Monday, May 4, 2020

May the 4th Be With You!

Ahh, it's that one day of the year when us Star Wars geeks get really annoying and think we're cute!  Given the day, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the current state of Star Wars for myself.

Personally, I'm fascinated by the current era of Star Wars, but for all the wrong reasons.  I like digging into politics and management stories, especially when they fail, and the behind-the-scenes stuff on Lucasfilm lately has read like a disaster investigation, but for management.  It seems the power-struggle is, in fact, still on-going, with some weird (shady?) things going on in the background.

So it should come as no surprise that the Star Wars community is, shall we say, pretty divided over the current state of Star Wars.  One common refrain I hear is "Star Wars is dead to me."  I think that's a mistake.  It's certainly not dead for me. In a lot of ways, Star Wars is more alive for me than it has ever been before.  To my ear, that refrain sounds like when a new edition of an RPG comes out, and you dislike it, so you throw out all your old books.  The old works are still around. Just because you don't like the new stuff doesn't mean the old stuff got retroactively worse.

I will never be the guy who tells you to like something out of brand loyalty.  I think if you didn't like the Last Jedi or Rise of Skywalker or anything that's come from Kathleen Kennedy's Lucasfilm, that's your right, and you should acknowledge your experience.  There is an entire world of interesting space opera and pulp adventures that I can recommend to you instead.  But at the same time, I don't think you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I've really enjoyed the Mandalorian.  I've really enjoyed Rebels.  I've really enjoyed Clone Wars, and its latest season (with the exception of one episode which, while fun, you could have missed and not realized you had done so; for the "last season ever," I don't think you have room to waste on a literal filler episode; the fact that you're spending time on money on a wasted episode makes the episodes or moment you didn't do but could have seem all the more galling).  Jedi: Fallen Order is actually really good!  I'm actually increasingly curious about the other Streaming Star Wars offerings.

But for me, what's really jumped out at me hasn't been the galaxy of the future, but the galaxy of long, long ago.  As a kid, I had skipped the EU as bad knock-off of the real thing. This was a mistake.  It's got some great stuff! I've been hunting for "space opera pulp that feels like Star Wars, but isn't the familiar Star Wars" and it turns out what I was looking for was... Star Wars!  A lot of the Old Republic stuff is especially good.  I've gone through the Dawn of the Jedi, the Old Republic Comics (including, especially, the Knight of the Old Republic comic, which is some of the best stuff I've read, even if the art has varied wildly in quality over that series).  I finally sat down and beat KOTOR (I'm still trying to get through KOTOR2, which I suspect I'll enjoy more, but I keep running into technical difficulties) and while Star Wars: the Old Republic is held back by its insistence on copying Warcraft mechanics, the stories in it, and the worlds it shows you, are magnificent.

I think what writing Psi-Wars has helped me do is liberate my mind from the confines of the original trilogy and get a better feel for what Lucas was trying to do in the first place.  When I was a kid, a lot of my friends liked West End Games Star Wars, but for me, back in the early 90s, it was too bound to the trilogy.  All you could be were knock-off characters of the trilogy, and all you could do were knock-off things of the trilogy. The trilogy dominated everything and it was hard to figure out how to be creative.

But now that I've explored what inspired Star Wars to begin with and seen other people dive into new and interesting directions in Star Wars (especially in the Old Republic, the Prequels, Clone Wars and Rebels), and now that I've done it myself with Psi-Wars, I think I could do it with Star Wars.  If I were pressed to run a Star Wars RPG, I could easily whip up an innovative set of star systems with unique cultures and underworlds and exciting new bounty hunters or criminal cartels, and create a totally new Star Wars adventure.  Or I could draw on the broader material of Star Wars.  The ideal would be a synthesis of both: the familiar (to remind you that it's Star Wars) interwoven with the novel (to keep you from being bored). Given a choice, I'd rather run Psi-Wars, but mostly for similar reasons that I prefer DF over D&D: I like how GURPS runs, and I feel like I have more explicit freedom from my players when I'm running "my own thing." But I could do Star Wars, which is something I couldn't really do before.

So I suppose, in the End, I'm pretty okay with the current world of Star Wars. Sure, a lot of stuff is burning down right now, but that's often what it looks like when an era is ending.  The Star Wars community is passionate, which means passions run high, but at the end of the day, you can go to marvel streaming comics and get every Star Wars comic ever released (or close to). You have an unbelievable amount of Star Wars available to you at your fingertips on Disney+.  You have a ton of Star Wars games that go on sale every May the 4th every year. And if you tire of official Star Wars, I can show you dozens of interesting settings and worlds that will scratch that space opera itch.  It's a bumpy ride, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a ton of stuff to enjoy. You just might need to leave the guided tour to find a lot of it.

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