#star wars eu is my canon

[knightofthenewrepublic]

[skywalkr-nberrie]

Currently working on a meta on how Padmé and Anakin are like a “hero couple” in the galaxy with him being a Jedi Knight and her being one of the most influential “justice-seeking” politicians, and how that ties in so well with their individual characters as well as their relationship.

and….

Another meta on how Padmé and Anakin are a family and they have each other’s backs no matter what, and would do anything for each other. Even possibly discuss what Padmé would’ve done if she had lived in ROTS to bring Anakin back and her making it her sole mission out of love and devotion to their babies and their marriage.

[juliaswickcrs]

OC STAR WARS DAYS CHALLENGE :: MAY THE FOURTH ( I am one with the force and the force is with me )

the legacy of Zoya Onasi and Rey Kestis

tag list: @bisexualterror @foxesandmagic @iron-parkr​ @thatmagickjuju @camiemendess @a-song-of-quill-and-feather @arrthurpendragon @villain-connoisseur @starcrossedjedis​ @drbobbimorse​ @noratilney @stanshollaand @kingsmakers @astarionbae @darth-caillic @mystic-scripture @aliverse @misshiraethsworld @asirensrage @eddiemunscns

[tathrin]

If Finrod is Legolas's other dad, explain Lorien.

Reference is to this post, and also I'm tagging @z-h-i-e because this is their ship-baby, I just popped in to sprinkle some additional inspiration because my brain went "ooh hey!" when their post crossed my dash because that's the kind of supportive community fandom is supposed to be made of fyi.

Right, so. There's no sense of tone in straight-text communication on the internet, so I know that it's entirely possible that this ask was sent in the spirit of giggling-with-popcorn delight while you eagerly await the resulting explanation. It's equally possible that you're playing at being The Ship Police and challenging me in the expectation that I won't be able to make this Just For Funsies ship sail without floundering on the rocks of canon.

Either way: buckle up. Because the boats of Lórien don't sink.

Because when Legolas gets to the woods of Lothlórien with the rest of the Fellowship, he's delighted. He's never actually been here before! He's heard all the stories, and listened avidly, but. well. Thranduil and Galadriel both blame the other a little bit for the nasty way Finrod died (they know it's not the other's fault so they don't say anything, either to each other or anyone else but, well. it feels like it ought to be the other one's fault, somehow).

And there's all that tension re: Doriath still, and why Galadriel couldn't just pick-up where Melian her teacher left off and maintain the Girdle afterwards—because I'm not a maia, Thranduil, you ass! Oh, so you couldn't even TRY?—especially because she then proceeds to do basically that for Lórien just a few thousand years later...and of course Galadriel thinks it's Oropher's fault that so many of Lothlórien's elves died in the Last Alliance, because if only he hadn't been so reckless and pig-headed then surely Amdír would never have thought up that idiotic suicidal charge on his own...and if she'd maybe tried a little harder to rein-in the son/nephew of the Kinslayers, maybe Sauron would never have even made the Rings, and Mirkwood would still be Greenwood, which you'll note she can't be arsed to extend her convenient semi-girdle to either...and if he wasn't so damn prideful maybe somebody could help his precious stupid spider-forest...etc etc.

They aren't like. enemies. but they don't really get along anymore, either. They don't talk. (There's a reason the elves of Green/Mirkwood were moving north even before Sauron took up housekeeping in Dol Guldur.) So even though Lothlórien is like maybe a week's walk away, Legolas hasn't actually been here before. And he is stoked! Because he's always wanted to visit, but he didn't want to hurt his remaining dad's feelings by being like "bye, gonna go visit my aunt whom you haven't spoken to in like three thousand years, nbd!" so he never did — but here they are now, and it's part of the Quest, so it's not like Legolas just popped in for a visit, is it? He's doing something that just happened to bring him here, so Thranduil can't take it personally, and...well, here he is! At last! This is awesome! He's so excited to see his aunt's fabled forest!

