Struggles in Heroism: On the (New) Star Wars Expanded Universe

It’s probably not a big secret that I have had “issues” with Star Wars in its Disney years. There are a lot of things I love about the direction things are going — a more diverse cast, the emphasis on big sprawling adventure, etc. — but there are also problems I have with the cohesion of the stories, the structure of the narratives, Disney’s treatment of character, etc. Yet, it’s still Star Wars, and even when it’s not quite on the mark, it’s still enormously fun.

However, there’s something a tad “off” for me about Star Wars, especially the new Expanded Universe. Recently, I’ve been listening to several audiobooks of new Star Wars novels — Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Resistance Reborn — and it got me thinking a lot about some of the things that have made the Disney era so difficult for me as a Star Wars fan. To be clear: I have zero intention of bashing Star Wars here; rather, I want to talk a bit about what I have found less enticing about this new era while still keeping my love for this franchise.

To start, let’s aside all of the usual arguments you hear from people who apparently hate Star Wars with the passion of a thousand suns. Mary Sues. Nonsensical plots. Magic not making sense. Physics not making sense. Space not making sense. I hate women. I hate people of color. I am the new Sith, and I am filled with so much rage that I am mere inches from harassing someone into a mental breakdown. These are not my arguments, and I’m not interested in them, even if I kinda agree with two of them — physics and space — in totally minor ways that do not make me a monstrous anti-fan.

Instead, the thing I’ve struggled with most with these newer novels (and the films) is the structure of the books themselves and the treatment of characters in the franchise as a whole — two things tied together.

Star Wars has always had a problem with its presentation of characters, new and old, but one thing I have always appreciated about its pre-Disney narratives is the way it introduces side characters without trying to make the narrative about them when their involvement in the whole will remain as extras with lines. I’m thinking of characters like Boba Fett, Dexter Jettster, Wedge Antilles (who gets his due in the original EU), and a whole host of characters who may or may not appear in future stories. When classic Star Wars does introduce a new character who will be important to the narrative, that character actually sticks around and is actually important to the story — or at least sticks around to serve as recurrent background characters who don’t get fully realized backstories. Think Lando Calrissian or Yoda for the former.

One of the things this made possible for the Expanded Universe was access to a whole host of curious and unusual characters — background, one-liners, etc. — who could make great subjects for books. To be fair to modern franchises, Lucas couldn’t have predicted that fans would have latched on to Mos Eisley Cantina background characters or Boba Fett with such passion. Still, the way those classic stories mostly handled characters outside of the main cast was to put them in positions where the real strength of progressing the story rested in the hands of our main heroes. The EU, however, had other ideas, giving entire novel series to Wedge Antilles or other characters so we could learn about their heroic adventures, too.

Disney-era Star Wars, however, often introduces characters, implies their significance in the narrative, and then ignores them. Rose Tico is the most obvious example of this; she plays a significant role in The Last Jedi, but she is virtually pointless in Rise of Skywalker (she had about 1 minute of screen time), something I found to be an absolute waste of a character. If not for The Last Jedi, you’d have no reason to think she was any more important to the overall story than Snap Wexley — someone who clearly does something useful, but mostly is just there to remind us that there are other people doing important stuff for the Resistance. And, yeah, maybe she’d get a cute line or two. Like Snap. Or look at Jannah, one of the Company 77 folks who appears on the back of a Orbak in Rise of Skywalker; we get all this time with her character, but none of it actually matters to the story beyond the simple fact that she becomes the basis for a really cool scene on top of a Star Destroyer. Or look at Zorri Bliss. (Note: Babu Frik actually follows the class trilogy model.)

Part of my issue is the transparency of these moments. They’re clearly (for me) setups for Expanded Universe material, but they are also absurd distractions in the mainline narratives (films). Rather than spending time with our heroes, whose narratives are the most important component of the entire sequel trilogy, we spend lots of time trying to create meaningful connections between the heroes and random new people — and lots of time trying to make those new people feel like fully realized characters whose histories matter even though they really don’t matter in the story all that much at all. None of this is to say that I dislike these characters. I am still deeply annoyed that Rose didn’t get her Lando moment because she should have been a major part of the heroic center cast. I think Jannah is super cool and deserved more than just a meaningless blip, too, though maybe as a character in a different movie. But this new universe doesn’t seem to allow for it.

The novels follow a similar pattern, though to a lesser degree because novels do allow for more space to explore these introduced characters. Many new Expanded Universe novels frequently present us with far too many POVs, some of which are essential to the story and some of which could be dropped without significantly impacting the main narrative. Aftermath, a book I think is generally pretty decent by an author I think is actually really great, does this quite a lot. There are so many POVs, and the impact is a narrative that drags on and on — and, honestly, sometimes makes for a plot that feels bloated by too many subplots. Part of me thinks this is designed to make us think that the story we’re reading is “much big,” but when you boil down the plot of that novel to is base components, it’s really small potatoes from the perspective of Star Wars. And that’s OK. Some EU books in the past have dealt with this sort of small potatoes stuff before to great effect. Indeed, some of the most intriguing parts of Star Wars EU work (Legends especially) is the small potatoes stuff that appears in all varieties of Star Wars stories. But small potatoes books should read like small potatoes books.

What I’m getting at here is the singular problem I think I have with the Disney era of Star Wars: it doesn’t seem to understand fully the interconnection between character and plot. And that makes for stories that are often bloated, filled with excess characters who are largely irrelevant to the greater story but still take up space, and, frankly, missing a lot of the heroic focus that makes Star Wars what it is. Much of that can be blamed on the incoherent mess of the prequel trilogy, which provides a fairly direct map upon which the rest of the EU is built. Ultimately, I’m getting a lot of what I want out of Star Wars stories in all versions of the EU, but I’m also getting a lot of stuff that detracts from that.

None of this is to say that the Legends universe is perfect. It’s not. It is also bloated — largely as a result of its incessant need to fill every gap imaginable — and full of extraneous material that doesn’t really add to anything. But the one thing I can say about Legends that I can’t say about the Disney era EU is that one has stories that define the EU ouevre and the other doesn’t. You can tell by the fact that the new EU has mined some of the most important figures from Legends for its own versions. Thrawn is the most obvious example — and, in my view, the single most important un-filmed character in all of Star Wars.

That statement should be a “yet.” Maybe this will change. After all, as Mike Underwood and I discussed in a recent Star Wars retrospective episode on The Skiffy and Fanty Show, the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga opens up enormous opportunities for Disney. It can tell any story it wants now, and it can invent any number of new and amazing heroes. My hope is that they learn a lesson from everything thus far and make the right choices. Focus on the stories that matter and ignore the ones that don’t — or, at least, push them into their own stories so you can make them matter.

Whether Disney will do this, I don’t know. I hope so. But we shall see.