Star Wars AU of the day
Oct. 24th, 2007 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerBefore plunging into the fannish fun, a note on something closer to home: Southern California is burning down. This is all taking place hundreds of miles from my home, and it feels like it's some distant story on another planet - but a really, really depressing story.
I was surfing through the links at this Star Wars blogathon to see what was outside my usual circles. Now, the first thing I noticed was actually this: I was going down the list, looking at the contributors' names, and went, "Chris, Nathaniel, Scott, Bob, Jeff, Adam, Dan, Peter... you know, there's something different about this list... Oh!" I'd actually forgotten that women actually don't comprise the vast majority of Star Wars fans. (Now there's material for a snarky satire article: "OMG there are mens on teh internets!!!1! What could they want with a tool mainly used for communication, which everyone knows is a girl thing? Experts say they're there for arguments about who is the best lightsaber master ever.")
Anyway, while reading through an entry on RotS and the prequels generally, I came across this quote: "One of the major themes is not to judge a person’s worth by their appearance: R2, Ewoks, Chewie [say, shouldn't the Falcon be on this list?]; they can all look after themselves. So it’s a little shameful that Jar Jar is ultimately a fool figure."
Wait, that's not the quote I meant (though it's a good one). No, the one that really caught my attention spoke more generally about the prequels dropping the ball on really making a cohesive story that doesn't wander off in all directions:
Now, it's Star Wars tradition to randomly introduce new planets, aliens, and villains at any moment, even when there are already perfectly good ones who could do the job, but that doesn't mean Lucas had to do it in RotS too. We already get the montage of Jedi dying on a bunch of new worlds, and we already have new locations Utapau, Mustafar, and Polis Massa as well, so we don't really need yet another new planet. All those new planets keep the galaxy from feeling too small, but replacing one of them with a planet from a previous movie would keep RotS from feeling quite so rushed and scattered. Actually, the originals do this already: hi again, Tatooine! And hello, mysterious Jabba; good to finally meet you after two movies of ominous hints! See? Works great.
But I differ from the above scenario on one point: instead of cutting the Wookiees and slaughtering the Gungans, I say cut the Gungans and slaughter the Wookiees. This way, we not only tie the prequel trilogy together, but the whole saga too! This way, even if we never saw Chewbacca himself in the alternate prequels, we'd be able to fill in the blanks and go, "Oh, he must have been living on the run since the Empire killed and enslaved his people back in RotS. No wonder he's hooked up with a smuggler and started working for a Hutt!" Extra layers of meaning with no changes to the Originals required.
And there's plenty of opportunity for neat trilogy-bridging references in the prequels, too. Everyone else's parents or mentors show up, so instead of Jar Jar, why not have, say, Chewie's mother? It could be one of those throwaway lines where she mentions her son Chewbacca who's working as a mechanic or hyperdrive engineer or whatever back home. That would take up far less time than Jar Jar's antics.
Yeah, there's the slight problem of Wookiees being from Kashyyyk rather than Naboo, which would make the plot of TPM difficult. But since that's never actually stated in the originals, Lucas could have done whatever he wanted and left us to retcon as best we could (see: Boba Fett's origins). He could have said that Kashyyyk is the Wookiee name for Naboo, and the Naboo are living on land they clear-cut a couple of millenia ago, which is why they and the Wookiees haven't gotten along since, for instance.
Then we could sit here and imagine how much cooler even than that the movies would be if Lucas had had Wookiees in Return of the Jedi instead of Ewoks, the way he originally wanted it...
So that's my shiny toy for the day.
I was surfing through the links at this Star Wars blogathon to see what was outside my usual circles. Now, the first thing I noticed was actually this: I was going down the list, looking at the contributors' names, and went, "Chris, Nathaniel, Scott, Bob, Jeff, Adam, Dan, Peter... you know, there's something different about this list... Oh!" I'd actually forgotten that women actually don't comprise the vast majority of Star Wars fans. (Now there's material for a snarky satire article: "OMG there are mens on teh internets!!!1! What could they want with a tool mainly used for communication, which everyone knows is a girl thing? Experts say they're there for arguments about who is the best lightsaber master ever.")
Anyway, while reading through an entry on RotS and the prequels generally, I came across this quote: "One of the major themes is not to judge a person’s worth by their appearance: R2, Ewoks, Chewie [say, shouldn't the Falcon be on this list?]; they can all look after themselves. So it’s a little shameful that Jar Jar is ultimately a fool figure."
Wait, that's not the quote I meant (though it's a good one). No, the one that really caught my attention spoke more generally about the prequels dropping the ball on really making a cohesive story that doesn't wander off in all directions:
It's this overall mess that is more frustrating than individual elements or moments. That is: Jar Jar Binks himself, Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters voice and all, is less galling than the total dropping of Gungans from the story by the time we reach Sith. If this trilogy were less of a mess, we wouldn’t hear Mace say the word Kashyyyk, and the big invasion would be about the nascent Empire slaughtering Gungans. That is what is set up in Episode I, and that should’ve been delivered in tragic spades in III.
Now, it's Star Wars tradition to randomly introduce new planets, aliens, and villains at any moment, even when there are already perfectly good ones who could do the job, but that doesn't mean Lucas had to do it in RotS too. We already get the montage of Jedi dying on a bunch of new worlds, and we already have new locations Utapau, Mustafar, and Polis Massa as well, so we don't really need yet another new planet. All those new planets keep the galaxy from feeling too small, but replacing one of them with a planet from a previous movie would keep RotS from feeling quite so rushed and scattered. Actually, the originals do this already: hi again, Tatooine! And hello, mysterious Jabba; good to finally meet you after two movies of ominous hints! See? Works great.
But I differ from the above scenario on one point: instead of cutting the Wookiees and slaughtering the Gungans, I say cut the Gungans and slaughter the Wookiees. This way, we not only tie the prequel trilogy together, but the whole saga too! This way, even if we never saw Chewbacca himself in the alternate prequels, we'd be able to fill in the blanks and go, "Oh, he must have been living on the run since the Empire killed and enslaved his people back in RotS. No wonder he's hooked up with a smuggler and started working for a Hutt!" Extra layers of meaning with no changes to the Originals required.
And there's plenty of opportunity for neat trilogy-bridging references in the prequels, too. Everyone else's parents or mentors show up, so instead of Jar Jar, why not have, say, Chewie's mother? It could be one of those throwaway lines where she mentions her son Chewbacca who's working as a mechanic or hyperdrive engineer or whatever back home. That would take up far less time than Jar Jar's antics.
Yeah, there's the slight problem of Wookiees being from Kashyyyk rather than Naboo, which would make the plot of TPM difficult. But since that's never actually stated in the originals, Lucas could have done whatever he wanted and left us to retcon as best we could (see: Boba Fett's origins). He could have said that Kashyyyk is the Wookiee name for Naboo, and the Naboo are living on land they clear-cut a couple of millenia ago, which is why they and the Wookiees haven't gotten along since, for instance.
Then we could sit here and imagine how much cooler even than that the movies would be if Lucas had had Wookiees in Return of the Jedi instead of Ewoks, the way he originally wanted it...
So that's my shiny toy for the day.
