Star Wars Multiverse 9781978815292

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STAR WARS MULTIVERSE

QU I C K TA K E S: M O V IE S A N D P O P U L A R CU LT U RE Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high-quality writing on cutting-edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics. SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Rebecca Bell-­Metereau, Transgender Cinema Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies Jonna Eagle, War Games Carmelo Esterrich, Star Wars Multiverse Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies Desirée J. Garcia, The Movie Musical Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema Julie Grossman, The Femme Fatale Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises

Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema Carl Plantinga, Alternative Realities Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema Stephen Prince, Apocalypse Cinema Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes Dahlia Schweitzer, Haunted Homes Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies John Wills, Disney Culture

CARMELO ESTERRICH

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Esterrich, Carmelo, author. Title: Star Wars multiverse / Carmelo Esterrich. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Quick takes: movies and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045571 | ISBN 9781978815254 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978815261 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978815278 (epub) | ISBN 9781978815285 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978815292 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Star Wars films—History and criticism. | Star Wars fiction—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S695 E88 2021 | DDC 791.43/75—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045571 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2021 by Carmelo Esterrich All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

TO BECKA, WONDERFUL FRIEND TO JOSEPH, HUSBAND EXTRAORDINAIRE

CONTENTS

Preface: Seriously, Star Wars 1

2

Navigating a Multiverse: Watching, Reading, Wearing Star Wars

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Humans and Creatures + Droids: Hierarchies of Life

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3

Imperial Desires: War, Order, Colonialism

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4

Beyond Princesses and Flyboys: Gender and Sexuality in Star Wars

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Conclusion: Star Wars, Seriously

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Acknowledgments135 Further Reading

137

Works Cited

141

Filmography149 Index151

PREFACE

Seriously, Star Wars

When you really pay attention, Star Wars is surprisingly tricky. It has harrowing films like Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, with Anakin Skywalker spiraling downward into the darkness of Darth Vader, and it has delightfully clever droids like R2-D2 and BB-8. It has disconcerting events, like the carnage at the Battle of Umbara on the television show The Clone Wars or the horrifying encounter between Leia Organa and Eneb Ray in Marvel comics, but it also has Ewoks, Porgs, and the irresistible Grogu from The Mandalorian. Star Wars straddles horror and cuteness, despair and optimism. Star Wars is disturbing and sentimental, charming, humorous. Star Wars is paradox and simplicity. But there’s a tendency to focus on its simplicity: the mythical and archetypal nature of the narratives; the obviously symbolic names of many characters (Greedo, Savage Opress, Darth Tyranus, Skywalker); the seemingly simple notion of the Force, with its dark and light ix

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sides; the perennial presence of hope in so many of the stories. Focusing on these elements has led many people to dismiss Star Wars as merely for kids, and indeed it is partially marketed that way. Star Wars has toys galore; it has graded readers and Little Golden Books. Some public libraries even have their Star Wars movies and television shows in the “juvenile” section, in the same room with Pikachu and Dora the Explorer. Possibly because of the impression that this world is fundamentally for children, Star Wars is not often taken very seriously—certainly not as seriously as other American space narratives like Star Trek or recent television shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse. But we should take Star Wars seriously. The world of Star Wars is more than cute creatures, thrilling battles, and awesome explosions. It is also filled with thought-provoking ideas: the social and cultural effects of war; political oppression and colonialism; discrimination, patriarchy, and xenophobia. And elements like the Force, as we watch and read the narratives carefully, become less and less simple. Kids are not the only consumers of Star Wars. And, besides, even if it was “kiddie stuff ” (including the kid in us adults), children’s culture still deserves a meticulous, astute examination, because it is inevitably informed by

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serious and significant cultural, social, and political ideas. Furthermore, understanding our stories—particularly the ones we experience through media—sensitizes us to how we view the world and how we interact with it. This book leads off from the premise that Star Wars is as otherworldly as it is familiar. It is only seemingly, fictionally, in a galaxy far far away. As an undeniable American cultural product, Star Wars reflects our own world. It portrays very particular notions of empire, democracy, and authoritarianism. The sentient beings that inhabit it are gendered and racialized in specific Western ways; some are socially privileged, others are marginalized. The well-known reactions to the first appearance of JarJar Binks in Episode I: The Phantom Menace indicate how acutely aware audiences are of the connections in Star Wars with our world. Scholarly or journalistic, in print or online, serious examinations of Star Wars tend to fall into a few general categories. Some writing focuses on Star Wars as a phenomenon—its fans, its appeal, its popularity. Some center on the stories, either regarding it as a modern myth that borrows from an entire tradition of popular narratives (ancient myths and legends, Hollywood and Japanese film, comics) or pointing out how specific political, cultural, and social elements in Star Wars connect to (mostly) American culture and history. More recent

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work has done important analyses of gender, politics, and media. And to be sure, many of these are engaging, useful, and suggestive approaches. With this book, I would like to shift the focus. Instead of studying the specific connections between, for example, the original trilogy of films and the Cold War, or the Jedi Order’s appropriation of Buddhism, I want to examine how the fictional world of Star Wars, as a world informed by our world, operates culturally and socially. Instead of “universalizing” Star Wars as a modern myth, I would like to particularize it, acknowledging that, for better and for worse, Star Wars replicates our globalized, American world. What is the social and cultural relationship between humans and droids? What about all the nonhumans that inhabit the galaxy—how do they fit in the social hierarchy? How do language and accent (and subtitles!) play into all this? How does Star Wars think about war and empire? What articulations of masculinity and femininity are favored in this world? I want to examine the intricacies of the fictionalized cultural makeup of Star Wars without ever forgetting that the cultures from the galaxy far far away are all constructed from the complex fabric of our own. Except in recent publications, most Star Wars analyses tend to focus only on the films. Today, that would amount to an irresponsible act. As I argue in chapter 1, there is a

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multiplicity of Star Wars beyond cinema in comics, television, and fiction; there is also a rich amount of material produced by fans, artists, and filmmakers who, outside the control of Disney and Lucasfilm, manage to expand Star Wars in revealing ways. This book wants to survey an all-inclusive Star Wars. There are a few things this book is not. I am not going to engage in a value judgment of Star Wars artifacts. I am not interested here in cinematic, televisual, or literary quality but in what Star Wars reveals through these artifacts. This book is most definitely not a fan memoir, but it would be foolish to assert that my identities will not frame and influence how I approach Star Wars. Though I am sure the film scholar will temper the fan, the fan might at times sidestep the scholar; the Puerto Rican man, in his colonial experience, will inform notions of empire and citizenship; the gay man, all too aware of the social constructions of gender and sexuality, will reframe the discussions of how male and female and femininity and masculinity get articulated in Star Wars storytelling. If you are actually holding this book, as opposed to reading it electronically, you’ve already noticed that it is not a large tome. This is not the space to be exhaustive or “completist” or encyclopedic (that’s what Wookieepedia is for!). The objective of this book is to kick-start more conversations and not to be the last word on Star

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Wars. I have tried to pick examples from inside and outside the screen, from films and novels, television and comics, that are illustrative of what Star Wars does, what Star Wars signifies, how Star Wars represents; but there will always be many more examples out there. Also, in our lightning-speed world of posting and reacting, slashing and ranting, I hope a book, that deliciously slow medium, can produce a space to think and critique with judicious excitement and composed thought processes. Rather than the knee-jerk reaction of social media, books allow us to ruminate—a healthy activity indeed. Stephen Colbert was the host of the Star Wars Celebration Chicago panel on the then forthcoming Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. He began by saying that we go to Star Wars to escape and to dream. It’s hard to disagree with that. But with this book, I want to argue that we can go to Star Wars to think, as we ponder and wander through its layered and complex worlds.

STAR WARS MULTIVERSE

1 NAVIGATING A MULTIVERSE Watching, Reading, Wearing Star Wars

Star Wars is not one universe. It is a multitude of them. Though the narrative is all set in one huge galaxy (nominally far far away), experiencing that narrative is multifaceted. There are the movies, of course. Since the mid-1980s, there have been television shows, many of them animated. There is fiction. Literally hundreds of novels and comics emerge from and expand stories and characters from film and television, including a vast array of young-adult novels and children’s books. There are role-playing games; there are toys—lots of toys. After Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, theme parks opened in California and Florida. In addition to all this, and no less interesting, there is a universe not produced by either Lucasfilm or Disney: fan fiction, fan art, and cosplay create yet another layer of Star Wars. 1

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The franchise and the fan base have historically referred to the world beyond the films as the Expanded Universe (aka EU), but I believe this term is not as accurate as it once was. Early on, the films were indeed the focus, and the books and comics “expanded” the cinematic saga. That view of the relationship is difficult to sustain today. While the films are still advertised and received as major events, the television shows and even some of the novels and comics have an increasingly important role in the narrative. Characters that are not present in the live-action movies, such as Grand Admiral Thrawn or Ahsoka Tano, have developed a huge following, becoming, I would argue, quintessential Star Wars. There are important plot points (to the delight of some and the aggravation of others) that now occur not in a film but in a comic book, a television episode, or a novel. Recent films like Rogue One and Solo are subtitled “A Star Wars Story,” revealing their supplemental quality to the narratives—just as a Star Wars novel or a comic-book series might have been introduced and marketed in the past. In 2014, in preparation for the sequel trilogy of films (Episode VII: The Force Awakens; Episode VIII: The Last Jedi; and Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker), Lucasfilm and Disney declared that a large part of the material already released (novels, comics, some television shows) would not count as “canon” anymore but rather

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as “legends” of Star Wars; in the process, they inadvertently created a Star Wars alternate universe! Since the rise of social media, fan art and images of cosplaying are easily accessible and consumable. Because of all these factors, I would like to suggest that we talk not about an Expanded Universe but rather a Star Wars multiverse. I realize I am not using the term the way contemporary science has in recent years, nor am I trying to suggest a parallel with the Marvel multiverse. But I am intrigued by the term as a word that encompasses the multiple and the singular—a multi-/uni-verse. As such, it can articulate the intersections of Star Wars in cinema, television, comics, fiction of all sorts, cosplay, and other fan-produced material. The noncinematic universes are too rich to be pushed aside as second tier; let us allow the idea of a multiverse to include the many worlds and many platforms on an equal footing. It is undeniable that there is a commercial objective to these various platforms (Disney made back the purchase price of Lucasfilm in just a few years; Whitten), but these platforms also create, in a very real way, a richer narrative and a more intricate world. This chapter delves into how cinema and television, comics and fiction, even cosplay, interact with each other, complementing, supplementing, and creating fascinating and complex layers of what we might start calling the Star Wars multiverse.