And then they want to blindfold him!? He's FINALLY in Lórien, and he's not even allowed to look at the place!? This is his aunt's forest, for fuck's sake — he is an elf and a kinsman here, dammit! No wonder he goes from zero-to-sixty re: "golly Gimli don't be so stubborn" => "hOw dARe yOu!?!?!?" when the blindfold is suggested. He's not just pissed, he's taking it personally. Because he's family.

Okay so far so good, but when the Fellowship comes before Celeborn and Galadriel why doesn't anyone say anything about Legolas literally being their nephew, one might ask? Ah! Well, that's because we have Hobbits for our narrators, and they simply don't know elvish family trees well enough to catch that detail. Which is why when Celeborn says "Welcome son of Thranduil! Too seldom do my kindred journey hither from the North," it's perhaps a little more pointed of a statement than the Hobbits know. Celeborn is saying long time no see nephew, how nice of you to visit FINALLY. But Legolas and Thranduil have called themselves "Wood-elves" since moving to Greenwood, so the fact that he's actually half-Noldor just never gets mentioned, because it's not like it's relevant, is it? He doesn't mention being half-Sindar either. He calls himself a Wood-elf because he is a Wood-elf...by adoption. So why would the Hobbits even think to ask?

And we know that Galadriel uses ósanwë on everybody, so why wouldn't she be using it with her own nephew? What better way to have a private family chat, after all? And she doesn't say anything aloud to anyone while Celeborn is greeting everybody else, and it's not like Galadriel really needs to listen to the "hellos" either; perhaps she and Legolas have a little mental confab just the two of them while everybody else is settling in. You could easily write that in, if you wanted to, without breaking any of the existing canon.

After that, we actually have a perfect textural opening for Legolas to go hang with his aunt and uncle some more: while the rest of the Fellowship doesn't see Galadriel and Celeborn again until the Mirror and then their departure, the book says "Legolas was away much among the Galadhrim, and after the first night he did not sleep with the other companions, though he returned to eat and talk with them." So we know that Legolas is going off to hang-out with the Lórien elves...a.k.a. Aunt Galadriel. Probably sleeping in the guest bedroom and pestering her for embarrassing stories about his dads. And maybe asking her for tips on how to talk to dwarves without putting your foot in your mouth since she's clearly got experience.

And no, none of them went in for stuff like gushing hugs when they meet...but if they haven't spoken to one another in a few thousand years, and probably didn't spend all that much time together even before that (Galadriel and Thranduil weren't much in any of the same places after Doriath fell) then they wouldn't likely be all that cuddly with one another anyway, would they? Distant-but-fond seems like the order of the day to me, and you can definitely read their fleeting interactions in the book that way. (A kickass bow potentially strung with your own hair is a great gift for a nephew you don't know well who's about to go off into danger! I bet he could even shoot-down a Ringwraith with a bow like that!) Tense-and-awkward-but-trying-to-be-polite would work too, of course; depends on what kind of drama you want.

So yeah, actually I think it's perfectly reasonable to posit that Galadriel could potentially be Legolas's aunt; I've seen several fics that present Celeborn and Thranduil as cousins or some other close relative, and nobody gets shirty about the canocity of that kinship re: the Lórien scenes, so why wouldn't the connection be just as acceptable to come via Finrod and Galadriel instead? There's nothing in the text that I know of that says it can't be canon.

Anyway, Finrod-as-Legolas's-other-dad wasn't actually meant to be a serious "look how well canon supports this idea, it's definitely a very plausible thing that people should embrace in a wholly serious and canonical manner" theory to begin with. I was just having fun. Somebody said, "hey check out their weird rare ship, it's a lot of fun!" and my brain had a lightbulb moment and went "ooh what if you took that silly fun ship and leaned-in even harder with it, though?" and here we are.

Does a marriage between Thranduil and Finrod actually fit with all the canon of the Silm? I don't know, probably not; then again it might, simply because so much of the Silm is vague, especially when it comes to the elves of Mirkwood who barely even get mentioned once or twice. Personally I prefer having Legolas be born in Mirkwood and to be relatively young for an elf when Fellowship starts (there's no canon about that either way, I just like the vibes of it). However, this ship is a lot of fun too. In fact, I think it's already my favorite idea for an older-Legolas-with-ties-to-important-people take on the character, if that's how you want to take the character, simply because it is so much fun.

