Friends! This is occurring so late in the day, for which I apologize — I went to see The Rise of Skywalker and then got caught up with visiting friends.
I am not going to ask you, here, what you thought of TROS. (Seriously, please let us keep this a spoiler-free space.) I am, however, going to ask you which part of the Star Wars franchise is your favourite? Is it a book, a film, a TV show, a character?
This is the perfect day for this question, because today's the third anniversary of Carrie Fisher's death. She gave us both Leia - the most misunderstood character in Star Wars history - and herself, in all of her triumph and tragedy.
Leia was a princess in a meaningful for the first part of the first movie, but she was a leader of the Republic, Resistance and/or Rebellion for 42 years. Without her, the Empire would have conquered the galaxy with very little opposition decades ago. Han walked away. Luke walked away. Leia stayed. For every second of her life, birth to death, she was a crucial figure in the fight against evil.
And what can I say about Carrie? She lit up the world for an 8-year-old boy in 1977 and she broke the heart of a 47-year-old man in 2016. She gave me the courage to openly talk about my mental-health issues and she provided one of the most mind-blowing moments of my life by liking one of my tweets. Like Leia, she was in the spotlight from her birth to her death, and she didn't have to be there for 150 minutes six times in 42 years. It never ended. She was spectacular and inspiring and horribly flawed. I'm still angry she's gone and angry at the way it happened, but not angry at her. Leia was a role model in a fictional way. Carrie was one of the realest people of my lifetime.
Maybe the thing I love best is KOTOR. Much more than the prequel movies (with which it was contemporaneous), the game felt alive: rich in Star Wars-esque settings (beautiful grasslands, crowded swamps, bustling hubs of living and commerce) and great characters with fun, meaningful dialogue and relationships. The only video game RPG I’ve taken the time to play twice, and the pre-cursor to the excellent Mass Effect trilogy. (The second go-round I tried to play as Dark Side and just couldn’t do it. Learned something about myself.)
The fact that it feels like our modern myth, like an Odyssey, and retains the sort of oral storytelling tradition of getting constantly garbled and remixed because of the many media legs of the franchise and more importantly the huge generative fanwork community. Star Wars feels like this for me more so than any other franchise because of how long it's been around but also because it feels more human and janky than, say, the Avengers franchise-- which is possibly because of my personal familiarity with it, but also because I love our heroes having to whack at broken ship parts in the middle of their world-saving.
Also, the fact that Werner Herzog cried when he saw the Baby Yoda puppet. And threw a shit fit when they considered replacing the puppet with CGI. Just. Beautiful.
I forever have a deep love for Tenel Ka, friend to Jacen and Jania Solo in the Young Jedi Knights books. She came from a matriarchal planet ruled by warrior women and almost certainly was an influence that led to my friends' catchphrase of 2019, "Why do people keep giving you knives?!"
My favourite piece of Star Wars media is KOTOR II. It's a lot like The Last Jedi in that it interrogates a lot of the core assumptions of the franchise, while still telling a good Star Wars story. It has deep characters, strong storytelling (as long as you have the restoration mod, because the game was shovelled out unfinished) but yeah. It's fascinating, exciting and clever. The first KOTOR is fine, but II actually has interesting things to say about Star Wars and gaming as whole.
Well, I say favourite piece. I can only say that due to my massive enduring love for all Star Wars media, because it doesn't work without that context.
I guess my favorite thing is actually a feeling. I’ll never forget being 16 and sitting in a dark theater watching Luke Skywalker watch a twin sunset to the swell of orchestral music and the sense of wonder, loneliness, and longing it evoked. It was visually so different from anything I’d seen before. (Up ‘til then I was more of a Twilight Zone kind of sci-fi fan.) As the film series progressed I always was so aware of the twin suns of Tatooine and that it was a movie series about twins, though later I was annoyed that evidently the boy twin was counted as more of a “new hope” than the girl twin. But that scene of the sunset is just burned into my brain.
Ahsoka Tano! Best growth as a character! My opinion is based on the "Clone Wars the animated series", the novel Ahsoka, and rebels. She also appears in several comics.