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TELEVISING THE CLONE WARS

Because of the audiovisual nature and reach of television, it has garnered an important position in the Star Wars multiverse. While it is true that the remarkable popularity of The Mandalorian (Disney+, 2019–20) has secured the place of television as an essential medium, almost two decades of animated shows on Cartoon Network, Netflix, and Disney XD have generated a mountain of Star Wars lore. Especially since the first episodes of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars (2003–5), television has become a space to develop characters we knew well from the films while also introducing narratives and characters that were not present in the Skywalker saga or had only a brief appearance in those films. Beyond additional content, serial television also contributes a different approach to narration. While television shares stylistic elements with film, its multiepisodic nature frees Star Wars from the somewhat self-contained stories of cinema (though I grant that the use of trilogies in the movies might have prepared the way for televisual Star Wars). The long arc of serial television allows slower pacing, which lets audiences become acquainted with planets and creatures, witness the unfolding of historical events, and experience gradual character development.

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It also encourages the creation of multiple narrative arcs within a show. Except for The Mandalorian, which benefits from the flexible nature of streaming television, Star Wars episodes have been short in duration. Most are in thirty-minute slots; the earliest episodes in Cartoon Network last all of three minutes! The short episode format, however, allows for quick bursts of tight narrative, as compact and full of plot as a good episode of The Simpsons. Television, not unlike comics, broadens Star Wars without slowing down either narrative action or the energetic vitality that is characteristic of the films. An excellent example of how television augmented and enhanced the Star Wars narrative is its portrayal of the clone wars. From the moment Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi briefly discussed them in A New Hope (the very first Star Wars film, though now officially Episode IV), the clone wars were the object of wild speculation and mystery. A watershed historical event that ended the Republic, destroyed the Jedi Order, and established the Galactic Empire is hard to resist! (And what about those clones?) Not until the prequel trilogy (Episode I: The Phantom Menace; Episode II: Attack of the Clones; and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) did Lucasfilm finally start to depict certain events of the wars. But as the clone wars

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appear in the trilogy, they are mostly backdrop. Except for a small smattering of battles and the devastating Order 66 that kills off most of the Jedi, the focus of these films is the story of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader. Though there was some fiction published during and after the prequel trilogy dealing with the wars, television is principally responsible for the way we imagine and understand them today. The first attempt to narrate the clone wars in detail actually occurred during the production of the prequel trilogy: Lucasfilm decided to produce a 2-D animated television show to bridge the creation of the clone army at the end of II: Attack of the Clones and the Battle of Coruscant at the beginning of III: Revenge of the Sith. For the job, it hired Genndy Tartakovsky, an animator from Cartoon Network who created Dexter’s Laboratory and the award-winning Samurai Jack (“Genndy”). While Star Wars movies tend to be a bit over two hours, this show was made in “microepisodes”—from three to five minutes in the first two seasons and twelve to fifteen in the third and final season. The remarkable visual economy of Tartakovsky’s animation style worked well with the short length. His style does not aim for realism; on the contrary, his cartooning relies on abstraction and expressionistic draftsmanship to land an emotional and narrative punch. If the plots in his Clone Wars are necessarily

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simple, they make up for it in visual spectacle and layered characterization. Regardless of its noncanonical status in the multiverse (as if!), Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars proved that minimalist narration can work excellently for Star Wars—so much so that, after III: Revenge of the Sith and with no film projects in sight, Lucasfilm decided to return to the short format of animated television. Once again, it chose the clone wars. Moving away from traditional cell animation, this new rendition of the clone wars employed 3-D computer animation, and the episodes were made in traditional twenty-­two-minute, “half-hour” slots. I find this decision to continue with animation very interesting. I don’t disagree with Will Brooker’s assertion that CGI and computer animation align with George Lucas’s desire for production control, “containing and excluding the rogue energy of actors, special-effects mavericks and idiosyncratic crew members” (82). Still, animation adds another visual language to Star Wars, superimposing the hyperbolic graphics of comics onto the hyperdetailed spectacle of the moving image. The Clone Wars (differentiated from the Tartakovsky show by the definite article) is another attempt at narrating the wars, though there is a shift in focus. As the show’s supervising director, David Filoni, explained, “The Clone Wars is more about dealing overall with life during

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wartime” (qtd. in Sweet 4). And indeed, the show became a space for examining people’s behavior in wartime, not only the soldier and the military officer but also the refugee and the arms dealer, the senator and the profiteer. It showed audiences how different generations—from the very young to the very old—negotiated life during war, and it documented how war changed the political landscape of local and galactic governments. The significance of The Clone Wars is in its portrayal of the intricacies of war and the multitude of perspectives in a military conflict, transpiring episode by episode, season by season— slowly, painfully, devastatingly. The Clone Wars managed seven seasons of gradually unfolding war, something cinema—due to cost and time—would have a very difficult time achieving. The show also managed to make war quite complex, at times blurring the simple dichotomy of good guys and bad guys, ally and enemy, as Derek R. Sweet has eloquently argued in his book-length study of the show, Star Wars in the Public Square. The show abandons the Manichean structure that made the first Star Wars movie so popular. The Clone Wars is not without depictions of war as thrilling spectacle, and we do get a few story arcs that could be described as “kiddie” oriented, but the bulk of the show is persistently thinking about war and its social, psychological, and cultural effect, much as the animated show Rebels

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(Disney XD, 2014–18) would do a few years later. In spite of common assumptions, animation in Star Wars is not simply children’s programming. In The Clone Wars, there’s devastation, political intrigue, the impulse for violence, and the consequences of that violence. In The Clone Wars, we get a padawan ( Jedi apprentice) who has lost faith in the Jedi Order and sabotages the war effort. In The Clone Wars, we get a different padawan who, having lost the Order’s faith, leaves the Order permanently. In The Clone Wars, we witness societies realizing that allying with “the good guys”—the Republic, the Jedi Order, and the clone army—still means militarizing themselves. Two female characters in this television show merit mention, in that they complicate the narrative of the clone wars. Ahsoka Tano, an adolescent of the Togruta species, is the padawan of Anakin Skywalker. In many ways, she is the character who holds the hand of the audience as we enter war. As a Jedi apprentice, she is filled with questions about the Order and about its role in this tumultuous period. Ahsoka is forever wondering and questioning without ever being outright rebellious. She maintains a stubborn intelligence about what surrounds her and the contradictions she is experiencing as a Jedi at war. The other one is the formidable Assaj Ventress, a Dathomirian woman who had a brief but flashy debut in Tartakovsky’s show. In The Clone Wars, she initially appears as

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a two-dimensional evil character—hired assassin, Sith apprentice, and official representative of Count Dooku, the public persona of the Sith Lord Darth Tyranus. But after Dooku discards her, she has to figure out how to fit into the complicated world of a civil war. She tries returning home to join the clan of “magickal” Nightsisters; she tries bounty hunting; she even allies herself with characters who had been her enemy in the past. In the novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden—which is based on unproduced scripts of the television show—Ventress falls in love with the unlikeliest of partners: a Jedi. Television stands tall as a partner to the Star Wars cinematic world. The Clone Wars established the medium as a significant element of the multiverse; Rebels and The Mandalorian have made it fundamental. Television is not ancillary because, as we are about to see with fiction, it not only adds content to Star Wars but also adds complexity.

RETHINKING “BADDIES”

Fiction has been part of the Star Wars multiverse since the very beginning. George Lucas’s novel Star Wars was actually published five months before the release of Epi­ sode IV: A New Hope (Hidalgo, Essential vii). During the production of the original trilogy, several novels were published in addition to the novelization of the films. But

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after the successful reception of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy in the early 1990s, the number of Star Wars fiction books increased exponentially. Today, there are over four hundred novels and short-story collections, counting newer “canon” books and the older ones that Lucasfilm now calls “legends.” Before Star Wars came to television, fiction was the primary way of digging deeper and going beyond the cinematic narratives. The movies’ novelization always gave the reader a bit more than they had visually witnessed in the films—like a literary version of a director’s cut. The many other novels prior to the establishment of the recent canon truly “expanded” Star Wars: recounting the further adventures of principal characters of the trilogy, stories about the remote past of the galaxy, about Jedi apprentices and old Sith, about X-Wing pilots and bounty hunters. In the process, dozens of characters were added to the lore. This tendency continued with the so-called canon novels, though the majority of them have focused on stories connected in some way to the recent films and television shows. But fiction, as part of that “expanded universe,” did more than just add narratives to Star Wars. Star Wars fiction is intensely descriptive, in part because it maintains a narrative and stylistic connection with the audiovisual medium of film. But literature functions differently from film: written language permits a

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different type of introspection, with regard to both character and plot. Whether an author is using omniscient narration or the more intimate first person, fiction opens up a world of psychological detail that is not easily created in film. Literature is uniquely suited to helping us understand a character’s motivation, reactions, decisions, and internal conflict. One medium is not better than the other, but they create Star Wars in very different ways. The establishment of the new canon after Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm was intended to clear away impediments to the development of new stories and characters. The demotion to legends status affected fiction and comics the most. The term “legends” has been received with intense skepticism by readers and fans, but this controversial corporate pronouncement has had an interesting effect. My calling this body of work an alternate universe was not a throwaway comment. Mythology and the epic are filled with story variants, many of them contradictory: look at the ancient Greek or Norse tales of heroes and gods or the medieval legends of knights. Even something as well known as the Trojan War comes down to us in multiple versions. I am tickled by the idea that two hundred years from now, the distinction between Star Wars legends and canon might simply disappear. Not unlike the many stories of a Zeus or an Arthur, there are connections and divergences between Star

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Wars canon and legends. In Kevin J. Anderson’s 1994 Jedi Search, Han Solo’s famous Kessel run occurs after a shady spice pickup; in the canon film Solo, the Kessel run happens after stealing coaxium fuel. Luke Skywalker’s idea of establishing a place to train new Jedi after the collapse of the Empire, as told in flashback in VII: The Force Awak­ ens and VIII: The Last Jedi, has more than one parallel in Anderson’s Jedi Academy trilogy of novels. I am not particularly interested in the battles over which version is better, but I remain intrigued by the existence of different accounts of this or that story because they create layers of storytelling and interpretation. Legends versus canon is not the only hierarchy in Star Wars fiction. There is another. Among the hundreds of Star Wars books, a considerable number are what we now call junior and young-adult novels (or YA). The fourteen short novels of the Young Jedi Knights series, written by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta in the mid-1990s, focused on Han and Leia’s Force-sensitive twins, Jacen and Jaina (now relegated to legends status). During the prequel years, Scholastic published twenty novels in the Jedi Apprentice series, all but one written by Jude Watson (a pen name for the prolific Star Wars writer Judy Blundell), following the adventures of a very young padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi and his “new” master, Qui-Gon Jinn. Since Disney’s purchase, YA fiction

