Spoilers What do casual fans get wrong about Star Wars?

[Autumnal]

I’ve found some of the High Republic stuff interesting because that’s supposed to have been a high point, and even run a game in that setting.

I’m mildly interested in that. Are there any particularly good starting points?

I’m one of those people who’s sort of a hardcore fan of a Star Wars that never quite existed. I thought at the time that Empire went off the rails with the Skywalker family stuff, which undercut the kind of drama it had alongside the action. It’s the difference between WW1 and WW2, in some ways: the Kaiser and the Czar were part of a family web, but the Fůhrer and the General Secretary weren’t,and the drama of their conflict wouldn’t be improved if they were. But I liked most of Empire and Return anyhow.

There’s a surprising amount I do like in the prequels, but you can’t get from there to the parts of the originals I like without drastic contrivances. (Which reality does dish up sometimes. But drama doesn’t get to use “that’s reality” as an excuse.) I really, really like The Last Jedi. Mostly I’d already tuned out, though - I still haven’t seen the final sequel movie and very little of the TV. My last peak period was when things like Michael Kube-McDowell’s Black Fleet Crisis books were coming out, before the Yuong Vozh or Zhodani or whatever they were.

Since the 2000s, I’ve been pretty casual. I liked Rogue One and respected its obvious desire to grow up to be a John Woo movie. I like John Ostrander and jam Duursema’s Star Wars: Legacy. And so on. But it generally gets me a lot to divert attention away from other things that suit me better. And that’s fine. I have fun with what I have fun with. I want others to have fun with what they have fun with, too.

 

[overgeeked]

Star Wars is about fighting imperialism and fascism, and many people miss that the US is included in the list of imperialist nations who inspired the Empire. Yes, it’s common knowledge among fans, but less so among the viewing audience, I think.

The Rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Empire being the US is the official read from Lucas.

 

[pawsplay]

Princess Leia's hair style was inspired in part by a hairstyle seen in photographs of some of Mexico's revolutionary women. The Rebellion is multi-planetary and multi-racial; the Empire is human-centric with other friendlies in subordinate roles. The Rebellion embraces Jedi spirituality, an Asian-inspired religion; the Empire mirrors the soulless industrialization of Britain and the USA and the contemptuous atheism of Communist China. Luke Skywalker is a proxy recruit, initially open to the idea of the joining the Imperial Navy but radicalized when the Empire kills his entire family. Etc. It just gets hammered in, time and again: political and military power is necessary to protect peace, but it cannot be trusted for one second in the hands of anyone with the ambition to tell anyone else how to live. Leia tells Luke that Han can't be compelled to join the fight; he must choose the cause of his own free will. Lucas tells us, through Rebellion and Imperial voices, that massive strategic weapons serve no just or practical purpose, they exist only to create fear. The true target of the Death Star is the average Imperial citizen. Etc.

Yes, Star Wars is kiddie stuff. But there are always choices being made in what we tell our children.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

So there's one major thing that basically every Star Wars hardcore completionist is likely to "get wrong" (by which I mean more miss out on), along with many people creating Star Wars media to cater to completionists, but that I think a casual fan is likely to "get right". And that is that Star Wars is (or was originally) supposed to take place in an alien setting where all the elements don't make sense to you the viewer. Lucas said (per a director's commentary I encountered a few years ago) that he was struck when he saw Kurasowa's samurai films in film school by how he didn't understand many of the customs and material culture in them but nevertheless found the narratives compelling (and I think he said that helped him focus more on the universal human element or the plot or whatever). And so he had the idea to worldbuild with lots of little unexplained elements just there to be strange and different and mysterious. Tatooine sequences at the beginning of the original Star Wars is paced very slow to us today to help people adjust to such a strange setting. Sure we're supposed to more or less figure out what a Jawa is, but what it means to "go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters" can just be left a mystery.

From almost the beginning this scheme of a universe filled with little mystery details broke down. Fans wanted to know about everything, because it all looked cool. Kenner needed to name all the toys they made, even for background characters and blink if you miss them vehicles. By the 90s we were getting short stories for every random one shot alien in the Mos Eisley Cantina and so forth, and I owned some sort of Star Wars encyclopedia. Indeed, contradictorily Lucas himself liked to have answers for all manner of details, his worldbuider impulse somewhat getting in the way of the cinematic reason he was doing all that worldbuilding. Now we live in a true information age where the Star Wars mysteries not answered by Wookipedia are few, far between, and usually big, intentional things like Yoda's species.