Do I think it's canon? No, of course not. But who cares? We're not writing Academic Articles on Accurate Tolkien Scholarship, we're writing fanfiction. We're having fun. So if you're a giggling-with-popcorn anon: good, awesome, glad to have you here enjoying the fun too. If you're a Ship Police Anon...well, acab and farewell because I frankly just do not have the time to give a shit about what somebody else ships or doesn't. Block the tag and move on.

[sailforvalinor]

Alas, they've found me (the Ahsoka haters found my posts)

[rabbiteclair]

they keep using Thrawn in new Star Wars stuff, but the cowards refuse to also make Luuke Skywalker, Luke's evil clone from the exact same books, canon to the new material

[oceanandspring]

star wars canon is just whatever you think is coolest or fits the best at this point! take whatever eu, legends, comic, new disney canon, or whatever canon you like. its all contradictory and intermixed anyway! like idk star wars canon is whatever you like the best.

i hold eu novel obi wan and the clone wars obi wan in my hand at the same time and that's okay!

[smol-blue-bird]

I feel like every writer/producer/etc in charge of every major franchise in the world is infested with brain worms that do nothing but sit in their minds all day whispering "kill off all of the fan-favorite characters! retroactively make that happy ending miserable!! destroy the expanded universe to make way for our controversial sequels!!! do itttttttttt"

[marmota-b]

Chapter 3 is up. Alex settles in, begins to realise things about his family and upbringing he isn't very happy about, and gets support.

So far, so good, but I'm running into gaps in my finished writing now. Still, I'm inordinately pleased with myself for working a couple EU/Legends characters in, so if I get typical and monumentally stuck now, I at least managed that. Some of it is just shameless shoutouts. Astonishingly, Ton Phanan actually gets to say something, I didn't count on that when I began posting this. @syrena-of-the-lake & @rthstewart

[aeskanera]

damn remember when everyone was losing their minds over Disney making the EU/Legends non-canonical (even though technically most of it pretty much already was non-canonical), and now everyone’s just like wait a minute…if Legends aren’t canonical then I can make up any headcanon I want and it can’t be disproven…male!Revan and his baby and Catholic!Boba Fett can be thrown out the window…perhaps this is one of the best things Disney did with Star Wars

[gold-wolf-soldier13]

With all the new Anakin and Ahsoka posts I’m seeing, I’m also seeing more and more Obi-wan post and ig here’s my hot take of the day: fandom has absolutely made me hate Obi-wan. I honestly didn’t think much of him in the movies but the more I interact with fandom, and the prequels fandom in specific, the more I hate fanon interpretation of him which leaks into the canon portrayal and it’s gotten to the point where any time i even see his name I’m scoffing out loud and rolling my eyes

[nikxation]

One thing I find eternally amusing is that if I say the statement "Discounting the toxic crybabys, most people who were mad about what Luke became in the sequels are the older generations who grew up with the OG trilogy and spent 30 years headcanoning him as their perfect special uwu boy"... I can group people in the area into age brackets based on how annoyed they get at the statement... Bonus points if the phrase "but the EU/books!" is spoken.

[swan2swan]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY BLEW UP THE ULTIMATUM???

[david-talks-sw]

The OTHER type of Star Wars fan

We've already covered (through this longer post and this addendum) that research shows George wasn't that involved or interested in the derivative material of the Star Wars franchise, also known as the Expanded Universe (EU). Aside from approving a few points, he let Howard Roffman and Lucasfilm Licensing handle it.

He is the first to say that he ain't as knowledgeable about Star Wars lore as we fans are.

Thing is... he's also not as passionate as we are.

Recently, I was watching some Q&A videos of George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones... and it occurred to me:

Martin is what most Star Wars fans wish Lucas was.

Think about it.