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remains alive and well. Authors like Claudia Gray, E. K. Johnston, Greg Rucka, Jason Fry, and Beth Revis have created novels about the young Leia Organa, the feisty Ahsoka Tano, Padmé Amidala, even Baze Malbus and Chirrut Îmwe, the former Guardians of the Whills from Rogue One. Do not let the term “young adult” mislead you. Though these novels are shorter than adult fiction, and the early ones contain a somewhat simpler language, they do not shy away from morally intricate stories and layered characterization. Before the complexity in The Clone Wars surfaced on television, YA novels of the prequel-trilogy era were already complicating Star Wars. In the Jedi Appren­ tice series, Qui-Gon Jinn and the preteen Kenobi are depicted “warts and all.” Obi-Wan, soon after becoming Qui-Gon’s apprentice, renounces the Jedi Order to join a planet’s righteous rebellion (The Defenders of the Dead, The Uncertain Path). Later in the series, Qui-Gon falls in love with another Jedi and makes a clandestine commitment to her. After she dies, Qui-Gon is consumed with anger and vengeance, reaching a point that is perilously close to the dark side (The Ties That Bind, The Death of Hope, The Call to Vengeance). In the end, Kenobi comes back to the Jedi Order and Qui-Gon rejects the dark side, but these novels portray the noble Jedi heroes of the prequel trilogy as conflicted, complex individuals. We are

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witnesses to morally difficult circumstances that, curiously, have no parallels in the films. One of the most remarkable novels in recent Star Wars young-adult fiction is Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars (2015). It is the story of Ciena Ree, a poor rural girl, and Thane Kyrell, a rich urban boy. The children meet and become fast friends, sharing a love of flying and a dream of studying at the Imperial Academy in Coruscant. That dream becomes a reality for both of them, but soon after they begin their lives as Imperial Navy officers, the destruction of the planet Alderaan by the Empire’s Death Star changes their lives forever. Thane deserts the Empire in disgust; he eventually joins the Rebel Alliance. Though shocked by the genocide, Ciena stays, convinced that she can still do good within Imperial ranks. Her duty to the Empire is strengthened when the Rebels destroy the Death Star in the Battle of Yavin, killing many of her friends. The novel is also a love story, weaving the development of their romantic relationship into the major events of the original movie trilogy. One of the reasons I call Lost Stars remarkable is that the novel depicts those who serve within the ranks of the Imperial Navy as full-fledged characters. This is incredibly rare in Star Wars. The amusing rap session from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994)—two young men at the convenience store debating the casualties of war during the

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destruction of the two Death Stars—is not only taken seriously in Lost Stars but taken to the next level. In Clerks, the boys have no qualms about the destruction of the first Death Star since everyone there was “evil”; their issue is in regard to the presumedly innocent “independent contractors” hired by the Empire who were working on the unfinished second Death Star and unjustly died when the Rebels destroyed the battle station. While the guys in Clerks recognize the loss of human life in an event that is perceived as “good” (blowing up the first Death Star), the clerks still see a moral difference between killing “baddies” and killing “innocents.” Not so in Lost Stars. By focusing on the “baddies,” the novel allows readers to become acquainted with a group of young men and women who view the Empire not as pure evil but as a legitimate government that protects its citizens and secures the peace of the galaxy. And these officers are depicted as individuals, so how they behave and carry out their duties differs widely. Some of them believe blindly in the Empire, others with some skepticism. Some are interested in doing good; others are interested in climbing up the ranks as quickly as possible. Some will die on the first Death Star; others will be transformed by its destruction. This perspective contrasts starkly with the portrayal of the Empire in the original trilogy. There, the countless

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humans who make up the Galactic Empire are either faceless stormtroopers or officers who are mostly preoccupied with following orders. In the films, many in the lower ranks have military caps that cover their eyes, as if to erase them as persons. Except for the handful of high-ranking officers given a few lines of dialogue, who come and go without much characterization, audiences never really meet anyone on either of the two Death Stars. Their deaths at the end of IV: A New Hope are not tragic. In Lost Stars, their deaths are devastating. Claudia Gray seems to be complicating the clear demarcation of good guys and bad guys that IV: A New Hope established. In the beginning scroll of that film, the Empire is the “Evil Galactic Empire”; the Rebels are being “pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents.” This Manichean notion of the world crumbles in Lost Stars. To be clear, Gray is not interested in vindicating the Empire— even Ciena toward the end of the novel realizes the inherent evil of the Empire’s actions—nor does the novel do away with the notion of evil to create some sort of relativistic moral ground. What Lost Stars accomplishes is to provide us with the possibility that within the Empire there might be individuals who do not necessarily agree with the Empire’s ethics and military decisions. Halfway through the novel, Gray gives readers two parallel scenes that question that systemic binary notion of good guys

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and bad. Though the orders for “Imperial” Ciena were simply to rescue the garrisons of a planet devastated by volcanic eruptions, she decides, all on her own, also to save a group of citizens trapped in a building nearby. In the following chapter, “Imperial deserter” Thane delivers medicines to a planet suffering under the harsh weather of a super hurricane. Granted, Ciena is punished because she failed to clear her decision with her Imperial superiors, but Claudia Gray is presenting readers with a noble act from someone who actually believes in the Empire. It’s important to point out that the notion in Lost Stars of moving away from the black-and-white world of the original trilogy is a deliberate trend in recent Star Wars. At the beginning of Rebels’ third season, Jedi apprentice Ezra Bridger toys with the dark side in very disturbing ways. I often wonder if the negative reaction against the Luke Skywalker of VIII: The Last Jedi (Luke tossing away the lightsaber; Luke—in a flashback—attempting to murder Ben Solo) is partially because this characterization undermines Luke as a heroic “good guy.” I am not trying to argue that there is no complexity in the older films: Lord Vader becomes an increasingly conflicted character in the original trilogy, and the prequel trilogy makes Anakin Skywalker more and more complex. The beginning scroll of III: Revenge of the Sith even acknowledges that “there are heroes on both sides.” But it seems

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that Lucasfilm gives noncinematic Star Wars a bit more leeway when it comes to tweaking or dismantling the moral dichotomies of the narratives. George Lucas’s “special edition” change of making Greedo shoot first in IV: A New Hope seems yet another attempt at keeping the dichotomies intact: the good guy should not be shooting first. In contrast, in a popular Dark Horse comic-book series from the 1990s, Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy’s Dark Empire Trilogy, Luke Skywalker is seduced by a resurrected Emperor and goes to the dark side—albeit for morally complex reasons. Timothy Zahn’s new trilogy of novels about the enigmatic Thrawn, while not dismissing the malignant existence of evil, offers a story in which the moral binary is quite difficult to discern.

ONE THRAWN, TWO THRAWNS

Passionate lover of art, brilliant military tactician, and formidable enemy, Grand Admiral Thrawn today is quintessential Star Wars. Though he hasn’t yet appeared in any of the live-action films, this Chiss man, with the eye-­ catching blue skin and unsettling red eyes of his species, has captured the attention of Star Wars enthusiasts since his creation. His origins are in fiction; since Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, he has appeared as a major antagonist in the animated television series Rebels and in a new series

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of novels. But the televisual Thrawn and the Thrawn of the various novels, while being one fairly consistent character, are depicted in quite different ways. Thrawn is an excellent case in point in the ways the Star Wars multiverse tweaks the portrayal of a character across media. The fiction writer Timothy Zahn created Thrawn for his early-1990s trilogy of novels that brought Star Wars back into the limelight. These novels, and the aforementioned comics series Dark Empire, are responsible for kick-starting the popularity of the Expanded Universe. The novels Heir to the Empire (1991), Dark Force Rising (1992), and The Last Command (1993) are set a few years after the events of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, and Grand Admiral Thrawn has become the new threat to the creation of the New Republic. His goal is, as he says at the beginning of the trilogy, “The complete, total, and utter destruction of the Rebellion” (Zahn, Heir 12). Thrawn is most definitely a “baddie” but one that many readers can’t help admiring for his keen intelligence and outstanding military strategies. Though he is defeated at the end of the early-1990s trilogy, in the late 1990s, Zahn published The Hand of Thrawn, a “duology” of novels where the threat of Thrawn looms in the plot (Specter; Vision). The Thrawn from these five novels belongs to what Lucasfilm now calls legends. To the delight of many fans, the character was “admitted” into canon a few years after

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the purchase of Lucasfilm. Thrawn is one of the few characters from legends that continues in canon fiction; Zahn is one of the few authors from legends who continues to write in the canon era. His recent authorized trilogy about Thrawn goes back in time to focus on his entry into the Galactic Empire, his rise through the ranks to Grand Admiral, and a series of exploits in which Thrawn uncovers a new threat to the galaxy, the potential invasion of a warrior culture from the Unknown Regions. The new novels work beautifully as a standalone trilogy, but they also function as a sort of tie-in, because in season 3 of Disney’s first animated television venture, Rebels, Thrawn makes his first audiovisual appearance in Star Wars. And that is when things get interesting. The legends Thrawn of the 1990s is a classic antagonist. That Grand Admiral is a calm, calculating tactician, unfazed by the resourceful Rebels and focused on his objective. The über-official StarWars.com describes him as “reserved and cerebral” (Hansen-Raj). This is pretty much the Thrawn that we get on television. His first entrance in Rebels (“Steps into the Shadow—Part 1”) is accompanied by a sinister minimalist tune, played dramatically on organ, as he literally emerges from the shadows of the Imperial control room. It’s one thing to read about his blue skin and red eyes and yet another to see those glowing eyes slowly approaching the camera. The

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events on the television show occur before the narrative of IV: A New Hope, so the Thrawn we are watching does not contradict the Thrawn of the legends trilogy (even though the plot of those novels was “discarded” in canon narrative). All throughout seasons 3 and 4, Thrawn is a consistent “bad guy”: devious, clever, and cunning, as serene as he is cruel, and guided by a perverse sense of justice. When the first novel of the canon trilogy came out, seven months after the first appearance of the “evil” Grand Admiral on television, readers were in for a surprise: Mitth’raw’nuruodo, as Thrawn is called in his native Chiss, is not an antagonist. Even though the novel is written in third-person narration, each chapter begins with what could be the diary (or the memoirs?) of Thrawn, and the entire book is interspersed with his thoughts— in the first person and in italics—as he observes and analyzes those around him. The legends novels, and even Rebels, maintain a certain narrative distance from Thrawn, keeping him mysterious and impenetrable; in the canon novels, we enter his mind and begin to see the world from his perspective. This is not a different Thrawn, but it is a different angle on Thrawn. The early chapters of the first novel make the character quite sympathetic. Soon after he has been admitted into the Empire, readers witness the rampant xenophobia

