All Things Star Wars

[AdrienIer]

Burned through Tales of the Empire in a couple days. Very strong but does get a little weaker at the end, which prevents me from giving it a 10. Worth a gander. Mostly only relevant for those who have seen the Clone Wars show, a single episode of Mandalorian, and Ahsoka. I mean, it's watchable without that context, but it matters more if you have it.

The fact that

Spoiler :

they're leaving Bariss's story open ended

is interesting. Will she show up again someday on other star wars shows ?

 

[Synobun]

The fact that

Spoiler :

they're leaving Bariss's story open ended

is interesting. Will she show up again someday on other star wars shows ?

Spoiler :

She stops breathing after the fight with Lyn, so I assumed she's dead. That's actually why I lowered my score, since it seemed a waste of her arc.

 

[Patine]

Spoiler :

She stops breathing after the fight with Lyn, so I assumed she's dead. That's actually why I lowered my score, since it seemed a waste of her arc.

Everyone knows, in TV and movies, apparent death is only final until they can be plausibly re-wrritten back into the plot. Exhibit A, your honour - Darth Maul.

 

[Clubber Lang]

To wrap up our exclusive Star Wars Outlaws cover story, we're publishing an 18-minute video interview with Massive Entertainment's Alice Rendell, senior narrative systems designer on Outlaws, and Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle, wherein we learn about the sorts of encounters players can expect to experience while interacting with the game's Reputation and Wanted Systems.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Pretty good video. It closes with what amounts to a 6-minute trailer for Andor.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Pretty good video. It closes with what amounts to a 6-minute trailer for Andor.

I came across that... probably around its release, and wanted to plug it in a reply to Gori's post (so I guess you've forced my hand ). The problem as I see it isn't that all spacelanes are destined toward a Trench Run; it's that the way the franchise is built (and especially within the Mouse's current paradigm of fracking the nostalgia wells), everything keeps getting pushed back toward the flagship theatrical films in the same strategy of multi-level marketing that turned the MCU into a sprawling jigsaw of interdependent continuity. Hence what could have been a boundless romp in the sandbox instead railroads to the Core Canon: Skywalkers, Palpatine, and the showy Hero Quests that we're all browbeaten into accepting as the natural order.

Except for that tiny little problem that The Clone Wars demonstrated that you could deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of the universe to broaden the setting (and its themes) in ways that the PT had wanted to do but fell up short. Star Wars is a huge setting, and even within the time frame of the main films, you can tell a compelling story without having to make it a call-forward to the Death Star II—probably the nearest parallel I can draw is the corpus of World War II media: some are dramas, some are romances, some are outright comedies; some focus on the front line, some are set behind the lines, and some never leave home base. Even the documentaries can't encompass the full scope of it all; nearly ninety years on and we're still finding new ways to tell its stories. Why should Star Wars be any different?

Especially given the sheer mass of untapped lore, even after the Expanded Universe was purged. A couple weeks ago I was revisiting a homebrew roleplaying game I was in several years back, and in contrast to everyone else who treated it straight-faced, I played a Quixotic mercenary company that wove in and out of established canon in the vein of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—I am not well-versed in the EU and wound up on multiple wiki dives to research specific details, and as much as I dunk on Wookieepedia, I can only admire the passion the universe attracts: researching EU-era Celanon revealed a society split between a Guild-ruled plutocratic capital city and basically the rest of the planet living as peasantry. Maybe about two paragraphs of information, but a whole story lurking beneath.

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

 

[Gori the Grey]

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

The thing is that the esteem Andor enjoys proves my point (and esp @tjs282's axiom).

Here's the other thing. "The galaxy" isn't a setting. I know there are star-charts of where all the systems are relative to one another. But only super-fans know those. The settings in Star Wars are defined only in being some kind of geographic feature (for the whole planet): desert-planet, swamp-planet, cloud-planet, ice-planet, city-planet, volcano-planet. And sometimes by relative distance from one to another, as established on an ad hoc basis by dialogue, like Luke's that I mentioned.

Stories set in the WWII timeframe can all work, regardless of how much they directly concern the war because we know (living on it) where on the planet Morocco is relative to the main fighting of the war.

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place. Because everything in that setting was just visual support for that story. (Look at all of these different cultures being impacted by the Empire and its Death Star).