Which is all just to say that a casual viewer gets to actually experience this stuff as originally intended.

 

[jian]

I’m mildly interested in that. Are there any particularly good starting points?

I’m one of those people who’s sort of a hardcore fan of a Star Wars that never quite existed. I thought at the time that Empire went off the rails with the Skywalker family stuff, which undercut the kind of drama it had alongside the action. It’s the difference between WW1 and WW2, in some ways: the Kaiser and the Czar were part of a family web, but the Fůhrer and the General Secretary weren’t,and the drama of their conflict wouldn’t be improved if they were. But I liked most of Empire and Return anyhow.

There’s a surprising amount I do like in the prequels, but you can’t get from there to the parts of the originals I like without drastic contrivances. (Which reality does dish up sometimes. But drama doesn’t get to use “that’s reality” as an excuse.) I really, really like The Last Jedi. Mostly I’d already tuned out, though - I still haven’t seen the final sequel movie and very little of the TV. My last peak period was when things like Michael Kube-McDowell’s Black Fleet Crisis books were coming out, before the Yuong Vozh or Zhodani or whatever they were.

Since the 2000s, I’ve been pretty casual. I liked Rogue One and respected its obvious desire to grow up to be a John Woo movie. I like John Ostrander and jam Duursema’s Star Wars: Legacy. And so on. But it generally gets me a lot to divert attention away from other things that suit me better. And that’s fine. I have fun with what I have fun with. I want others to have fun with what they have fun with, too.

I think we all have our eclectic experience and vibe of Star Wars. Pretty much nobody has read, seen, and listened to everything, and there’s not a predictable commonality of what things people are more or less likely to have consumed and incorporated. My personal vibe is based on the original trilogy, then X-Wing and TIE Fighter, then a fair chunk of the EU books and WEG RPG material (partly because I was running an on-off WEG campaign where the PCs replaced the main characters for much of the 90s) then the prequel trilogy, then Clone Wars, then the sequel trilogy and Rebels. I liked Solo and Rogue One, disliked the Mandalorian, and have run several Star Wars campaigns over the decades using a variety of rules.

As such the vibe of the first High Republic book - Light of the Jedi, the only one I’ve read all the way through - really worked for me. The Republic is functional and trustworthy, the Jedi are more diverse and less dogmatic, and the PCs are united by the motto of “We are all the Republic” - it’s everyone’s job to work together to preserve peace and justice in the Galaxy. They fight a great hyperspace natural disaster and nihilistic fascist pirates who are intent on destroying harmony and the rule of law, and thankfully aren’t Sith in any way. It seemed much more relevant to modern events than Star Wars had for years (this was before Andor). It was a much-needed dose of Star Trek into Star Wars: a more hopeful universe with ideals worth fighting for. And that’s the vibe I put into the campaign.

I don’t really know where the other books and media take the High Republic, but I thought Light of the Jedi was a very good start.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

They categorize it as science-fiction because there's spaceships.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

They categorize it as science-fiction because there's spaceships.

I think that's more "what people get wrong about Science Fiction".

 

[Retros_x]

For me the only correction I always do is when casuals say Star Wars is Sci-Fi. For me its clearly fantasy in space. The tropes, the themes, the stories, everything is fantasy about it. Maybe with parts of space opera, but definitely more fantasy than sci-fi. Even with a magic systems and good and evil wizards.

 

[delericho]

Though for my part I guess since my true hardcore days were mostly confined to the era whose wider media is now deemed non-canon, by Disney canon I am now strictly a casual who doesn't really know the galaxy far, far away at all. Read all those novels for nothing...

Yep, this is me, too. Disney, as the IP owners, were well within their rights to declare that all that stuff didn't count... but the price was that I exercised my right to ignore all of their secondary material. It's not like they won't hesitate to wipe that away, too, as soon as they find it inconvenient.

 

[Voadam]

Also the importance of trade policy.

I was thinking tax policy.