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that a Chiss man has to endure in an all-human Imperial Academy. Consistent with the Thrawn we know, he is not an unfortunate victim but someone who finds clever ways to repel his bigoted classmates. After graduation, Thrawn is assigned to a series of missions that drastically reconfigure how we view the Empire. These imperials are not the “baddies” we have encountered in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back or in Rebels; they defeat and imprison unscrupulous pirates and fight corruption across the galaxy. They are responsible and, I would dare to say, righteous. The back cover of the novel’s hardbound edition quotes one of Thrawn’s diary entries: “There are things in the universe that are simply and purely evil. A warrior does not seek to understand them, or to compromise with them. He seeks only to obliterate them” (Zahn, Thrawn 251). These are not, definitely not, the words of an archetypical “bad guy.” If Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars tried to bring an element of humanity to those who work for the Empire, Zahn is bringing a sense of righteousness (and not self-righteousness) to the Imperial project. In Rebels, Thrawn is a committed high-ranking officer of the Empire. In Zahn’s new trilogy, that commitment is qualified, as he recognizes the prevalent corruption and tyranny of the Empire (Thrawn 139). The novels also pre­ sent a Thrawn whose loyalties are divided between the Empire and the Chiss Ascendancy, the governing body

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of his home world. For him, these are not conflicting loyalties. What we gradually realize is that Thrawn has joined the Empire in order to gather intelligence about its resources, in case the Ascendancy and the Empire need to ally themselves in the future against a formidable threat. Of course, some in the Galactic Empire see his double alliance as treason; nonetheless, Thrawn manages to persuade the Emperor that this is not so. None of this if even hinted at in Rebels. There, he is nothing but a ruthless Imperial enemy of the Rebel Alliance. Is this just a way of simplifying a character for younger viewers? Perhaps, but complicating the portrayal of Thrawn on television would potentially detract from the narrative arc of the show. Besides, one Thrawn doesn’t contradict the other. Zahn’s Thrawn in the canon trilogy remains completely opposed to the idea of rebellion because for him it leads to chaos and lawlessness (Thrawn 390). Rebels’ Thrawn would not disagree. TV Thrawn and fiction Thrawn are both believers in the strong, dictatorial hand of government. Still, Zahn uses fiction to complicate Thrawn, to ask readers to reconsider the motives and projects of the Chiss man. Rebels gives us a Thrawn who is bound by the objectives of the Empire; the new trilogy gives us a Thrawn with a personal mission that doesn’t exactly align with the Imperial project. Both Thrawns remain fascinating.

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Timothy Zahn is scheduled to release a new trilogy concerning Thrawn’s time among the Chiss, set before the current trilogy. I expect Zahn to uncover yet more layers of Mitth’raw’nuruodo.

DRESSING THE PARTS

Me: “You look so real.” Stormtrooper: “I am real.” That interchange happened to me the first time I attended the annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, commonly referred to as C2E2. The craftsmanship of the cosplayer’s helmet and armor was quite impressive. He was a stormtrooper who had already experienced battle, so the uniform had been weathered and aged to make it look dirty and covered with scratches. When I told him that he looked “so real,” I only meant to say that he looked just like the ones from the movies. His clever response (with the classic audio distortion of a trooper!) took me by surprise—I was expecting the typical “thank you!” But the multiple meanings I could find in his response also intrigued me: that he was an actual person under that armor; that he was a “real” stormtrooper or at least as real as the actors who play stormtroopers in the films; that perhaps he was even more real than the ones on the screen because he was present in our material world; and that his costume, as he perceived it, was no costume but

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a real part of who he was. From that moment on, I started looking at cosplay differently. While it is true that cosplay—like fan art and fan fiction—is a realm outside the culture industries officially responsible for the production of Star Wars materials, cosplayers are constantly “producing” Star Wars, with fabric and leather, with makeup and 3-D printers, with plastic and metal. (Cosplay today is an industry in itself.) But unlike fan art and fiction, cosplayers construct Star Wars around their bodies, and through their bodies’ performance, making it, I would argue, a unique way of experiencing Star Wars. Cosplay intervenes in Star Wars as a physical act. The term “cosplay” is a portmanteau of “costume playing,” coined in Japan in 1983 for a magazine article on anime fandom (Ashcraft and Plunkett). Cosplayers “play”—like a child, they are having fun; like an actor, they are re-creating a fictional character; and like an artist, they are playing with their re-creation. The level of detail in the re-creation can vary greatly, but the basic objective of cosplay is to bring a fictional character “to life.” The participatory cultures scholar Nicolle Lamerichs argues that “cosplay makes the ambiguous relation between the fictional and actual explicit”; in other words, cosplayers insert the fictional into the social and the material. Many cosplayers aim for an authentic replication, but

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the dynamics of this activity allow an element of playful transformation. Some Vaders, Leias, Reys, Ahsokas, and Obi-Wans appear in cosplay with adjustments that alter the “original.” Because of this, cosplay needs to be understood as a “reading,” that is, a creative interpretation of the Star Wars multiverse: a Samurai stormtrooper, a zombie Leia, a Darth Maul in a tuxedo holding a martini glass. Some of them are hilarious; Leia’s line “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” from IV: A New Hope inspires a tongue-in-cheek picket line of very short troopers holding signs declaring, “Short troopers are people too.” Anakin’s throwaway line “I don’t like sand” in II: Attack of the Clones results in more than one cosplayer dressed as a bag of sand. Some of them are transformative mashups, like Mandalorian armor using the Hawaiian designs of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch (2002). Another way in which cosplay makes explicit the connection between the fictional and the “actual,” as Lamerichs calls it, is through the individual cosplayer’s identity markers: gender, race, nationality, sexuality. The diversity casting of recent Star Wars television shows and films has encouraged Asian American Roses, Middle Eastern Bodhis, and African Americans Finns, intensifying the link between actor and cosplayer. But many cosplayers do not let their identity markers limit their choice of character—there are African American Han Solos, male

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Slave Leias, Latina Reys, gender-fluid bearded Ahsokas. These individuals cosplay a specific character not necessarily to align themselves with the fictional world but rather to rework the character in question closer to the cosplayer’s notion of self-identity. Some cosplay even erases identity markers; this is a particularly prominent type of cosplay in Star Wars, since with Imperial troopers, Mandalorians, Threepios, Wookies, Jawas, and Ewoks, gear, garments, and headpieces cover the entire body. For populations that are labeled (and judged) by their phenotypical traits, this type of cosplay can be a liberating act. Sometimes, cosplay critiques the Star Wars multiverse. During the “canonization” of Grand Admiral Thrawn, some fans chose instead to cosplay the “legends” Thrawn, adding to the costume a couple of ysalamiri, those Force-repelling reptiles that appear for the first time in the novels of the early 1990s. Recent Star Wars Celebrations and other major conventions always have dozens of cosplayers performing characters that are now relegated to the legends cosmos. They keep those “legends” alive. Star Wars cosplay crossed a threshold during the filming of season 1 of The Mandalorian. The production team had too few original-trilogy stormtroopers for several major scenes, so it contacted some local 501st garrisons to recruit more (Star Wars Celebration Chicago). The 501st Legion is “a worldwide Star Wars costuming

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organization” (501st Legion) run by fans since 1997. In addition to providing definitive costume specs for Star Wars villains, it does a remarkable job giving back to communities, with volunteer work, appearances in hospitals and schools, and fund-raising for charity (calling this “Bad Guys Doing Good”). When asked to participate in filming, the cosplayers were understandably thrilled. This is, as far as I know, the first time Lucasfilm has recruited cosplayers to appear in Star Wars. Jon Favreau, the creator of The Mandalorian, was truly impressed by the accuracy of their costumes and the quality of their performance. By appearing on-screen, these cosplayers became literally as “real” as any stormtroopers in audiovisual Star Wars. But the magic of cosplay, for me, lies elsewhere. When cosplay replicates creatively, when it editorializes, when it makes a fictional world burst into our “real” space, we are witnesses to a literal proliferation of Star Wars. And in this process, this proliferation reshapes, expands, and renews the multiverse. If cosplay is mimicry, it is also transformation.

CONCLUSION: SPECTACULAR MULTIVERSE

Star Wars is still bigger than the examples I have covered here. There are Dark Horse and Marvel comics, Little Golden Books, role-playing games like Galaxy of Heroes

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or Knights of the Old Republic, all bringing still more dimensions to Star Wars. If Star Wars was ever a monolithic experience, it certainly is not one now. It can’t be. Zigzagging between platforms and creative endeavors, Star Wars encompasses layers of story and meaning, worlds upon worlds. If George Lucas is its original creator and responsible for a lot of material, there is also a Timothy Zahn Star Wars, a David Filoni Star Wars, a Claudia Gray Star Wars, a Charles Soule Star Wars, a Judy Blundell Star Wars. This is why I find the idea of a Star Wars multiverse so fitting: because it recognizes the multiplicity of expressions and media and dissolves the assumed hierarchies that have been imposed on that multiplicity. Even if the notion of canon is an attempt to police this world, the apocryphal texts of legends remain a vital part of Star Wars. All of it is Star Wars—diverse, divergent, and malleable. Despite all this multiversity, there is one element— aside from the stories themselves—that binds Star Wars together. The multiverse is spectacular. Literally. The pervasive technology of spaceships and gadgets, the flashiness of lightsabers or Queen Amidala’s wardrobe, the menagerie of creatures, the striking settings—from the endless desert of Tatooine to the towering sprawl of Coruscant—even the nonnarrative spectacle of special effects bring a certain consistency to it all. The aim of

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spectacle is to thrill and wow. It creates a sort of Star Wars porn: sensational, excessive, in your face, compulsive. As a vertiginous journey to distraction, spectacle also reveals the profit-seeking nature of commercial entertainment: Star Wars bears a tattoo, and it says “franchise.” This is something always to bear in mind but not to fixate on. It is just as important that the spectacle is infused by our world: our culture and history, our notions of gender and race, our thoughts of war and empire. Star Wars is both here and there. Let us go “there” now.