He's a talented writer who likes to focus on morally "gray" characters and complex political plotlines,

who created a series of novels for a mature audience in which his narrative merely asks questions and lets the reader draw their own conclusions,

knows and engages in the lore behind his creation and will often respond to those lore-heavy questions, and has gone on record stating that canon is the glue that holds a story together and keeps it coherent.

Contrast that with George "continuity is for wimps" Lucas, who:

Wrote a movie franchise which is also, partially, political... but he makes it for kids, and he's explicit about how this is thematically a clear-cut story about how the conflict of "good vs evil" is really about "compassion vs greed",

with flat dialogue, boring cinematography,

and whose approach to lore and canon can be summed up in his answer to how Anakin got his scar:

"I don't know. Ask Howard [Roffman]. That’s one of those things that happens in the novels between the movies. I just put it there. He has to explain how it got there. I think Anakin got it slipping in the bathtub, but of course, he's not going to tell anybody that." - Pablo Hidalgo’s set diary, August 2003

And as a Star Wars fan, I will admit that some of his casual retcons felt disrespectful, growing up.

"Boba Fett is NOT Mandalorian?!"

I had the same reaction when I saw an interview of Kathleen Kennedy stating she was a fan of Star Wars... from a filmmaking perspective. That seemed like such a finagling cop-out for me, at the time.

"Just say you're not a real fan, God!"

And it's easy to divide it in two camps, like that. You have 1) the fans, who will delve into deep lore, and you have 2) the average moviegoer.

But looking back on it... holy shit, that is actually a completely valid way of being a Star Wars fan.

Yes, Star Wars is a transmedia franchise, it's books, it's video-games, it's deep lore, it's lightsabers and Jedi and Sith and bounty hunters and Ewoks and Jabba and High Republics and Tython and Revan etc.

But before it was that, Star Wars was a filmmaking revolution. A juggernaut of innovation for the silver screen that inspired most of today's filmmakers.

So, sure, George Lucas isn't an avid lore-loving Star Wars fan like you and me. But he is a movie fan.

"I'm not that passionate about this story. I like it, it's fun and I enjoy doing it. But it's definitely not my life. I'm a bigger movie fan than I am Star Wars fan. I like making movies. At the end of nine years of making Star Wars, I was not ready to continue it. I was completely burned out on it. I was more passionate about raising my kids than making movies and especially making Star Wars. So I made other kinds of movies and TV shows and advanced the technology I needed. It's not a matter of passion. My passion is for filmmaking. I'll go and do filmmaking that is easier to do, where you can realise your ideas better. And nine years is a big part of your life, and to commit to another nine years, I didn't wanna do that right away." - EMPIRE, 1999

And you can tell this, when you watch the Star Wars films.

There are honestly so many homages and interesting filmmaking techniques, peppered throughout the six films, which only a nerd for cinema history like George would know how to implement.

C3-PO being based on the droid from Metropolis (1927) is a perfect example of this.

And that's interesting.

Because there's essentially this entire other dimension to the films, where it's not just the story unfolding, but to filmmakers it's also a series of techniques that make them go "I wonder how they did that!" or homages that make them go "OH! I know where that's from!" like we do when an comics characters appears in live-action.

Here's other examples:

CINEMA HOMAGES

All of Star Wars is absolutely littered with homages to cinema history.

I mean, you may already know this, but Flash Gordon is what George originally wanted to shoot, but the copyright holders said they only wanted Fellini to direct it (ironically, George wasn't artsy-fart enough for them). So he decided to write Star Wars instead.

As such, the inspiration from Flash Gordon is also present visually and spiritually throughout the two trilogies.

"It was like a Republic serial, a 1930s-style matinee adventure. The idea was that you came in, saw Episode IV, had missed the first three episodes, and wouldn't get to see the rest of it." - Starlog Magazine #300, 2002

The dialogue that a lot of people refer to as "campy" and "flat" is actually a mix of George being an experimental filmmaker who doesn't give much of a fuck about dialogue (and is by his own admission, not the best at it)...