Costume design. (Surprise surprise.) But I do love that Star Wars brings huge, meticulous visual variety in every onscreen story. It can too often dip into appropriation and cultural illiteracy, but that problem tends to stay in the prequels, thankfully. And the rest of the time it’s incredible and beautiful.
Also that thing of when a big ship is moving slowly and smaller ships are zipping past and around it. I live for that.
Oooh I hear you. A thing I didn't realize how much I loved until today was seeing what giant space battles look like from a planet. That frozen streaking of strange light in the sky. Just amazing.
The utterly inexplicable theme songs from the (Canadian) Droids and Ewoks cartoon have a special place in my heart, but I think that ultimately the original trilogy or "oridge tridge" is my favorite part of the whole franchise. It hit me at the right age that it has its hooks and barbs buried deep in my heart and I can't ever let it go, no matter how hard the ancillary material tries to dislodge them.
I know just what you mean about the trilogy. Seeing the first movie in the theater when I was nine and then devouring any background info as it came out in dribs and drabs — the trading cards that gave Luke and Leia different ages, hahaha! When my memory starts going those will probably stick until the end.
Star Wars got me into science fiction. I literally didn't think I liked science fiction until I saw A New Hope. (I've liked fantasy for pretty much as long as I can remember.) I saw the movie and then started borrowing Extended Universe books from one of my friends and that was pretty much that! Star Wars was my first major fandom.
I'm also a huge fan of The Last Jedi for many reasons. My very favorite part of it might be Yoda talking about failure and teaching. It's so *true*.
My favourite part is when I learned about all of the behind-the-scenes magic that went into creating the magical elements for the original trilogy. I just have so much awe for people who had worked on fantastical films pre-CGI. The people who wore those costumes, the people who made those costumes, the people who had the idea to make hover cars by post-editing the wheels from vehicles. *All* of those miniature models of the planets and the space ships.
I absolutely love that this is the question you asked! I think for me it's the detail - I love that for practically every recognisable character in the films, there's a name, a backstory, someone who loves that character. It makes the world feel endless in a way that no other fictional universe does, to me. (My favourite Noelle Stevenson fact is that her favourite Star Wars character is Zam Wessel. You know, the shapeshifting assassin from AotC who dies in the first ten minutes.)
As for individual bits - I love The Last Jedi. I love Rebels. I love Thrawn. And it's early days, but I think Fallen Order might join that list too.
Ahhhhh I love this fact about Noelle Stevenson because the character who has made me SOB THE MOST IN ANY FILM is ... PAIGE TICO!!!!!!!!! ughhhh now I have thought about her & so must go cry, excuse me
Paige 😭 the first time I saw it I actually thought she was Rose, cause I'd been avoiding spoilers and only knew her name and not what she looked like, and then I was like OH NO
Uh, so Max ran this Star Wars game in WEG in college, which is definitely my favorite Star Wars thing ever. But if you mean published, the Knights of the Old Republic games. They are some of the best computer roleplaying games ever.
Oooh I had not heard of those! (Awww Max running a Star Wars game!!! My only experience of Star Wars TTRPG was a one-off in highschool that wasn't very memorable but none of us really knew what we were doing)
I can't speak too clearly about what I love the most without spoiling RoS, so I'll talk about the second thing - that it had such a strong impact on us that we *know characters names even when they're never spoken in the movies.* I convinced my parents to sit through the credits of Empire so I could find out the name of Lando's cyborg helper (only he was referred to as 'Lando's Aide' so I had to wait for the comics aargh) and the rebel force general (General Rieekan! Played by an actor from Alberta!)... sheesh, who knew it'd be Boba Fett who was the most popular unnamed character? From then on, I'd watch credits for most movies if I saw them on TV, hoping for bit characters to have names, to have a history, to have a *life* that was just hinted at.
This means that Buboicullaar [Jabba's froggydog] ended up being my 3rd favorite character, because omg they named the frogpuppy, and that I'm still hoping for named Jawas in movie/TV credits.
My favourite things at the moment are Leia/Carrie Fisher (@Davud Hogg Said it beautifully) and Rogue One (loved pretty much everything about it, despite the mysterious absence of female population).
Also, I’m really impressed with the storytelling and characters that have come out of the animated series!