2 HUMANS AND CREATURES + DROIDS Hierarchies of Life

For audiences seeing IV: A New Hope for the first time, entering the cantina at Mos Eisley, the infamous spaceport on Tatooine, offered a startling display of the incredible diversity of the Star Wars galaxy. The scene begins not with an establishing shot of the bar but with a series of tight medium shots and close-ups of a variety of species: a triangular-headed Arcona; a four-eyed Talz; a horned Devaronian; hairless, blue-green Rodians; glassy-eyed, musically inclined Biths; short and pesky Jawas. It’s curious, but the scene doesn’t have the feel of an exotic freak show. Even though Obi-Wan Kenobi has just described the spaceport as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” I don’t find a sense of condescension or disgust in the scene. It seems instead to be filmed to evoke awe and wonder toward a world that is new to us 32

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and perhaps new to young Luke Skywalker. The scene has parallels in many of the later films of the Skywalker saga: Jabba the Hutt’s palace in VI: Return of the Jedi, the pod race in I: The Phantom Menace, Maz Kaneda’s joint in VII: The Force Awakens, and the Canto Bight casino in VIII: The Last Jedi. All these scenes are reminders that we are not on planet Earth anymore and definitely not in Kansas. Unlike other American space narratives that are devoid of nonhumans—such as the recent reboot of Battle­ star Galactica—the worlds and stories of Star Wars are peppered with life in all its fantastically kooky glory, from the very first film to the latest episode of The Man­ dalorian. And from the very beginning, life in Star Wars also included artificial life: the variety of organic life is almost equaled by the variety of droids and other technological beings. At first glance, Star Wars would seem a multicultural utopia of sorts. Wookies and humans side by side fighting the Separatist army. Droids joining the Rebel cause. A Jedi Council composed of Nautolans, Togrutas, Tolothians, Cereans, and many other species. Mon Calamari admirals, Neimoidian capitalists, human senators. But scratch the surface of this apparent rainbow of diversity, and one soon realizes that this is no paradise. While Star Wars is indeed multispecies and multicultural, the many

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life forms are constrained by complex social hierarchies. Neither equity nor equality reigns supreme here. This hierarchy is partly structured by phenotype, that is, by observable physical attributes. Do they look human? Are they humanoid? Are they sentient beings that resemble Earth animals? Are they mechanical in nature? Life is also stratified through language: Do they speak “Basic” (what Star Wars calls the English language)? What kind of “Earth” accent do they have? If they don’t speak Basic, do they at least understand it? When they don’t speak Basic, is their speech subtitled? Do they speak at all? It is with life—and these anatomical and linguistic cues— that Star Wars most clearly mirrors our world in theirs. Not surprisingly, how life is presented (and stratified) is informed by particularly Western notions of civilization and culture. And in a gesture that recalls the rhetoric of Western colonialism, humans are at the top.

ANTHROPOCENTRIC

It is hard to disagree with what Christian Blauvelt tells young audiences in Star Wars Made Easy: that most characters are human because they were easier to cast (18). Of course, narratively speaking, Star Wars “humans” are not Terran humans. And yet the visual connection between them and us creates a sense of identification and

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familiarity that can distract us from a clear-eyed understanding of what humans do in Star Wars. The high position of humans in the social hierarchy is due in part to their being a majority population. But in some instances, humans with power make an explicit attempt at what I would call human supremacy. One of the striking characteristics of humans in Star Wars is that they are not exclusive of one planet or culture. Wookies are from Kashyyyk, Ewoks are from Endor, the Quarren are from Mon Cala. Not so with humans: Mandalorians and Alderaanians are human; there is a large contingent of humans in Naboo, Coruscant, and Lothal; there are human minorities in Tatooine, Jedha, and Jakku. Whether this is due to migration or colonization (our knowledge of galactic history in this regard is pretty limited), humans are spread throughout the galaxy, and their biology is connected to many cultures. The majority status of humans doesn’t always translate into domination. Even though there are quite a few humans on the Jedi Council, that governing body is composed of a variety of galactic species, and humans do not rule it exclusively. Even though the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance are both led by humans—by women, in fact—these underground organizations are purposefully inclusive. During the clone wars, the Republic army is led by a variety of species, both Jedi and not.

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But in the military ranks of the Galactic Empire and the First Order, the situation is quite different. The Empire—including its governmental structure—is almost exclusively human. Certainly, all stormtroopers are. So are Grand Moffs and governors, captains and lieutenants. Wookieepedia lists a term for this, though it is rarely used: Human High Culture, an imperial “codified policy of humanocentric speciesism” (“Human”). This is not official policy, however, as the Empire is interested in seeming democratic and inclusive. I used the phrase “almost exclusively human” in reference to the Empire because there is one exception to this unwritten rule. As far as I know, Thrawn is the lone Chiss among humans in the Empire. Though he is “humanoid,” xenophobia against him is open and brutal in the Imperial ranks—both at the Academy and on the bridge of Star Destroyers, as we witness on the pages of Timothy Zahn’s recent Thrawn trilogy. As cadet Eli Vanto explains to Thrawn when they first land at the Academy on Coruscant, “Officially we’re not allowed to disrespect aliens. . . . I say officially, because that’s what the General Orders say we’re supposed to do. But that’s not always what we really do” (Zahn, Thrawn 47). But setting aside Thrawn (who, lest we forget, is placed in the military by the Emperor himself), human supremacy structures the world of military power in both the Empire and the First Order. It is

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revealing that the Separatist Alliance during the clone wars was composed of many species, with humans as a minority. But with the demise of the Jedi and the end of the Republic, the Empire would assign only humans to positions of power. It remains willing to deal with non­ humans if they are bounty hunters, workers, bankers, or, of course, slaves. While this idea of humans as superior beings is unique to galaxy-wide totalitarian regimes within the narrative, it curiously extends to certain production choices, that is, to narrative decisions in the construction of the Star Wars multiverse itself. “Our heroes,” for the most part, are human—in the film trilogies, in the television shows, in most novels and comics. The exceptions are scant: Chewbacca and Yoda in the original trilogy, Ahsoka Tano in The Clone Wars, Thrawn in the fiction by Timothy Zahn, Jar Jar Binks in the prequel trilogy. Even in the multicultural crew of the Ghost in Rebels, we get a human majority: one Twi’lek, one Lasat, one droid, and three humans— though, to be fair, Hera Syndulla, the female Twi’lek, is the leader of that Rebel cell. The preference for humans is also visible in plot points; few fans have forgotten that Chewbacca does not get a medal at the end of IV: A New Hope. Or take, for instance, the pod race in I: The Phantom Menace. The racers at Boonta Eve are a veritable menagerie of species, but the

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winner is the human slave Anakin Skywalker; in fact, he is the only human in the race. While the script has Ani mention this fact as something that is remarkable—almost as if humans didn’t have the biological wherewithal to be able to withstand the challenges of the race—the fact remains that he as a human stands out in the race. He is also the only one who speaks Basic, and the rest of the racers are not even given the generosity of subtitles for their dialogue. Granted, the plot of I: The Phantom Men­ ace needs Anakin to win the race, but my point is that the plot is constructed around a human as the superior racer. Looking carefully at the visual representation of diversity in live-action Star Wars, from IV: A New Hope to The Mandalorian, there is a curious multiculturalist paradox when it comes to galactic humans: casting nonwhite actors in the narrative doesn’t bring to the fore notions of difference. Let me explain. The race and ethnicities of the likes of John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, and Riz Ahmed do not play into who Finn, Rose, and Bodhi are. The skin color of Finn is never read as difference in the narrative; he is simply human. While this could be Lucasfilm and Disney’s gesture toward color blindness, or a deliberately progressive move toward diversity, it can also be read as an inadvertent act of erasing difference. The recent additions of women and Black men to the sequel trilogy’s First Order are an example: now you can be a man or a

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woman, Black or white, Asian or Latinx, and still be part of the Imperial bureaucratic structure. Thus, at face value, the Empire looks diverse—when in fact it isn’t. In the Star Wars multiverse, diversity mean multispecies, and the Empire is staffed solely with humans. Although there is also geographic prejudice in Star Wars—Core Worlders and Outer Rim humans sneer at each other with the stereotypical language of center versus periphery— full-blown prejudice, bigotry, racism, exoticism, and xenophobia, as many people have argued before me, are reserved for nonhumans (Deis; McDowell, Identity).

MANUFACTURED HUMANS

The male clones designed and manufactured by the Kaminoans for the creation of a Republican army face the classic paradox of replicating life: they are biologically human but technologically created. And because of their origin as clones, these soldiers are rarely perceived as part of the human population. In “Conspiracy,” an episode of The Clone Wars, a Kaminoan doctor reminds Jedi Master Shaak Ti that “every clone and their genetic makeup are property of the Kaminoan government.” Clones might be sentient, intelligent beings, but they are not seen as free individuals by their makers. The scholar John McDowell explains

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the particular issue of cloning in Star Wars: “Sentient life is created in order to do another’s bidding, and only another’s bidding. Clones are denied any semblance of independence.” He describes clones as “little more than biological versions of the Separatist Confederacy’s battle droid armies” (Politics 15). This attitude is stressed by how they are officially “named”: a code of two letters—usually CT, for “clone trooper,” or CC, “clone commander”—and four numbers, a system that will be partially adopted for stormtroopers in the Imperial Navy after the end of the clone wars. But as we gradually witness in The Clone Wars, and to some extent in Rebels, these men are constantly finding ways to differentiate themselves; a line repeated throughout the television shows is “we are clones, but we are individuals!” Clones fight for the Republic, but they also fight for their agency and recognition as individuals. In the prequel trilogy, all clones are played by Temuera Derek Morrison, a New Zealand actor; in The Clone Wars, Dee Bradley Baker does their voice. But regardless of their looking and sounding identical, the soldiers find ways of making themselves unique: by adopting names in substitution of their official designation, by adding different tattoo designs on their heads, by cutting and shaving their hair differently, by painting their armor in different ways. And to their credit, while Rex, Cody, Fives, Echo, and Tup might be biologically identical, each of them

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has a different temperament and personality. Perhaps this is why we never hear nonclones making a comment about clones looking the same; they seem to be able to tell the clones apart, even with their helmets on. And talking about helmets, another way they display their individuality is by frequently taking the helmets off. In Star Wars, the helmet of a trooper is there to erase individuality; comics, movies, and television shows often include a wide shot depicting a field of soldiers with their helmets on—think of the end of II: Attack of the Clones. In cinematic and televisual Star Wars, the stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire never take off their helmets. In the First Order, both FN-2187, later known as Finn, and Tam (in the television show Resistance) are reprimanded for removing theirs. Clone troopers, however, are frequently seen with theirs off. Unlike Din Djarin in The Manda­ lorian, who wears the helmet as a cultural identity marker (much as veils function today in certain Muslim societies), clones do not consider their armor part of who they are but a symbol of what they do. Clones’ desire for individuality, however, doesn’t mean that others will see them that way. We have gotten so used to the names of the clones that when, in season 5 of The Clone Wars, the brutal and authoritarian Jedi General Pong Krell starts calling the clones by their original designation, the effect is disconcerting. By addressing Rex

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as “CT-7567” (“Darkness on Umbara”), General Krell seems to be deliberately dehumanizing the clone trooper. And in fact, he is. At one point during the battle, he says with utter contempt, “I will not be undermined by creatures bred in some laboratory” (“Carnage of Krell”). In contrast, there is a beautiful moment in Star Wars when others recognize the clone troopers’ individuality. In “Ambush,” the very first episode of The Clone Wars, Master Yoda wishes to speak to the three clones who are accompanying him in his mission, and he asks them to remove their helmets. The clones, somewhat confused, remind the Jedi Master that they “all share the same face.” Yoda responds with a phrase that the soldiers probably found comforting and reassuring: “In the Force, very different each one of you are.”