By the way, this is one of the reasons, I think, for why the franchise has been faulted for its handling of (on our Earth) racially-diverse characters. Boyega feels they didn't do anything meaningful with his character. But what is Blackness in this galaxy? It hasn't been defined. Our cultures give the human element that Egon's video calls for, but no Star Wars world's culture is developed enough for that to bear meaningfully on a character's motives and decisions. Sand people ride single file, to hide their numbers. What else do we know about them? We know that factoid because that factoid is meaningful at one moment in the Death-Star story. So, let's say we want to tell a story about a Sandperson. All the story can concern is whether he rides single file or not. The Sandpeople feel like a culture. That was Lucas' genius: to make the set-decoration visually evoke whole distinct cultures. But they're not developed as cultures beyond that superficial visual level.

No one will be more happy than me if they start telling interesting stories in this space. It feels to me too as though they ought to be able to do so. But until they manage to I've got my theory as to why they keep failing to do so. We're expecting something of the galaxy that it isn't built to give us. It gave us the one thing it was built to give us.

Make a new galaxy for your new story.

 

[Patine]

I came across that... probably around its release, and wanted to plug it in a reply to Gori's post (so I guess you've forced my hand ). The problem as I see it isn't that all spacelanes are destined toward a Trench Run; it's that the way the franchise is built (and especially within the Mouse's current paradigm of fracking the nostalgia wells), everything keeps getting pushed back toward the flagship theatrical films in the same strategy of multi-level marketing that turned the MCU into a sprawling jigsaw of interdependent continuity. Hence what could have been a boundless romp in the sandbox instead railroads to the Core Canon: Skywalkers, Palpatine, and the showy Hero Quests that we're all browbeaten into accepting as the natural order.

Except for that tiny little problem that The Clone Wars demonstrated that you could deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of the universe to broaden the setting (and its themes) in ways that the PT had wanted to do but fell up short. Star Wars is a huge setting, and even within the time frame of the main films, you can tell a compelling story without having to make it a call-forward to the Death Star II—probably the nearest parallel I can draw is the corpus of World War II media: some are dramas, some are romances, some are outright comedies; some focus on the front line, some are set behind the lines, and some never leave home base. Even the documentaries can't encompass the full scope of it all; nearly ninety years on and we're still finding new ways to tell its stories. Why should Star Wars be any different?

Especially given the sheer mass of untapped lore, even after the Expanded Universe was purged. A couple weeks ago I was revisiting a homebrew roleplaying game I was in several years back, and in contrast to everyone else who treated it straight-faced, I played a Quixotic mercenary company that wove in and out of established canon in the vein of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—I am not well-versed in the EU and wound up on multiple wiki dives to research specific details, and as much as I dunk on Wookieepedia, I can only admire the passion the universe attracts: researching EU-era Celanon revealed a society split between a Guild-ruled plutocratic capital city and basically the rest of the planet living as peasantry. Maybe about two paragraphs of information, but a whole story lurking beneath.

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

The thing is that the esteem Andor enjoys proves my point (and esp @tjs282's axiom).

Here's the other thing. "The galaxy" isn't a setting. I know there are star-charts of where all the systems are relative to one another. But only super-fans know those. The settings in Star Wars are defined only in being some kind of geographic feature (for the whole planet): desert-planet, swamp-planet, cloud-planet, ice-planet, city-planet, volcano-planet. And sometimes by relative distance from one to another, as established on an ad hoc basis by dialogue, like Luke's that I mentioned.

Stories set in the WWII timeframe can all work, regardless of how much they directly concern the war because we know (living on it) where on the planet Morocco is relative to the main fighting of the war.

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place. Because everything in that setting was just visual support for that story. (Look at all of these different cultures being impacted by the Empire and its Death Star).

By the way, this is one of the reasons, I think, for why the franchise has been faulted for its handling of (on our Earth) racially-diverse characters. Boyega feels they didn't do anything meaningful with his character. But what is Blackness in this galaxy? It hasn't been defined. Our cultures give the human element that Egon's video calls for, but no Star Wars world's culture is developed enough for that to bear meaningfully on a character's motives and decisions. Sand people ride single file, to hide their numbers. What else do we know about them? We know that factoid because that factoid is meaningful at one moment in the Death-Star story. So, let's say we want to tell a story about a Sandperson. All the story can concern is whether he rides single file or not. The Sandpeople feel like a culture. That was Lucas' genius: to make the set-decoration visually evoke whole distinct cultures. But they're not developed as cultures beyond that superficial visual level.

No one will be more happy than me if they start telling interesting stories in this space. It feels to me too as though they ought to be able to do so. But until they manage to I've got my theory as to why they keep failing to do so. We're expecting something of the galaxy that it isn't built to give us. It gave us the one thing it was built to give us.