Hands down the A. C. Crispin and Brian Daley novels about Han and Chewy. 6 books detailing Han’s life from teenager to that day in Mos Eisley. Lots of details about Hutts and their society. Colorful smugglers. The complicated Solo family. Coruscant’s ghettos. How Han earned his Corellian Bloodstripe. Fabulous writing throughout.
I've been watching Rebels recently, and Hera is my new favorite Star Wars character. So many female characters in her role are treated as maternal figures, but Hera is nobody's mom--she's a captain and a guerrilla fighter. We get to see her in moments of competence, vulnerability, anger, frustration, fear, joy, and contentment. Not many characters get as much range as she does.
There’s lots from the original trilogy, but most recently Doctor Aphra, both Kieron Gillen and Si Spurrier’s runs. So well written, and space archaeologists!
I think Vonda McIntyre's THE CRYSTAL STAR might be my favorite piece of Star Wars storytelling. Or at least, it holds a certain sway over my high school age brain.
Knights of the Old Republic, both the video game and the comics, are some of the best storytelling in that universe. (Set three thousand years before the films.) Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane trilogy and Matthew Woodring Stover’s Shatterpoint novel are the novels I liked best.
So, this is going to be an unusual choice, but there's an amazing Phineas and Ferb Star Wars musical crossover, which has songs that manage to highlight, in particular, complex and bizarre aspects of the fandom. In particular, "Tatooine" is all about how amazing Tatooine is and why young heroes might _not_ want to leave the planet and never return, while "In the Empire" really drums down on the shiny attractive fascism of the Stormtroopers and questions why they are so appealing to so many fans and toy marketers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zecW__kovYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmREgtQxgAA
This is the perfect day for this question, because today's the third anniversary of Carrie Fisher's death. She gave us both Leia - the most misunderstood character in Star Wars history - and herself, in all of her triumph and tragedy.
Leia was a princess in a meaningful for the first part of the first movie, but she was a leader of the Republic, Resistance and/or Rebellion for 42 years. Without her, the Empire would have conquered the galaxy with very little opposition decades ago. Han walked away. Luke walked away. Leia stayed. For every second of her life, birth to death, she was a crucial figure in the fight against evil.
And what can I say about Carrie? She lit up the world for an 8-year-old boy in 1977 and she broke the heart of a 47-year-old man in 2016. She gave me the courage to openly talk about my mental-health issues and she provided one of the most mind-blowing moments of my life by liking one of my tweets. Like Leia, she was in the spotlight from her birth to her death, and she didn't have to be there for 150 minutes six times in 42 years. It never ended. She was spectacular and inspiring and horribly flawed. I'm still angry she's gone and angry at the way it happened, but not angry at her. Leia was a role model in a fictional way. Carrie was one of the realest people of my lifetime.
The video games KOTOR and the animated Clone Wars seasons are really the best things about SW.
I haven't experienced either of these!! I have high hopes of animated Clone Wars & getting to know Ahsoka Tano!
Ahsoka is the best. Clone wars made me like Anakin Skywalker. It gave him a complete character.
Maybe the thing I love best is KOTOR. Much more than the prequel movies (with which it was contemporaneous), the game felt alive: rich in Star Wars-esque settings (beautiful grasslands, crowded swamps, bustling hubs of living and commerce) and great characters with fun, meaningful dialogue and relationships. The only video game RPG I’ve taken the time to play twice, and the pre-cursor to the excellent Mass Effect trilogy. (The second go-round I tried to play as Dark Side and just couldn’t do it. Learned something about myself.)
The fact that it feels like our modern myth, like an Odyssey, and retains the sort of oral storytelling tradition of getting constantly garbled and remixed because of the many media legs of the franchise and more importantly the huge generative fanwork community. Star Wars feels like this for me more so than any other franchise because of how long it's been around but also because it feels more human and janky than, say, the Avengers franchise-- which is possibly because of my personal familiarity with it, but also because I love our heroes having to whack at broken ship parts in the middle of their world-saving.
Also, the fact that Werner Herzog cried when he saw the Baby Yoda puppet. And threw a shit fit when they considered replacing the puppet with CGI. Just. Beautiful.
