Patreon Letter: 4th September 2019 (Patreon)

Hey folks,

Jackson here with another Patreon Letter! Em and I have been doing catch-up with the letters for a while, and we've given it our best shot but unfortunately between the podcast workloads, extra letters on top of our weekly letters has just been out of our reach, so we're making an executive decision to return to doing them weekly. Hopefully this can mean a return to them actually releasing on the weekend! That's the plan, at least.

Anyway, everyone has always been super understanding about our workload so I hope this is fine and doesn't disappoint too many of you.

But now it is the weekend, and that means, it's time for my new patreon letter:

So last week, Em and I watched Revenge of the Sith for Voip Life, and it kinda... sent me down a Star Wars hole again. I'm back on my bullshit, if you will. I refreshed my memory on The Force Awakens, Rogue One and The Last Jedi, as well as finishing the Thrawn trilogy, which I started reading about two years ago now. God, how time flies. Anyway I have left this journey with more than a few disconnected Star Wars thoughts that I shall spend the next 800 words going on about, I hope you enjoy.

ONE: Star Wars is The Worst Franchise Ever Made

The thing I am struck by every time I return to Star Wars in any real way is that it is constantly falling apart at the seams, as a permanent state of being. People joke about the timeline not making any sense, as well they should, because the timeline does not make any sense. But that's just one symptom of a much larger issue: the 1977 movie "Star Wars" is maybe the worst possible bedrock on which to build a 40 year multimedia empire. The economic impact of George Lucas not knowing the definition of parsec is bigger than the GDP of entire countries. It is a pastiche, it is by design disposable and broad, trading in symbols and references. It is The Empire vs The Rebellion. It has history, but that history is vague and unimportant beyond a nostalgic yearning for better days. It is to a fault unconcerned with the weight of history and culture, with textured and detailed worldbuilding.

Anyway guess what everyone involved with Star Wars had to spend the next 40 years doing.

This isn't to say that Star Wars is bad, or that the expanded universe is bad, it's to say that it's fucking weird. There's no meaty thematic core in the original movies, no interesting strings to tug on, so writers have to invent their own. Please look to our episode of KOTOR 2 wherein me and Em are faced with Chris Avellone's grand critique of Star Wars as a whole and can only react with a bemused "this is not what Star Wars is dude," because our frame of reference is entirely post-prequels. The prequels complicate things so much because they are the exact opposite of the original trilogy, awkward and not fun to watch but nothing but strings to pull on. Which makes it very strange coming to what I've been watching/reading the last week, books that were written before anyone knew the prequels would be real one day, and movies doing big original trilogy nostalgia plays.

This stuff rears its head best in Last Jedi's various plotlines which do not thematically cohere in the slightest and partially it's because the movie is fairly poorly written, but also it's because Star Wars cannot support the things its writing about. This is most apparent when it's pontificating on the War Economy, and even dropping a make you think about how the Resistance and the First Order could perhaps be two sides of the same coin, they blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow. The Star Wars are officially going on forever. 

You can't do that! It's Star Wars! The universe of Star Wars - particularly modern Star Wars, where The Force Awakens is a movie so bad that I had to google "which planets did they blow up" when I left it - simply cannot support Metal Gear kicking down the door and intruding. It just doesn't work. The movie is a bit of a failure, which is a shame because TLJ, unlike TFA, actually has lofty thematic ambitions. TFA can't fail, because it isn't trying.

Anyway Star Wars is weird and very difficult to writer for because it's build on such shaky foundations, and if you're gonna ignore the prequels grounding the whole thing in a very specific context of a liberalism-to-fascism slide then you're just kinda left twisting in the wind. 

Okay that's enough on that, onto the things you're here to see, onto the books.

TWO: Grand Admiral Thrawn Is So Cool Dude

Alright: The Thrawn Trilogy. I enjoyed it a fair bit, though I think it ends really badly and can't quite capitalise on any of the things that it does really well.

First of all, while Thrawn himself is absolutely the star of the show, he's not quite the main villain. Which is a shame because C'Baoth, the resident evil Jedi of the saga, is deathly boring and the final showdown has every main character fighting C'Baoth, while Thrawn dies in a very perfunctory manner that can only be described as "well, time to end the books now." 

It sucks because Thrawn is a legitimately excellent villain. Doing Canonical Race Science with Art is, well, it's not the choice I'd make but [gestures at everything else in Star Wars] at least it fits with the source material. Aside from that, however, the choice to make the main villain a constant presence, responding to the hero's plans at every turn, detailing his moves and why he's making them, it's really engaging and unlike the actual Star Wars movies, it's a legitimate war story. There isn't really much time in the films for Space Tactics but you get a bunch here and you know I love that.

The main problem is while I - Death Note Fan no. 1 - am a sucker for dumb guy trying to write genius tactical plans, Thrawn has no opposite in the Alliance. Bel Ibis, a minor character, is a good battle tactician but he's not a main character, and so the sense of back and forth isn't as strong as it needs to be. It's like they wrote Death Note but forgot to put L in it. I feel like an easy edit to these books would be to put Leia as the main general of the New Republic Army, and have the central story be about her learning how to fight and win a war against this very different kind of enemy. But, alas, this is a Star Wars book written in the early 90s so that is absolutely not allowed.

It's really strange how the plots with the heroes end up going down in the Thrawn Trilogy. Because: our heroes are the state now. The New Republic is the dominant power within the galaxy, and crucially their control comes by literally moving into the Imperial Palace on Coruscant and taking over. There are systems changing their allegancies but it's clear The New Republic, on the whole, has inherited control of the Imperial State Machine. Instead of trying to grapple with what it means to win the war and use your newfound power to shape the world for the better, the book bends over backwards to make Han, Leia and Luke distrusted rogue figures acting outside the bounds of The New Republic government. The second book is all about a power play by a shitty senator that is going to get them all killed. In the third book they commit treason to break Mara out because they can't deal with the diplomatic red tape of freeing her, and justify it with the rebellion was also treason!

And this is played as a grand, heroic moment. But the dynamics aren't the same and that's completely full of shit. Breaking the laws of a state that is oppressing you is not the same as breaking the laws of the state that you literally control. So instead of interrogating this, it just makes the New Republic an inefficent useless beauracracy that can only survive with the executive action of our heroes, but not in an intentional way because it still wants you to think the New Republic is good, and the way forward for the galaxy.

Anyway that's enough moaning about that. I understand this is perhaps thinking too hard about Star Wars but I do this about everything and also, it's my job. One last take: Pellaeon is amazing. Middle manager ass Imperial captain. That's the shit.

Okay we're done here, I went on for much longer than I thought I would. I should watch more Clone Wars, the true peak of my Star Wars enjoyment. 

See you in two weeks

-Jackson