Make a new galaxy for your new story.

I disagree that the limits are the setting itself. I think it's moreso those making storyboard, cannon, and marketting decisions - first Lucas, and now Disney. I believe the old novel, ciomicbook, and Westend Games tabletop RPG franchise, before Lucas pulled the plug on it, and despite the fact that both Lucas and Disney mined many elements from it, also prove this point.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It's the cinematic storytelling that my theory addresses. That's part of what I had in mind in mentioning the reduction of cultures to visual cues that suggest a whole culture but with nothing substantial behind them. Keep in mind, I think Lucas' doing that is a major part of his genius--dirtying down, to give a sense that the objects in the universe are used. But it's also why his galaxy is a trap for future storytellers. Disnefication is part of the problem, of course. And the video makes a good point about "making you feel like a kid again" vs "treating you like a child." But I think it's more than just Disney. This whole world was built for its one story.

In fact, the right way to go would be this. Make a new, StarWars-esque, galaxy, but designed from the outset for ongoing story telling. The biggest thing that would involve is banning any one-time, threat-to-the-whole-galaxy-sized threat. Buncha little Sarumans with no Sauron, so that each little cluster of heroes could have its adventure without exhausting the whole galaxy.

 

[EgonSpengler]

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place.

This is the "IP vs non-IP" struggle going on in H'wood right now. The primary argument in favor of placing a new story inside the world of an existing IP is on the business side, name-recognition, to get funding for a project and draw audiences. On the entertainment podcasts I listen to, there's a lot of handwringing over the lack of original movies and shows, and the relative success of those that do dare to create a new setting.

On the creative side, having an established background on which to lean provides writers (and perhaps also actors and directors) a quick shorthand of references they can expect the audience to know. That's the reason to set a movie or a tv show in something close to the real world. You can orient your audience in your setting, in time and in place, with an "establishing shot", or with clothes, cars, and needle-drops from a time period. That's one reason movies and shows set in historical periods over-emphasize the characteristic elements of those time periods. The 1940s were never so 1940s as they appear in contemporary movies set back then. These days we see a lot of movies and shows set in the 1980s, and I can say that the 1980s were never quite so quintessentially 1980s as Stranger Things is. Using an existing fictional setting for a whole new story with whole new characters lets the creatives lean on the audience's preexisting familiarity. That can include upending those preexisting expectations, such as when Andor made TIE fighters scary.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Eventually, the universe I'm imagining would have all of the advantages of an existing, established world.

So, movie-cluster #1 is set in one particular sector of the galaxy, one system. We establish its territory, its menacing threat, the scrappy batch of heroes who are going to face down that threat.

In the later movies of that cluster, those heroes reach out for help to people in sector 2. That sector feels exotic, culturally and visually, to the world we've been living in during the first set of movies. And little hints are dropped about what's going on in their world.

There have to be some limits on travelling to the various sectors, incidentally. You can't have a hyperdrive whisk you anywhere in the galaxy. It's a long, dangerous trip, maybe an adventure in its own right (Marco Polo, the European colonizers) to get from one sector to another.

Movie-cluster #2 now brings us into sector 2. We get more fully acquainted with its cultures, its visual scheme. It has its own sector-scaled threat, it's own scrappy batch of heroes to face down that threat. These heroes might reach out to the ones in sector 1 on occasion, but again, it's a long-distance, and sector 1 can only be of limited help to sector 2; they have to solve their problems on their own. Late in this cluster, we start getting a glimpse of sector 3. It's own cultures, its own struggles, a hint regarding who its Big Bad will be.

Movie cluster #3 goes and attends to the story that needs to be told in that sector. Occasional cameos of the stars from cluster 2, but on the whole our new batch of scrappy heroes is solving its own new problems.

Rinse, repeat. Enough rinsing and repeating that, by the time you've had eight 9-film clusters set in eight sectors, there's been time for a new threat to develop back in sector 1. Some of the original scrappy heroes are now wizened old sages helping the new generation of scrappy heroes confront the new threat. (so you've got your ST fan service and nostalgia).

Anyway, the point is, the whole total space (all eight sectors of it) is conceived and designed from the start to house ongoing stories, rather than a single climactic, galaxy-defining, galaxy-depleting tale.

 

[Clubber Lang]

Ripley -

‘Star Wars’: Sigourney Weaver in Talks to Join ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’

​

 

[Clubber Lang]