This is such a lovely way of putting it. & extreme co-sign on the 2nd paragraph.
The shiny dice hanging in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon - 1977's vibe cast into the future, a long time ago.
I forever have a deep love for Tenel Ka, friend to Jacen and Jania Solo in the Young Jedi Knights books. She came from a matriarchal planet ruled by warrior women and almost certainly was an influence that led to my friends' catchphrase of 2019, "Why do people keep giving you knives?!"
Haha, that's amazing! (I too love knives & would like for to have more of them)
Tangential to this topic (though related by Rian Johnson): there's some great knife imagery in Knives Out.
My favourite piece of Star Wars media is KOTOR II. It's a lot like The Last Jedi in that it interrogates a lot of the core assumptions of the franchise, while still telling a good Star Wars story. It has deep characters, strong storytelling (as long as you have the restoration mod, because the game was shovelled out unfinished) but yeah. It's fascinating, exciting and clever. The first KOTOR is fine, but II actually has interesting things to say about Star Wars and gaming as whole.
I also love the janky Tales of the Jedi comics from the early nineties. So melodramatic. So dumb. So satisfying.
Well, I say favourite piece. I can only say that due to my massive enduring love for all Star Wars media, because it doesn't work without that context.
Since I recently learned of the re-release/mod, I’ve been eager to play again.
It's definitely worth checking out
I guess my favorite thing is actually a feeling. I’ll never forget being 16 and sitting in a dark theater watching Luke Skywalker watch a twin sunset to the swell of orchestral music and the sense of wonder, loneliness, and longing it evoked. It was visually so different from anything I’d seen before. (Up ‘til then I was more of a Twilight Zone kind of sci-fi fan.) As the film series progressed I always was so aware of the twin suns of Tatooine and that it was a movie series about twins, though later I was annoyed that evidently the boy twin was counted as more of a “new hope” than the girl twin. But that scene of the sunset is just burned into my brain.
Ahhhh I love the twin suns so much!! This is such a beautiful thing.
Ahsoka Tano! Best growth as a character! My opinion is based on the "Clone Wars the animated series", the novel Ahsoka, and rebels. She also appears in several comics.
Costume design. (Surprise surprise.) But I do love that Star Wars brings huge, meticulous visual variety in every onscreen story. It can too often dip into appropriation and cultural illiteracy, but that problem tends to stay in the prequels, thankfully. And the rest of the time it’s incredible and beautiful.
Also that thing of when a big ship is moving slowly and smaller ships are zipping past and around it. I live for that.
Oooh I hear you. A thing I didn't realize how much I loved until today was seeing what giant space battles look like from a planet. That frozen streaking of strange light in the sky. Just amazing.
The utterly inexplicable theme songs from the (Canadian) Droids and Ewoks cartoon have a special place in my heart, but I think that ultimately the original trilogy or "oridge tridge" is my favorite part of the whole franchise. It hit me at the right age that it has its hooks and barbs buried deep in my heart and I can't ever let it go, no matter how hard the ancillary material tries to dislodge them.
THOSE WERE MY INTRODUCTION TO THE FRANCHISE
ps come on these are utterly charming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7XCe2XorcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2cbGNE0xeo
I know just what you mean about the trilogy. Seeing the first movie in the theater when I was nine and then devouring any background info as it came out in dribs and drabs — the trading cards that gave Luke and Leia different ages, hahaha! When my memory starts going those will probably stick until the end.
Star Wars got me into science fiction. I literally didn't think I liked science fiction until I saw A New Hope. (I've liked fantasy for pretty much as long as I can remember.) I saw the movie and then started borrowing Extended Universe books from one of my friends and that was pretty much that! Star Wars was my first major fandom.
I'm also a huge fan of The Last Jedi for many reasons. My very favorite part of it might be Yoda talking about failure and teaching. It's so *true*.
My favourite part is when I learned about all of the behind-the-scenes magic that went into creating the magical elements for the original trilogy. I just have so much awe for people who had worked on fantastical films pre-CGI. The people who wore those costumes, the people who made those costumes, the people who had the idea to make hover cars by post-editing the wheels from vehicles. *All* of those miniature models of the planets and the space ships.