“OTHERED” CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL

The animal biodiversity of Star Wars is quite remarkable, taking into account that this is a fictional world! Countless creatures inhabit the many planets of the galaxy far far away. The very large are literally portrayed as monsters of instinctive brute force, like the rancor that Luke Skywalker kills in Jabba the Hutt’s dungeons or the rathtars that Han Solo is smuggling in VII: The Force Awakens. There are animals that are seen as mere beasts of burden:

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banthas, blurrgs, and tauntauns. And then there is the amazing variety of small (and not so small) creatures that fill the varied ecosystems across the galaxy. Almost all of these creatures are treated in Star Wars like Terrans treat animals, with varying levels of respect or interest. Things are less straightforward when it comes to the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of communities of nonhumans who have developed elaborate societies with cultures, languages, and varying degrees of technological advancement. In creating a universe informed by our world, Star Wars unsurprisingly depicts all of these groups by borrowing the idea of “civilization” from Western colonialism, creating hierarchies to evaluate and rank different societies, thereby constructing notions of superiority and inferiority. Humans are rarely included in this biased system. In fact, there is a tendency in Star Wars paraphernalia to lump together all nonhumans as aliens, regardless of their level of “civilization.” The term is unashamedly anthropocentric. Even though a recent children’s Big Golden Book is called Star Wars Aliens, Creatures and Beasts (Macri), implying different categories, the word “alien” is used pretty much indiscriminately throughout the book. Lest we think the term is an editorial decision for young readers’ books, Lucasfilm and Disney published the slightly more adult version of this type of book a year later and

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still called it Star Wars: Alien Archive. Humans are rarely thought of as alien; the Imperial officer Eli Vanto, in the novel Thrawn: Treason (Zahn), is one of the few instances when this happens, as he is the only human crew­member on a Chiss warship. It is true that the word “alien” is not often voiced within the Star Wars narrative, but it accurately renders how nonhuman species are presented. Diversity and difference in Star Wars exist thanks to all of these communities, but with few exceptions, Star Wars ultimately depicts them as unfamiliar, foreign, and strange—as other. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “other” as “to view or treat a person or group of people as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself.” When Kenobi first sees Jar Jar Binks in I: The Phantom Menace, he reacts by asking Qui-Gon Jinn, “What’s this?” using the interrogative “what” instead of “who.” This often happens in Star Wars: the othering of everything that is not human. And yet Star Wars is not universally xenophobic. Certain species are relegated to a “primitive” status, while others are considered to be as advanced as human societies. Fear and prejudice are bestowed on some groups, loyalty on others—equality is offered to few. Kaminoans are deemed more “civilized” than Tusken Raiders are, for example. The level of respect toward the Mon Calamari is rarely given to the Hutts; the Chiss and the Trandoshans

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are in very different categories. What actually occurs is a combination of marking difference and qualifying that difference. Some “aliens” are more equal than others. The most obvious ways to mark other species’ difference from humans is to do so either phenotypically— skin color, shape of body, quantity of eyes, fingers, or arms—or linguistically (more on language later). Sometimes the markers smack of slight repulsion: Geonosians and Lasats smell, the Hutts tend to drool. But there are more subtle ways of branding difference. One of them is through music. In film, television, and even in audiobooks, Star Wars is Star Wars thanks to the music that permeates the stories, and when nonhumans are introduced musically, there is frequently a tendency to differentiate them by resorting to non-Western instrumentation and sound. The Ewoks in VI: Return of the Jedi play wind- and percussion-based music that recalls indigenous cultures of the Americas. When we first encounter the Weequay pirates who follow Hondo Ohnaka in The Clone Wars, they’re listening to Bollywood-esque Hindi pop. When Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, and the Guardians of the Whills arrive at Saw Gerrera’s hideout in Rogue One, the disreputable Rebels are playing what sounds like a Middle Eastern oud. This tendency continues with background (or extra­ diegetic) music: South Asian tabla drums in The Manda­

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lorian when we first encounter the blurrgs, the Australian didgeridoo for the appearance of Gungans at the Battle of Naboo in I: The Phantom Menace, vocals eerily similar to the close harmonies of Bulgarian folk singing as we enter the atmosphere of the planet Bardotta in The Clone Wars. In many ways, music belies the Americanness of Star Wars: the exotic is never Appalachian, not even Tex-Mex. In fact, music that is more familiar to Americans brings nonhumans closer to us. Perhaps one of the reasons the Mos Eisley cantina scene doesn’t feel too foreign or intimidating is that the band is playing jazz. We bond a bit more with Zeb in Rebels because, during a rare moment of R&R in Star Wars, the green, “smelly” Lasat sits back on a lounge chair and listens to rock. One fascinating aspect of Star Wars is that we are witnessing a galaxy of intense migration, human and non­ human. Peoples of all species spread throughout the galaxy. Metropolitan planets like Coruscant, the cityplanet that serves as the Core and capital of the Republic, naturally attract diversity; but there are specific spots in other systems that also exhibit a variety of life: spaceports and space stations, casinos and cantinas, bazaars and underground markets. We don’t know much about the history of these migrations, though many seem to have been triggered by labor, commerce, or environmental disasters. Sometimes we can connect the dots: the

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Wookie diaspora, for example, apparently began with the Battle of Kashyyyk at the end of the clone wars and was intensified by the Imperial decision to enslave the species. One of the Wookies who suffered that fate is, of course, Chewbacca. Possibly the most prominent nonhuman in the Skywalker saga, Chewbacca is an interesting case because he is often assigned the stereotype of the savage creature. In the original trilogy, there is always the implication that Wookies are not to be trifled with. In IV: A New Hope, Han suggests that C-3PO let the Wookie win the game of holochess, since Chewie might, out of anger and frustration, end up ripping off the droid’s arms. Later, when Han and Luke, disguised as stormtroopers, pretend to take the Wookie as a prisoner to the detention center where Princess Leia is awaiting execution, the Imperial officer in charge says, quite disgusted, “Where are you taking this . . . thing?” This attitude continues in more recent films. When Han Solo is accused of trying to desert from the Imperial army in the movie Solo, a lieutenant orders the troopers to “feed him to the beast.” That “beast” is Chewbacca, who has been kept in a dungeon and left there starving—this is how (at least in canon narrative) Han Solo meets him. Yes, Chewie is loud and rough and can be violent, but nowhere in movies, comics, or fiction do we witness any savagery. He’s intensely loyal and a trusted

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member of the Rebellion; he’s also loving and lovable. With the character of Chewbacca, Star Wars plays off its own stereotype of Wookies as primitive and primal— large, hairy, colossally strong, unable to speak Basic—but as we get to know Chewie, that stereotype gradually falls away, because he is depicted as an individual. In fact, not all Wookies are like Chewie. In recent comics, the bounty hunter Black Krrsantan, sidekick of the devious and dubious archeologist Captain Aphra, is the polar opposite of Chewbacca: vicious, monstrous, immoral. Something different happens with the Ewoks, the aggressive teddy bears from VI: Return of the Jedi. If we think of the production order of the Skywalker cinematic saga, this is the first time that audiences get to observe nonhumans in their own community. Because of this, we are witnesses to their culture in a way that we haven’t been with other Star Wars species—at least in the early 1980s, when the film was released. Ewoks are resourceful forest dwellers, though their technological development remains quite “primitive.” In line with Star Wars’ inclination for cultural hierarchies, their supposed simplicity is enhanced by Western “tribal” notions: the Ewoks have a shaman, and, of course, they are happy to have humans for dinner! In spite of their “cannibalistic” tendencies, however, Ewoks are never portrayed as truly threatening. They are crafty and fierce in battle, but they are depicted

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with a certain innocent nature. Trandoshans they are not. John Williams’s leitmotif for the Ewoks corroborates their amiable character with a simple, cheerful melody that hides a military march in jolly parade music. There’s another important element in the Ewoks’ affable portrayal. Ewoks are imbued with cuteness. My calling Ewoks teddy bears was deliberate: they are creatures to make one go “awww!”; they are also toys in the making (Lucasfilm didn’t need to learn that from Disney). In their short-lived animated television series from the mid1980s, cuteness oozes out of them. The notion of cuteness is quite interesting because it produces a strong emotional response. Cuteness disarms. Cuteness distracts. Cuteness displaces the intellect. Grogu, the big-eyed child from The Mandalorian, has won over even the harshest critics of Star Wars. Loth cats are featured on T-shirts and available in plush. Porgs have their own Facebook group. If Ewoks are the first full-blown explosion of cuteness in the franchise, this element will be used again and again to influence how we perceive certain species in the galaxy. I have to agree with the online critic Jim Vorel that Star Wars of late has been reluctant to include nonhumans as principal characters in the narratives. While he is writing mostly about cinema, his idea could apply to a lot of recent fiction but less so to television and new comics. What has slightly changed recently is how nonhumans are

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treated by humans. Take, for instance, the Tusken Raiders of Tatooine in The Mandalorian. In IV: A New Hope, they are depicted as savages. In II: Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker tells Padmé that “they’re like animals” (after slaughtering them in revenge for kidnapping his mother). But Din Djarin treats them with humane respect. Toro Callican, the Mandalorian’s interim partner in the season 1 episode “The Gunslinger,” mentions that he has heard about this “filth” from the locals; Mando responds, with an awareness of the Tusken Raiders’ social condition in the planet, that the Raiders are actually the locals, since they cannot be trespassers in their own land. Mando is implying that humans are the actual trespassers in Tatooine, a planet of settler colonialism. What’s more, in a unique moment in Star Wars, the Mandalorian actually communicates with them, with a form of sign language, and negotiates a way for getting through the Raiders’ territory. Season 2 shows multiple scenes of Mando communicating with the Raiders, even speaking their language. The notion of cultural hierarchy has not disappeared in Star Wars, and there is at times still a sizable divide between humans and nonhumans. I think it is revealing that not a human but a four-armed Ardennian, the pilot named Rio, is the one who declares the following in Solo without one hair of irony: “You will never have a deeper sleep than curled up in a Wookie’s lap.” And yet there are

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moments when humans recognize difference without creating a prejudicial chasm. The sole Ugnaught in The Mandalorian has to correct Din Djarin after the human calls him by his species. He has a name: Kuiil. If the Mandalorian is, in that moment, a bit testy about using a proper name for the Ugnaught, Mando will always call him Kuiil from that moment on. In that small acknowledgment, Kuiil goes from “creature” to “person.”

