a firm grip on the Skywalker lightsaber and an expression that dares you to try to duel her. It’s an awesome hero pose and I’m looking forward to seeing how the character grows under Luke’s tutelage.

The Story?

So I don’t know what the story for the next episode will be. I’ve read a bunch of weird theories, like Rey being the reincarnation of a Force-Tree or something (really!), but none of them seem likely. The story for “The Force Awakens” left things open-ended but vaaaaague. We know there’s more to the story (outside of the fact that it’s a Star Wars movie and Disney loves the Scrooge McDuck-style pool of money it’s going to make them). Kylo Ren escapes the destruction of Starkiller Base and the nature of Supreme Leader Snoke is largely a mystery. Luke’s whole deal is a big question mark, as is the identity of Rey’s parents (a question I care less about than most people on the internet, apparently). If nothing else, none of the characters really finished their arcs (not in a bad way): Finn’s in a coma, Poe’s...I don’t know, making a sandwich or something and Rey ended the movie on that powerful moment with Luke. 

Soooo yeah, there’s a lot of open story threads but no clear indication of where the story is going outside of basic presumptions one can make based on the earlier films. For example, this one will probably be the darkest and might not have a happy ending (being the second in a trilogy). 

But there are a few things to consider. I don’t claim to know where the story’s going or what’s been happening but I have some mostly-baseless speculation. After all, Lucas has said that the movies are supposed to “rhyme” and Episode VII sure did rhyme with Episode IV, so one can assume that Episode VIII might rhyme with Episode V. By “rhyming”, I mean that certain themes, plot elements and tone are similar to the other episodes in that position in their respective trilogies (As the first episode of their trilogies, for example, Episodes I, IV and VII all had a lot of similarities, which I might cover in a future post). 

Baseless Speculation!

So while I don’t have much concrete information to go on, a lot of my speculation comes from A) What I’d do as a writer and B) The fact that I read somewhere that “The Last Jedi” is supposed to pick up like, literally where “The Force Awakens” left off.

Finn’s main thing at the start of the story is looking for Rey.

Poe is probably going to drag Finn along on a mission for the Resistance. I doubt the movie will have the “war movie in space” feel that “Rogue One” did, but Poe’s involvement outside of working for the Resistance feels out of place at this point, especially if little to no time has passed between Episodes VII and VIII. 

Kylo Ren will be much more intimidating this time around due to his “increased” training. Odds are low that he’ll kill Luke, though. He just might end up maiming Rey, however, considering main characters tend to lose hands fighting the Big Bad Guy in the second chapters of these movies. Anakin lost most of his friggin’ arm to Count Dooku in “Attack of the Clones” and Luke famously lost his hand to Darth Vader in the iconic Bespin Duel in “The Empire Strikes Back”. It’s not terribly out-there to suggest the same might happen to Rey. 

Rey and Luke are going to have some philosophical training sequences and will become involved in Poe/Finn’s mission through sheer “The Will of the Force”. Possibly (hopefully!) because she has similar force visions of Finn and Poe suffering, as Luke once did. 

Luke will be awesome, I hope. Though he’ll probably be a little unwilling to train Rey at first because of what happened to his last crop of new Jedi (hint: the movie is titled “The Last Jedi”). 

Speaking of the title, “The Last Jedi” does not refer to either Luke or Rey; it’s referring to the both of them together. The plural of Jedi is Jedi, after all. Just another thing they have in common with Moose. 

While I have little doubt that the movie will be the darkest of the third trilogy, I don’t think it’s going to go too dark. Like, it’s not gonna pull a “Rogue One” on us. Whatever happens, even if the good guys technically lose, I think it’s going to end on a slightly hopeful note, much like the end of “Empire”.

We’re going to get some answers regarding Rey’s parents because apparently people care about that. That’s fine, you need to expound on that a little bit for sure since you set it up in “The Force Awakens” but I just hope to god she isn’t a Skywalker. I know the main trilogy is the Saga of the Skywalkers but like...I don’t want Rey to be a Skywalker. I have a bad feeling, though, that Luke being her father is going to be a funhouse mirror to the Darth Vader being Luke’s father reveal. But maybe that’s too obvious, I don’t know.

We’ll get a liiiittle more info on Snoke, but I think any big reveals about his character will come in Episode IX, where I think stopping him is going to be a bigger focus. 

There will, without a doubt, be BB-8 + R2-D2 duo shenanigans for the kids. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.    

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s my two cents on the whole thing. Feel free to share your own thoughts, theories, speculations and opinions on anything I talked about here. I love talking Star Wars, so you know.

Thanks for dropping by.