My favorite part is the redemption stories. I love that everyone can have a second act.
I absolutely love that this is the question you asked! I think for me it's the detail - I love that for practically every recognisable character in the films, there's a name, a backstory, someone who loves that character. It makes the world feel endless in a way that no other fictional universe does, to me. (My favourite Noelle Stevenson fact is that her favourite Star Wars character is Zam Wessel. You know, the shapeshifting assassin from AotC who dies in the first ten minutes.)
As for individual bits - I love The Last Jedi. I love Rebels. I love Thrawn. And it's early days, but I think Fallen Order might join that list too.
Ahhhhh I love this fact about Noelle Stevenson because the character who has made me SOB THE MOST IN ANY FILM is ... PAIGE TICO!!!!!!!!! ughhhh now I have thought about her & so must go cry, excuse me
Paige 😭 the first time I saw it I actually thought she was Rose, cause I'd been avoiding spoilers and only knew her name and not what she looked like, and then I was like OH NO
This is my favorite answer. Without spoilers, I love the way they recognized that history in TROS.
Uh, so Max ran this Star Wars game in WEG in college, which is definitely my favorite Star Wars thing ever. But if you mean published, the Knights of the Old Republic games. They are some of the best computer roleplaying games ever.
Oooh I had not heard of those! (Awww Max running a Star Wars game!!! My only experience of Star Wars TTRPG was a one-off in highschool that wasn't very memorable but none of us really knew what we were doing)
I can't speak too clearly about what I love the most without spoiling RoS, so I'll talk about the second thing - that it had such a strong impact on us that we *know characters names even when they're never spoken in the movies.* I convinced my parents to sit through the credits of Empire so I could find out the name of Lando's cyborg helper (only he was referred to as 'Lando's Aide' so I had to wait for the comics aargh) and the rebel force general (General Rieekan! Played by an actor from Alberta!)... sheesh, who knew it'd be Boba Fett who was the most popular unnamed character? From then on, I'd watch credits for most movies if I saw them on TV, hoping for bit characters to have names, to have a history, to have a *life* that was just hinted at.
This means that Buboicullaar [Jabba's froggydog] ended up being my 3rd favorite character, because omg they named the frogpuppy, and that I'm still hoping for named Jawas in movie/TV credits.
My favourite things at the moment are Leia/Carrie Fisher (@Davud Hogg Said it beautifully) and Rogue One (loved pretty much everything about it, despite the mysterious absence of female population).
Also, I’m really impressed with the storytelling and characters that have come out of the animated series!
Hands down the A. C. Crispin and Brian Daley novels about Han and Chewy. 6 books detailing Han’s life from teenager to that day in Mos Eisley. Lots of details about Hutts and their society. Colorful smugglers. The complicated Solo family. Coruscant’s ghettos. How Han earned his Corellian Bloodstripe. Fabulous writing throughout.
I've been watching Rebels recently, and Hera is my new favorite Star Wars character. So many female characters in her role are treated as maternal figures, but Hera is nobody's mom--she's a captain and a guerrilla fighter. We get to see her in moments of competence, vulnerability, anger, frustration, fear, joy, and contentment. Not many characters get as much range as she does.
There’s lots from the original trilogy, but most recently Doctor Aphra, both Kieron Gillen and Si Spurrier’s runs. So well written, and space archaeologists!
I think Vonda McIntyre's THE CRYSTAL STAR might be my favorite piece of Star Wars storytelling. Or at least, it holds a certain sway over my high school age brain.
Knights of the Old Republic, both the video game and the comics, are some of the best storytelling in that universe. (Set three thousand years before the films.) Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane trilogy and Matthew Woodring Stover’s Shatterpoint novel are the novels I liked best.
So, this is going to be an unusual choice, but there's an amazing Phineas and Ferb Star Wars musical crossover, which has songs that manage to highlight, in particular, complex and bizarre aspects of the fandom. In particular, "Tatooine" is all about how amazing Tatooine is and why young heroes might _not_ want to leave the planet and never return, while "In the Empire" really drums down on the shiny attractive fascism of the Stormtroopers and questions why they are so appealing to so many fans and toy marketers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zecW__kovY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmREgtQxgAA