PicoBlog

Racing across the forbidden desert of Pasaana, Poe, Finn and C-3PO dodge and weave on a stolen skiff, pursued by First Order Stormtroopers. Suddenly, launched from the backs of treadspeeders, the troopers buzz around with jetpacks, firing triple loaded rocket launchers. Shocked, C-3PO exclaims “They fly now!” Finn asks, “They fly now?” Poe confirms “They fly now.”

Many a hardcore Star Wars fan wrinkled her nose at the line. From video games to animation to comics to toys, jet packs aren’t new to the Star Wars, especially at the late space in the timeline The Rise of Skywalker occupies. Look no further than the last two episodes of The Mandalorian to see Imperial Troopers flying around the screen.

So what accounts for this line? Why would three characters that, in the larger story of Star Wars, appear shocked to see jetpacks in a universe full of them?

The in-story explanation (even defense) might be that our Resistance heroes are referring only to the First Order. Perhaps Finn, Poe and C-3PO are remarking on the First Order in particular, not stormtroopers in general or, to these characters, stormtroopers from thirty years ago. To me, that’s sufficient for the purposes of understanding the line within the fictional universe.

But I think there’s another explanation that gets underneath something fundamental and unspoken about Star Wars.

The ‘Episodes’ are a stand-alone Star Wars story.

But wait, I hear the readers saying. When Lucasfilm restarted canon for publishing, we were told that everything was ‘canon.’ Everything matters!

It’s a nice idea in theory and I think that’s certainly the intention. If everything matters, it satisfies those of us who like an orderly, tidy story. It’s also good business sense: it’s hard to skip a comic book or a video game or a novel if you’re told that it’s a crucial, real, important part of the Star Wars Saga.

But there are pitfalls to trying to make every aspect of the story align.

The first pitfall is that it’s practically impossible. In a universe with this many characters and creators, this many permissions and publishers, there’s just no way to feasibly ensure that nothing contradicts anything else, ever. It can be challenging to be consistent in one season of television, let alone hundreds of comics, stories, cartoons and books. As more and more stories are written about increasingly crowded sections of the narrative (between Episodes III and IV, for example), it’s like the Story Group setting up an obstacle course and then adding obstacles every time you try make it through. You’re going to trip sometimes, no matter how nimble you are. That’s why stories like The High Republic exist, I’d imagine - to carve out creative space away from the narrative asteroid field.

The second pitfall is that it can make storytellers lose sight of what connects to the Celebration crowd vs the general population. Take Maul’s appearance in Solo. For people who pay attention to canons and timelines, maybe this was an exciting moment. I have at least anecdotal evidence (meaning, almost everyone I talked to after seeing the movie) that his appearance didn’t land. I was asked if that means Solo takes place before The Phantom Menace, because, of course, Maul is dead to the audience that only watches the films. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even quite know who they were looking at. It’s not just elusive, it’s confusing, even it makes sense if you’ve seen Clone Wars and Rebels. A story isn’t a legal document, it’s artwork. If something is technically true that doesn’t make it legible to every viewer.

Think of it as the “your mom” test. Does your mom read trade paperbacks? I doubt it. Mine doesn’t. Does your mom keep up with the High Republic? If so, she is a very cool mom. Did your mom ask you to take her to see The Force Awakens over Christmas in 2015 because she saw a commercial and Harrison Ford is back? You bet she did.

The story of Star Wars from Episode I to Episode IX is for everyone, and that includes your mom and your aunt and your cousins who are really into March Madness and your Social Studies teacher and the greeter at Target and President Obama. They are an entire self-contained story that requires, by design, no broader context to understand. It begins with two Jedi Knights dealing with a trade dispute and ends with the next generation of heroes taking up the mantle of the future. If you read not one book, saw none of the animated series, skipped The Mandalorian, you would be able to understand the Episodes and their story from beginning to end. You don’t have to know, for example, that Kylo is supposed to mean something derogatory, or that Han Solo maybe had a wife named Sana. You don’t even have to know Ahsoka exists for Episodes I through IX to make sense.