PROGRAMMED LIFE

“Did you hear that?” That was the very first line of dialogue in the very first Star Wars film back in 1977. And it was spoken by a droid, the now beloved C-3PO. This means that the first character we meet in the Skywalker saga is not a biological being. Welcome to Star Wars. The variety of droids might not quite equal the diversity of living creatures, but there is a plethora of mechanical beings in the galaxy. They are part of most everyone’s everyday. Some droids are machine-like, functioning as tools or aids to other creatures. Some are more advanced but follow their programming strictly, without any sense of independent thought. Some possess sophisticated artificial intelligence, and many of these acquire personalities and traits that make them socially relatable to humans and other species. Droids are an obvious example of

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technological spectacle in Star Wars, but many of them are more than the sum of their mechanical parts: they are artificial life. It’s important to point out that Star Wars has droids, not robots. This is an important distinction. At least in science fiction, there is a tradition of using the term “robot” to imply a potentially threatening electro­mechanical entity, starting with the 1921 Czech play that coined the word, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. Star Wars opted for “droid,” short for “android,” which combines the Greek root andro-, meaning “man” (and not “human,” as some people suppose) with the suffix -eides, meaning “form” or “shape”; thus, the Anglicized “android” refers to a mechanical contraption “in the shape of a man.” Star Wars generalizes the term, using “droid” for any mechanical being, with or without human shape, and disregards its gender-specific meaning (very masculinist of them). Though there are some droids that could easily be labeled “robotic”—the Czech word robota means “forced labor” or “servitude” (Patell 177)—the use of “droid” in Star Wars suggests a desire to think of them as somehow approachable, relatable. But relatable to whom? Most linguistically abled species in Star Wars interact with droids, and yet droids’ relatability seems to be defined by their connections to humans. Once again, anthropocentrism rules. The pro-

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tocol droid OMR-1, in the Marvel comic The Phantom Limb, explicitly talks about this: “I find it interesting . . . how our programming—human programming—makes us so much like humans themselves” (Robinson, Harris, et al.). Not only programming: when a droid is designed to look like a biological being, the human body is the most likely model. Threepio’s way of introducing himself, “I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations,” is an odd yet telling phrase, because he presents himself not as an individual but as a bridge between humans and droids. There are, of course, droids who socially relate with nonhumans (Chopper and the Twi’lek Hera Syndulla in Rebels is one example), but they are the exception in Star Wars. Utopically, Star Wars tries to pave the way for a world in which the biological and the technological share an affective bond: the way Luke (and even Anakin) interacts with Artoo; the way Poe treats BB-8 (fluctuating between pet and friend); the way Lando puts up with L3-37 in Solo but then truly mourns her “passing.” L3’s call for “Droids rights! We are sentient!” is partially fulfilled in Star Wars. There are various ways in which humans and non­ humans try to reduce the social distance with droids. The most common is to give name to droids, taking their designated code and number and producing an endearing nickname for them. The names are a way of personifying artificial life: not R2 but Artoo; not C-3PO but

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Threepio; not BB-8 but Beebee; not WA-2V but TooVee. This happens across languages: in Spanish, for example, R2-D2 becomes “Arturito” (“little Arthur,” in English), from the phonetic similarity between “Ar-too-dee-too” and “Ar-tu-ri-to.” These names are given to droids whose artificial intelligence allows a complex interaction with biological beings. Battle droids and probe droids don’t get nicknames. This affectionate attitude, however, is not generalized in the galaxy. From the cantina in IV: A New Hope— where the bartender warns Luke and Ben, “We don’t serve their kind here”—to the Rebels episode “The Forgotten Droid,” in which an Imperial logistics protocol droid is cruelly mistreated by the crew of its ship, Star Wars displays a world with an open prejudice against technological beings. Kuiil in The Mandalorian points to the creators as the responsible party for the behavior of droids: “Droids are not good or bad. They are the neutral reflections of those who imprint them” (“The Reckoning”). But his point of view is not shared by many characters. The most common attitude is to dismiss droids as mere programming. In Jude Watson’s The Dangerous Rescue, a Scholastic novel from the Jedi Apprentice series, battle droids are unintelligently mechanical: “Their weakness was the same as their strength: They did not think. They responded

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to stimulus. They saw beings as targets to be destroyed” (127). That novel is set years before the creation of the Separatist droid army, but the attitude persists during the clone wars. Ahsoka Tano states it simply and with obvious disgust: “Violence. That’s what those droids are programmed for” (“Defenders of Peace,” The Clone Wars). Indeed, they are maligned because they are the enemy (clones call Separatist droids “clankers,” with a derisive tone in their voices), but I have always wondered if the clone wars established a social distaste for artificial beings. That is certainly the case with Din Djarin in The Mandalorian, since his parents were killed by Separatist droids when he was a child. Thinking back to nicknaming droids, the act reveals a paradoxical situation. As endearing as it might be, the naming of droids is quite different from the naming of the clones. The clones name themselves, asserting their own individuality. With the droids, the naming is done by someone else. Threepio never calls himself Threepio. The nicknaming of droids always originates in a biological being; it is, if I may be allowed a neologism, bio­ centric. The droid is not asserting individuality here; it is Poe or Luke or Hera who wishes to relate to a droid as an individual. But many droids see themselves as individuals. There are bonds of friendship (and antagonism!) between

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droids all over the multiverse. The conversations in The Phantom Limb between OMR-1 and C-3PO are all about sentience and decision-making in droids. Some droids in Star Wars do strive (and fight) for the acknowledgment of their individuality, for recognition that they are a life form. L3-37 is perhaps the clearest example, as she presents herself as an activist of equal rights for droids throughout the film Solo. This might sound odd, but some droids fare better than some nonhumans in the Star Wars galaxy. If droids are sometimes dismissed as machinery, at least their depiction does not draw from the colonial and Western tropes of otherness: no exotic music, no savagery, no cannibalism, no intellectual inferiority. Some speak Basic, some don’t—but the lack of Basic doesn’t seem to create a sense of affective distance. In fact, lots of nonmechanical beings seem to understand binary languages, as is the case with Luke and R2-D2 and Rey and BB-8. BB-8 fares better than an Ewok, I regret to say—at least Beebee is addressed by name.

LIVES AND LANGUAGES

Just as there is an astounding biodiversity in Star Wars, there is a vast array of languages spoken. Linguistic communication is one more way in which Star Wars

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categorizes life, but trying to discern a clear taxonomy of language use, or even allegorical connections to our world, is not useful. Rather than attempt to make perfect sense of every exception (some fans have tried, on Reddit and YouTube, to mixed results), I would like to focus on some general linguistic tendencies of speaking species. To distance our world from the Star Wars world, English is not called English in Star Wars; it’s “Galactic Basic” or “Standard Basic” or simply “Basic.” The name says it all: it is the lingua franca of the galaxy, and large numbers of beings speak it. It is also the official language of the central galactic government and military (during the reign of Emperor Palpatine, it is renamed “Imperial Basic’). Setting aside the production practicalities of a franchise in which English is the default language, Basic is used in Star Wars as yet another marker of “civilization.” For those who speak Basic, the accent in which they speak also carries significant meaning. In most cases, accents are used to denote galactic diversity. The French accent of the Twi’leks, the Irish accent of the Lurmen, the South African accent of the Pantorans, even the New Zealand accent of the clone troopers, just to mention a few, hint at the many ways different systems in the galaxy speak Basic. Star Wars does not seem particularly interested in creating meaning between the Terran nationality of the accent and the culture that uses that

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accent, though there are a few moments when the connection is, let us say, trite, like the thick German accent of the mad scientist in The Clone Wars’ “Blue Shadow Virus.” In the case of American and British accents, the use is different. They are the two most common Basic accents in Star Wars, and they seem to function as the standard accents—here again, the Anglo roots of the franchise (a Hollywood movie filmed in part at British studios) have a lot to do with that. Though in IV: A New Hope it feels as though the Empire speaks with a British accent, in fact American and British accents are distributed fairly evenly among heroes and antagonists (though the distribution fluctuates from trilogy to trilogy). While nonhumans and clones speak accented Basic to indicate diversity, humans in Star Wars typically speak with an American or British accent. Once again, the notion of normalcy is attached to humans. In addition, most leading characters speak with one of the two accents, presumably to establish a connection between audience and character. Though the Togruta Ahsoka Tano is an exception, phenotypically differentiated by her nonhuman features, her American accent pushes her toward a narrative position closer to her human counterparts. In Rogue One, the two main characters, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor, are portrayed by Felicity Jones, a Brit, and the Mexican Diego Luna. British-accented Jyn is rebellious but never truly

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“objectionable” in her actions; Cassian, with his Mexican accent in Basic, is by far the darker character of the two. Sometimes, the American accent has a generational connection: the Twi’lek Cham Syndulla speaks with a French accent, but his daughter, Hera Syndulla (from Rebels), speaks with an American accent, as if she is a second-­generation immigrant. When she gets angry with her father, as she does in the episode “Homecoming,” Hera reverts back to her “original” French accent. Something similar happens with the Mandalorian Sabine Wren from Rebels: she has an American accent; her mother has a British accent. It is possible that the American accent of all stormtroopers is a way of homogenizing them, pointing to the erasure of their cultural past. In Star Wars, accent matters. Though not as common, accents can also mark a speaker whose native tongue is not Basic—Neimodians and Gungans in I: The Phantom Menace, perhaps even Yoda. Sometimes, speakers of BAL (Basic as an Additional Language) are depicted as having a lower level of sophistication and development. The Gungans are a revealing example because their accent and morphology imply a “creole” Basic: “Mesa like-a dis,” says Boss Nass, the leader of the Gungans, when agreeing to an alliance with the humans of Naboo. The creators seem to be using the Gungans’ speech patterns to indicate inferiority:

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Jar-Jar Binks uses the infantilized “exqueeze me” instead of “excuse me,” and Boss Nass is not able to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative of a th in “think.” The negative reactions to Jar-Jar stem in part from his speaking, as it racializes him in a very objectionable way. By contrast, the first appearance of Yoda in V: The Empire Strikes Back plays with his BAL status in a more sophisticated way. Luke assumes that he is a simpleton, in part because of how he speaks, and is surprised to discover that this old and slightly comical being with the odd “Help you I can, mmm, yes!” is the Jedi Master he is seeking. In I: The Phantom Menace, the Gungans’ Basic speech pattern is presented as a simple reflection of their intellect. In V: The Empire Strikes Back, the creators set up both Luke and the audience to make a similar assumption about Yoda but then expose this assumption as false. What about the many beings who simply do not speak Basic at all, communicating in dozens of different languages? Some species do not have the anatomy to produce the sounds of Basic (or so Star Wars reference books constantly remind us); the same goes for droids that were not given the necessary technological capabilities. Some groups choose not to speak it, for cultural or political reasons. In some instances, not speaking Basic is yet another sign of “primitive” culture ( Jawas, Ewoks, Tusken Raiders), but mostly it is a marker of otherness. Another

