The final trailer for The Last Jedi dropped just a few days ago, leaving all of us with some mixed feelings. For me, this is Carrie Fisher’s last movie, and part of me doesn’t want to believe that she’s really gone. The possibility of seeing her die on screen also gives me pause. Nevertheless, I’d go see this movie just for her, even if I wasn’t a giant Star Wars nerd. Carrie Fisher, the world did not deserve you. Rest in peace.
Lightsabers are awesome. Who wouldn’t want one? They’re magical light swords powered by crystals, and they can slash your enemies to fiery bits. Lightsabers are all around some of the sweetest weapons in any fictional story. Unfortunately, despite the large role lightsabers play in all seven of the Star Wars movies, and even in the cartoons, we don’t really know all that much about them, their creation, or how Jedi and Sith relate to their weapons. This seems like a bit of an oversight, considering Rey’s reaction to touching Anakin’s lightsaber in The Force Awakens. We are told the lightsaber actually called out to her, and that it’s probably the lightsaber that showed her all those things. What this means is that lightsabers have to be more than just awesome weapons. They also have to have their own connection to the Force, and maybe even some semblance of sentience as well. One of the defining features of lightsabers is their color, and the color can tell us a lot about that saber and its owner.
I firmly believe that one of the reasons why Star Wars is going to stand the test of time is because it’s the classic hero’s journey. Our plucky hero hears the call to adventure, but needs reassurance before they begin. Once our hero sets out, they meet all kinds of interesting characters and gains knowledge and training and spiffy tools to help them with their mission. Just when they think they’re at their lowest, they’re pulled out from despair and prepared for the final boss battle. Our hero wins, we celebrate, and our hero is a changed person for it. This model worked for the original trilogy, and it looks like it’s working for The Force Awakens, too.
You could probably name dozens of stories that fit this model without much effort. You see shadows of this model all throughout the Bible, too. In the Old and New Testaments we have all kinds of stories of people that follow a similar (or the same) framework. So it’d be easy to say that Star Wars is a Christian story, right? We have a great fight between good and evil, the Jedi are a lot like monks, and even the evil Darth Vader has that gloriously religious line: “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Christian groups clamor to ride the hype train by injecting Star Wars themes into religious services. Alissa Wilkinson’s article in Christianity Today shows just how popular a “spirituality of Star Wars” is becoming in all sorts of religious groups, especially among Christians. But does it work? Is Star Wars really a universe compatible with Christian beliefs?
Spoilers abound below.
Star Wars’s next episode is almost here, you guys! Well, it’s a couple months away, but still, I’m excited, and I’m feeling all Star Wars-y today because of it.
So in order to celebrate, let’s talk about Jedi, monks, and monasticism. The Jedi are warrior monks, who spend their days either meditating or kicking Sith ass. They live minimalistic lives and belong to a spiritual order charged with keeping the peace. The Jedi and their way of life, like many other things in Star Wars, are based off Eastern cultures and religions, but the story is told from a Western lens. As such, the story, especially in the prequels, doesn’t really do all that well representing the way of life it borrows from.
image via funnyjunk
Last year I wrote an article about nuns in geek culture. Nuns and religious sisters of all stripes have such great potential as iconic feminist characters, but writers spend more time casting them as evil sexy sirens in black and white costumes. But what about the nun’s male counterpart, the monk? Monks are men who take vows of virtue and live apart from society (usually in a community with other monks). They’re mainstays of both Western and Eastern religions. Monks challenge popular stereotypes of what real masculinity looks like. And yet monks face a problem similar to nuns: we can’t seem to break them out of a handful of inaccurate stereotypes.
Spoilers for Doctor Who and Avatar: The Last Airbender after the jump.
The Force and whether or not it’s balanced has always been a central part of the Star Wars mythos. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Force—sometimes referred to as the Way in ancient times—was a field of energy created by all living things. In the prequels, we discover that this energy field actually came about by microscopic organisms called midi-chlorians living in people’s bloodstreams. Someone who had a lot of midi-chlorians was called Force-sensitive, and they could interact with the Force to perform amazing feats—telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, and more.