"I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic. It's not designed to have a clever turn of phrase. [...] I just wanted to get from point A to point B. This film doesn't lend itself to that sort of thing because it's not about snappy one-liners.  I think that Lethal Weapon-style dialogue is overused, it's a necessary aspect of high action films where you have to have the smart retort. You have to say "I'll be back baby" and stuff. It's not my style. It takes away from the integrity of the movie. [...] I'm aware that dialogue isn't my strength. I use it as a device. I don't particularly like dialogue which is part of the problem." - EMPIRE, 1999

... which is convenient, because it helped him simulate the dialogue of 1930s matinee serials, such as Flash Gordon.

"Let’s face it, their dialogue in that scene is pretty corny. It is presented very honestly, it isn’t tongue in cheek at all, and it’s played to the hilt. But it is consistent, not only with the rest of the movie, but with the overall Star Wars style. Most people don’t understand the style of Star Wars. They don’t get that there is an underlying motif that is very much like a 1930s Western or Saturday matinee serial. It’s in the more romantic period of making movies and adventure films. And this film is even more of a melodrama than the others." - Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Attack of the Clones, 2002

But beyond that, literally it's everywhere.

The scene where Palpatine ascends to being Emperor as Anakin slaughters his political rivals parallels the final scene in The Godfather, where Michael becomes the Don while his goons do the same thing.

This video compiles all the tributes beautifully. Check it out.

Even The Clone Wars has whole episodes that are direct homages to cult classics. The Zillo Beast episode is a clear reference to Godzilla, the episode The Wrong Jedi is inspired by The Wrong Man, etc.

"CINEMA VÉRITÉ" CINEMATOGRAPHY

I've already written a whole post (one of my favourites) showing how his fascination with cinéma vérité documentaries is reflected in the cinematography of all six Star Wars films, and it's part of what makes the entire franchise feel so immersive.

You can check it out here:

KUROSAWA

We've gone over how he's a big fan of Akira Kurosawa, and how big an influence Hidden Fortress was on both the Star Wars trilogies...

... but so is the mise-en-scène and the way George approaches production design. The reason Star Wars feels so "lived in" is also a lesson George learned from Kurosawa, which is that by making everything just a bit off-kilter, a bit dirtied-up and imperfect...

... and yet keeping it all consistent, in a way, you manage to make the film feel grounded and immersive, no matter how alien it is.

"[It] may sound odd in a movie like this, but credibility and realism, even in the most unrealistic situation… to sorta create that sense of realism is very important to making the story work and making you feel like you’re actually in the environment that transports you and gives you the suspension of disbelief that you need in order to enjoy a movie. [...] Kurosawa used to call it “immaculate realism” which is to make it slightly off-kilter, slightly eccentric, like things are in real life. Even if it’s a very predictable situation, give it that little funny edge that takes it away from that and makes it realistic. And I had to struggle very hard, in the Star Wars films, to make them appear to be realistic, even though they’re totally fantasy." - The Phantom Menace, Commentary Track #2, 1999

POST-PRODUCTION & VFX

Another one of the more impressive aspects of the first Star Wars was the dogfights and the trench raid of the Death Star. The camera pans with the spaceship, the dynamism of the cuts. The space battles is what made George creat ILM in the first place.

He was determined to do the opposite of what 2001: A Space Odyssey had done with that opening scene where the space ship moves into frame slooooowly...

... so he gave the team a collection of WWII dogfight footage to give them ideas.

(note: this was the same approach he would take years later with Dave Filoni, when teaching the latter how to edit and craft dogfights in The Clone Wars)

The attempt to film the trench run eventually led to the creation of the first motion control camera dolly.

Best analogy I can think of, when describing George's approach to Star Wars, is the following:

An avant-garde esoteric contemporary artist - y'know, the type who puts a blue dot on a white canvas and calls it art - creates a comic.

Why? Because he wants to make this one art installment for a gallery exhibition. After that, he intends to move on to other things.

But the comic is really good! And like, its audience quickly expands beyond just gallery visitors, no, everyone likes it.

Suddenly, the comic develops a cult following, and the entirety of comic book geek culture has zeroed-in on the artist and they're all asking him to make more art! And he makes more! And more!

Then he stops for two decades, moves on to other art projects, raises his kids. Years later, he discovers new ways of drawing, and he's like "I'm making a Prequel to the comic, y'all wanna see it?"

Everyone cries out gleefully: "Oh God, yes! Finally! Show us!"

But this motherfucker makes a manga.

Why? Because he feels like it.

And of course he does, he's just creating art, right? He discovered the graphic tablet, so he's having fun with it, because he's always innovating and pushing the envelope with his art.

And the movies are fine, by manga standards. But by comic book standards, they obviously suck! The comic book audience is mad. They wanted another comic book, not a manga. Why is it in black and white? Why is read right-to-left? This comic sucks!

(And arguably, they have a point... as a savvy businessman, he's made a whole lot of money off this comic, he built a media empire out of it, and instead of giving them what they want, he made something else)

But again... this guy isn't a comic book illustrator, and has been very explicit about saying this.

He's an artist who - for a very specific project - drew a comic.

Many things can be true at once:

the fact that these creative decisions didn't always hit their mark for the average moviegoer, or fans of "Star Wars, the space fantasy movies and expanded universe" (usually the lore-loving geeks like myself)...

... and the fact that they were meticulously and carefully crafted in a way that fans of "Star Wars, the revolutionary film" (aka fans of cinema and filmmaking) can appreciate.

There's a spectrum of the fandom, and there is a spectrum in the way we can appreciate Star Wars. Which kinda reminds me of that scene in Chef (2014) where Carl goes on a rant explaining the intricacies of making his chocolate lava cake to a food critic.

It's not just undercooked chocolate.

It's molten.

Conversely, it's not just flat, campy dialogue. It's an homage to the 1930s matinee serials à la Flash Gordon.

It's not just boring cinematography. It's a reproduction of cinéma vérité documentary-style camera work which effectively grounds the film.

Having considered all this, when I hear that Tony Gilroy or Kathleen Kennedy were more in the latter camp, I go "fair enough".

First of all, because like it or not, so was George. He clearly didn't give a single crap about the comics and books, besides signing off on minor plot points. He's not a "sci-fi movie director", he's an experimental filmmaker who makes movies set in space.

But secondly, because - aside from children - it's clear the audience he was targeting was these cinema-savvy folks who'd get his references and would be inspired by the filmmaking techniques.

Not the fans or the critics.

[artbyblastweave]

I think about Star Wars a lot more than I post about Star Wars, and I've had some free time recently to type up some thoughts on Episode 7 that've been swirling around in my head for a couple of years. There were a few ideas and plot beats, and moments of apparent self-examination in Episode 7 which I thought were fairly compelling, even though they ultimately paid no dividends:

First was Finn’s character concept. “Star Wars as experienced from the perspective of a Stormtrooper undergoing a crisis of faith” is a rich hook; humanizing and giving a face to what's basically the platonic implementation of the faceless mook. Unfortunately, the potency of the arc was undercut by the pre-existing textual ambiguity as to what stormtroopers actually are. Star Wars extended canon has settled on the idea that each trilogy features an entirely novel cohort of white-clad mooks, each with a fundamentally different underlying dynamic. The clones and the First-Order forces are different flavors of slave army; in contrast, the stormtroopers are more frequently portrayed in the expanded universe as military careerists, stormtrooper being a thing you work up to rather than a gig for a fresh conscript. A slave-soldier who defects is a very different character from a military careerist who defects, and they invite different analysis. There's a bait-and-switch going on here, in that Finn gestures in the direction of the familiar OT stormtroopers but can't comment on or examine them because he's actually part of a novel dynamic invented for the new movies. And there's one final nail in the coffin here, signaled by the number of times I've had to invoke the expanded universe so far. When Finn debuted, the racists were of course, legion, but I also ran into a number of people who were sincerely confused as to why they'd recast Temuera Morrison. Going off the seven films that existed at the time, it wasn't unreasonable to read the prequel trilogy as an origin story for where the OT stormtroopers came from. Going only off the nine films that exist now, it still isn't unreasonable! It's muddied from so many different directions by their failure to establish the ground rules in the mainline films before they tried to put on subversive airs about it. I am still irritated by this.

Next up is how Han Solo was written. I actually liked the tack they took with him quite a bit. Because initially, right, his role in the movie is just to be Han Solo. He's back, and he hasn't changed! He's still kicking ass and taking names, he's still the lovable scoundrel you knew and loved from your childhood- and the principle cast members react to his presence with the same reverence the film's trying to invoke in the audience, they've grown up hearing the same stories about him. Except that episode 7, at least, is also very aware of the fact that if Han Solo is still recognizably the same guy thirty years on, it indicates that things have gone totally off the rails for him. We find out that the lovable rogue routine is the result of him backsliding, his happy ending blown up by massive personal tragedy rooted in communicative failures and (implicitly) his parental shortcomings. It feels deliberately in conversation with the nostalgic impulse driving the entire film- here's your childhood hero back just as you remember, here's what that stagnation costs. And it also feels like it's in conversation with what was a fairly common strain of Han Solo Take- the idea that Ep. 6 cuts off at a very convenient point, and that Han and Leia's fly-by-night wartime relationship wouldn't survive the rigors of domesticity. Obviously, that's not the only direction you can take with the character; the old EU basically threaded the needle of keeping Han recognizable without rolling back his character development gains. But it felt like they were actually committing to a direction, a direction that was aware of the space, and not a reflexively deferential and flattering one, which at the time I appreciated! The problem, of course, is that for it to really land, you need to have a really, really strong idea of what actually went down-of what Han's specific shortcomings and failures were. And given the game of ping-pong they proceeded to play with Kylo Ren's characterization, this turned out to be. Less than doable.

Kylo Ren is the third thing about Episode 7 that I liked. His character concept is basically an extended admission by the filmmakers that there's no way to top Vader as an antagonist. Instead, they lean into the opposite direction- they make him underwhelming on purpose. Someone who's chasing Vader's legacy in the same way any post-OT Star Wars villain is going to, pursuing Vader's aesthetic and the associated power without really understanding or undergoing the convoluted web of suffering and dysfunction that produced Vader. It's framed as a genuine twist that there's nothing particularly wrong with his face under that helmet. Whatever it takes to be Vader, he doesn't have it, and he knows that he doesn't have it, and the pursuit of it drives him to greater and greater acts of cartoonish villainy. The failure to one-up Vader is offloaded to the character instead of the writers, and it was genuinely interesting to watch. For one movie. The problem, of course, is that if the entire character archetype is "Vader, but less compelling," you can't try to give the bastard Vader's exact character arc. You can't retroactively bolt on a Vader-tier tragic backstory when you spent a whole movie signaling that whatever happened to him wasn't as compelling as what happened to Vader. You can't milk his angst for two more movies when it's the kind of angst on display in "Rocking the Suburbs" by Ben Folds!

There's a level on which I feel like Moff Gideon was a semi-successful implementation of Vader-Wannabe concept; he's the same kind of middling operator courting the Vader Aesthetic for clout, but he's doing it in the context of the imperial warlord era, where there's a lot of practical power available to anyone who can paint themselves to the Imperial Remnants as a plausible successor to Vader. Hand in Hand with this obvious politicking, Gideon is loathsome, which relieves the writers of the burden of having to plausibly redeem the guy; he's doing exactly what he needs to do and there'll never be a mandate to expand him beyond what his characterization can support. Unfortunately, the calculated and cynical nature of how he's emulating Vader precludes the immaturity and hero-worship elements on display with Kylo, which is unfortunate; the sincerity on display in Kylo's pursuit of authenticity is an important part of why he worked, to the extent that he worked at all, and it'd be worth unpacking in a better trilogy. As he stands Kylo is a clever idea, and that's all he is- he lacks the scaffolding to go from merely clever to actively good.