This is all to say: the story surrounding the episodes by and large tracks with them. For those of us who celebrate this religion of Star Wars and can’t get enough of it, the expanding scope of Star Wars’s story is a blast. It's thrilling. It sparks our imaginations and gives us oodles of Sy Snoodles.

But the films are their own thing. When Star Wars was solely a George Lucas joint, contradictions between the Expanded Universe and the Episodes were always resolved in favor of his creative freedom and the movies. Before Episode II came out in 2002, Jaster Mereel was the identity of Boba Fett according to Star Wars non-flick lore. He had been since his first appearance in 1996. These are stories published by Lucasfilm, not fan fiction, but George Lucas had his own ideas and those ideas superseded and replaced the original ‘canon.’

This still happens. Poe Dameron had a backstory built up through comics, Rebel Alliance parents, and none of it pointed to being a spice runner. Episode IX came along and gave him a shifty past, not in direct contradiction to the story that had been told in comics before, but certainly not reverent of it. The films were granted creative license that was respectful of, but not beholden to, the backstory created in the comics.

One might be tempted to throw up one’s hands and say “Well then why read the comics at all if they’re not canon?” I could write a whole other essay (I’m sure I will) about the concept of canon and it’s uses and abuses, but I’ll just say, briefly, that this is all an imagined world and there’s a lot of it, and you can enjoy the parts you like and leave the rest aside. The story is entirely fiction, so no parts of it are more fictional than others. If you read Shattered Empire and feel as if The Rise of Skywalker contradicts it, you have the power to reconcile the two stories if you want to, or just leave one aside if you so choose.

For example, I’ve never really been persuaded by Ren, who preceded Kylo Ren as the leader of the Knights of Ren, according to the comics.

I think that guy looks like a villain out of the pages of The Legion of Superheroes. He’s very 1990s and I’m sure he’s someone’s idea of ‘cool’ but to me, it’s a little, I don’t know, shrug. That’s my taste. It’s no big deal. I love 95% of what Charles Soule writes, but this wasn’t my jam. So I’ve never really put The Rise of Kylo Ren into my imagination-rotation, so to speak, because what I imagine for him is something I like more than the official explanation. Luckily, I can think what I want. The reams and reams of material created to bolster, flesh out, or toy with the Star Wars universe is not there to restrict our imagination but inspire us and entertain us.

So, I enjoy what I like, discard other parts, and have patience when little pieces of the Star Wars story don’t perfectly align. It’s frankly amazing that they align as much as they do. But to understand the films, you have to unlearn what you have learned. The films are written as if no other Star Wars stories exist, because to most of the moviegoing audience, that’s true.

Once a story requires special knowledge to understand, it begins to flirt with hostility to the outsider, gatekeeping, of becoming myopic. If in order to understand Episode IX, you needed to read this…

…would have made for a pretty difficult night at the cinema. I’m glad to read comics like this one, but I’m also glad they aren’t required reading.

The fastest way for Star Wars to become niche (read: irrelevant) is for it to cater primarily to people like me, who writes a Substack named after a planet never named on camera. Lucasfilm’s creators have already sold me a ticket, and a video game, and I’m signed up for every episode of Skeleton Crew. When it comes to the films, screenwriters should be just as responsible to person who would dress up like Sabine Wren at ComicCon as they are to the woman who is taking her kids to the movies to get away from her visiting in-laws over Thanksgiving.

I realize this has been a very long way of addressing as single line of dialogue. (As Edward Albee wrote in The Zoo Story: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”) But I think moments like “They fly now?” not only represent the unspoken separation between the movies and everything else, but also good etiquette.

It’s a way of making a visitor feel comfortable in your home.

It’s a way of saying: there’s nothing here you can’t understand, this is for you.

Because to the vast majority of the audience, the first time they’ve seen a stormtrooper fly?

Is in The Rise of Skywalker.

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