Naturally, different religious factions came about, with different beliefs about the Force and how best to use it. One of the main tenets was that the Force needed to be balanced, and according to prophecy, that balance could only be brought about by a Chosen One. This Chosen One prophecy ended up being a central part to the prequel universe, and it was something about Star Wars that I was always interested in exploring more. Unfortunately, the prequels never explain to us what the prophecy is, the Chosen One’s role in it, or what balancing the Force even means.
After the Star Wars prequels came out, I found myself a little disenchanted with the entirety of the universe. Let’s face it, Episodes I–III were really bad. Poor characterization, plot holes, the works. To this day, I still don’t even understand why the events in Episode I even warranted a movie, since that entire film could probably be cut and the franchise would lose very little.
Coming to my rescue, however, and restoring my love for the Star Wars Universe, was Misunderstood by Quill of Molliemon.
Thus far, I have found two trailers for this series. There’s the one above, and there’s another that’s only around fifteen seconds long and features a lone ship flying through space. All in all, I didn’t find either of them particularly compelling. However, for those like me who were wishing to know more about the series, Disney has thankfully released a clip or two already and a couple “Meet the Characters” videos.
So sure, neither of the trailers I found really tell me all that much, but the characters themselves seem interesting enough, and there’s one that I’m really excited to learn more about: Sabine.
Yeah, she’s someone who I can easily see myself falling in love with, which is good, because unfortunately for me, Ahsoka Tano is nowhere to be seen.
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be divided by a pretty definitive line. Science fiction deals in advanced technology that either doesn’t exist yet, such as interplanetary travel on massive levels, or seems to be completely impossible given what we currently understand about science, like Stargates. We suspend our disbelief and for a brief period of time allow for the possibility of the seemingly impossible. Fantasy also requires our suspension of disbelief for another seemingly impossible matter, one that is generally more fantastical that scientific. On top of that, magic is normally an unexplainable construct within a universe, and its existence is usually simply accepted without any kind of reasoning as to why it’s there. That tends to be the purpose of the fantastical. We suspend our disbelief for it, and though we like to learn how it works, we don’t need its existence defined.
This distinction, however, is not always clear cut, and it has resulted in some debate over which category Star Wars falls into. On the one hand, though it takes place “a long time ago”, the setting is still a futuristic society with advanced technology and space travel. On the other hand, the story still utilizes some fantastical elements in how it presents its technology—lightsabers, the Death Star, etc.
Light doesn’t bend like this. Sorry.
But probably most fantastical is the Force. Because of this, I would classify Star Wars as science fantasy, since it has elements of both. I mean, let’s face it; the Force is essentially just magic.
So quite a while back, I did a post on the Jedi and their sexual relations, but I feel the need to revisit this world. One nice thing about the prequel universe—depending on how you look at it—is that nothing is developed at all. Characters are personality-free vehicles going through the motions George Lucas wanted them to, and the universe itself certainly isn’t portrayed that well either. In some ways, this is a good thing, because it gave the Clone Wars a lot of space to work with. In fact, it gave just about anything dealing with this time period a lot of room to work with. But the Clone Wars is what I’m most familiar with, so we’re going to use it almost exclusively for the purposes of this post.
One thing that I always liked about Stars Wars, especially on the planet of Coruscant, is that there are a bunch of different sentient species all intermingling with each other. However, it doesn’t often appear that they are engaging in interspecies relations. We know that there has been and probably still are sexual relationships between people of different species going on in the universe. Every once in a while, characters will be revealed as being bispecies, and the Twi’leks in particular have a long history of being sold into slavery, with their women usually ending up as sex slaves. (The Wookieepedia article says that they usually were dancers or entertainers for their owners, because of how attractive people found them, but let’s be realistic: they’re used as sex slaves.)
However, the fact that there are interspecies relationships—outside of slavery—makes the Star Wars universe much more interesting.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 