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element, however, creates additional hierarchies among those who do not speak the lingua franca: subtitles. Subtitles are part of that continuing gesture of diversity​ —in such a big galaxy, not everyone is going to speak one language. Who gets subtitles and who doesn’t depends on many factors. Many times, narrative flow requires them; subtitles for Jabba the Hutt in the special edition of IV: A New Hope or for the Geonosian Poggle the Lesser in II: Attack of the Clones are needed for following the plot. The animated television shows avoid subtitles in order to remain inclusive of younger audiences. Some of the linguistic inconsistencies in Star Wars stem simply from this decision. Rodians require subtitles on film (we all remember Greedo in IV: A New Hope, who speaks Hutt), but many Rodians speak Basic (as BAL speakers?) on animated television, such as Ezra Bridger’s family friend Tseebo in Rebels or Padmé Amidala’s family friend and fellow senator Onaconda Farr in The Clone Wars. It’s important to point out that subtitles in films are the exception; most individuals who do not speak Basic are not subtitled. What are the effects of this decision? Why are Ewoks, for example, not subtitled? To be sure, C-3PO understands them and can act as translator between them and humans, but even when Threepio is not around, we still get no translation of what they say. Is it because they fall within the “cute creature” category in Star Wars, and

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therefore their words are inconsequential? Is it because their “primitive” status in Star Wars implies that the Ewoks’ body language is enough? I am tempted to answer in the affirmative to both these questions. Speaking a language other than Basic creates a certain distance between an English-speaking audience and that character; not providing subtitles for what they say effectively increases that distance. This doesn’t happen with all individuals. Let’s take Chewbacca, who doesn’t speak Basic and whose speech in his native tongue, Shiriiwook, is never translated with subtitles, even though what he says matters to the story. When Finn in VII: The Force Awakens reacts in surprise with “You can understand that thing?” referring to Chewie, Han Solo quickly responds, “And that thing can understand you, so watch it!” The Wookie is surrounded by people who understand him: Han Solo, of course; Yoda in II: Attack of the Clones; even Rey and Poe do in IX: The Rise of Skywalker. In Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, now designated a legends novel, even Leia knows some Shiriiwook! In the case of Chewbacca, therefore, speaking only his native tongue is not distancing, because audiences can participate in the comfort zone of comprehension created by his friends and associates, especially since most of those who understand him are humans. The fact that we are dealing here with an individual and not

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an entire society (as in the case of the Ewoks) does make a difference. But the treatment of Chewbacca, regarding his language, is unique. There is one amusing advantage to not speaking Basic and not having subtitles in Star Wars: you can swear to your heart’s content. While there are some inoffensive expletives in Basic used here and there—“blasted!”; “karabast!”; “dank farrik!”—crude swearing is simply not present. This is not a post-Disney decision; it has always been that way. (Needless to say, things are quite different in Star Wars–themed pornography.) When C-3PO snaps back at R2-D2 with “You watch your language!” in IV: A New Hope, children and adults can fill in the blanks with what Artoo might have said. The same goes for Sebulba’s exclamation when he loses the pod race in I: The Phantom Menace. The principal droid in the television series Reb­ els, C1-10P, is mischievous and obviously foul-mouthed; were Rebels to translate Chopper’s lines in subtitles, it would cease to be a wholesome Disney show! Looking at the production history of live-action Star Wars films, one could construct a rough trajectory of language and subtitles when it comes to depicting cultures in the galaxy. The original trilogy tended to use subtitles when needed for the plot, but language outside of Basic remained largely untranslated and became galactic diversity garnish. The prequel trilogy tried to avoid subtitles

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for “likable” cultures, by giving them an accented “creole” Basic that did not sit well with many audiences. Subtitles were retained for antagonist cultures (the Geonosians). The sequel trilogy reverted to similar techniques to the original trilogy: subtitles when needed, but for the few cultures we meet in their own habitat, their language remains untranslated. The Mandalorian (at least in its first season) plays it safe: members of the first culture we meet in their own habitat, on planet Sorgan, all speak Basic with an American accent, and all of them are humans.

CONCLUSION: STAR WARS LIFE

We should not be surprised that Threepio, like the protocol droid he is, has developed a very clear sense of what is considered civilized and what is not. For him, the Jawas are “disgusting” creatures; the clones are impossible to understand; the planets he visits with Artoo in The Clone Wars episode “Nomad Droids” are populated by “primitives.” Threepio seems to have been programmed with the life hierarchy I have been examining here. The Little Golden Book Star Wars: I Am a Hero (Nicholas) may promote the utopic idea that everyone in Star Wars can be a hero, but Jawas know better. The diversity of life in Star Wars is more than spectacle; it is a way in which audiences and readers come to

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learn about the intricacies of living and interacting with others in the galaxy far far away. These interactions are far from perfect, wavering between prejudice and tolerance, stereotype and liberality. Star Wars is both community and conflict. One more thing: the narrative of life in Star Wars is not about first contact, exploration, or discovery—Star Trek it is not. The project of Star Trek’s Federation of Planets is, as the title sequence tells us, “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations.” The key word here is not “strange” but “new.” In Star Wars, beings are already in contact and have been interacting for a very long time. Star Wars is the day-to-day of a multiculture, multilanguage, multispecies galaxy. Some beings live peacefully with others; some are resentful. Some have stopped paying attention to the diversity of the galaxy; some are fearful of it. Some have perpetuated stereotypes, while others have found unity and strength in the varied forms of life.

3 IMPERIAL DESIRES War, Order, Colonialism

Star Wars enthusiasts of all ages have their own periodical get-together. Since 1999, Lucasfilm has been organizing the cheerfully named Star Wars Celebration, a long weekend of major panels, major shopping, and major cosplaying (and now . . . tattoo parlors!). My first was Celebration Orlando in 2017. I was there for only one day, but it decidedly gave me a new perspective on Star Wars. I had never been around that many children for that long without ever witnessing a tantrum or a meltdown. They were having a blast. I had never been anywhere surrounded by so many Star Wars fans, in and out of costume. There were Leias and Vaders of all ages; Tatooine Luke, Endor Luke, Dagobah Luke; Han Solos, Kylo Rens, and more Reys than she could shake her stick at. But one thing startled me: I had never seen so many “guns” in my life. Imperial stormtroopers and First Order 66

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stormtroopers; clone wars troopers, flame troopers, snow troopers, death troopers, and scout troopers; bounty hunters and Mandalorians—all of them carried blasters of some kind. I need to confess something that will sound preposterous: it was not until Celebration Orlando that I really noticed the word “wars” in “Star Wars.” Perhaps coming to Star Wars as a child prevented me from seeing this glaringly obvious fact, but of course, it’s everywhere. The beginning scroll of IV: A New Hope begins with “It is a period of civil war.” The first word in III: Revenge of the Sith’s scroll is “War!” (exclamation point in the original). The music of John Williams for the nine-movie Skywalker saga has at least two military marches—the famous Imperial March and the March of the Resistance—and the scores for many battle scenes are informed by an entire tradition of Hollywood war-movie music. Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack for Rogue One is overtly military. In the animated show The Clone Wars, the John Williams main theme, originally composed as an optimistic, celebratory fanfare, is militarized by the composer Kevin Kiner, with various drums driving the melody. Galactic history in Star Wars is mostly organized around battles: the Battle of Scarif, the Battle of Endor, the Battle of Coruscant. What’s more, dates in Star Wars are usually set by the Battle of Yavin: BBY/ABY, before or after the critical

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turning point when the first Death Star was destroyed. More recent Star Wars material continues this tradition. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn begins each chapter with war dictums by the Chiss admiral himself, written in the spirit of the Chinese military strategist Sunzi’s The Art of War. During Christmas of 2016, I heard more than one person say that Rogue One was a “real” Star Wars movie. I think what they meant was that Rogue One, true to Star Wars, was a war movie. Thinking about my revelation, I am almost embarrassed. But in my defense, perhaps there’s something to my late discovery: films like IV: A New Hope and V: The Empire Strikes Back are not really about war; they’re more about living in an imperial, authoritarian society and attempting to resist it. While it is true that the prequel trilogy focuses on war, even there the plot is more about Anakin’s journey into darkness, with war essentially as a backdrop. War as a protagonist really begins with the television shows about the clone wars, both Tartakovsky’s and the animated series supervised by David Filoni. The multiple narratives of these shows center on war—fighting in it, living in it, fleeing from it. The shows explore how war shapes politics, how war shifts the notion of a citizen, and the toll that war takes on civilians, on soldiers, on governments, on the environment, on hope.

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While those television shows focus on war itself, Star Wars, in any format and platform, is informed by the threat of war, its allure, its violence, and its consequences. The language and the acts of war propel the narrative, shaping characters and transforming societies. War in Star Wars is perennially connected to imperial power: as a colonial endeavor, as an authoritarian regime, and as an ideology. Even the Jedi have to deal with war, whether trying to prevent it or actively participating in it. This chapter looks into the different ways in which Star Wars frames war—and war frames Star Wars.

A STATE OF EXCEPTION

In war, language and action require simplification: war forces the establishment of binaries—us and them, ally and enemy. In wartime, language that speaks of collaboration, negotiation, or compromise is criticized as weak, perhaps even treasonous. War generates and upholds a state of exception in which the objectionable is permitted and the unthinkable is seriously considered. In war, laws and morals lose their strength. War is more than a condition of conflict; it is crisis itself. Nowhere is this idea of war clearer than with the Galactic Empire. As instigators of war, the Empire and its reincarnation, the First Order, view bellicose conflict

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as one of their principal methods of exercising control. Their rhetoric may use the language of peace, but their idea of peace is one achieved through forceful means: abduction, mass murder, assassination, genocide. At first, the white armor of the stormtroopers seems like a paradox in a military that, at least symbolically, should be wearing black, but thinking of those helmets as stylized skulls—as the Star Wars illustrator and art director Doug Chiang describes them (Star Wars, “Evolution”)—fits perfectly with the use of fear and intimidation. For the Empire and the First Order, the enemy is always clearly identified: it is whoever threatens order and security. Perhaps because the ideology of the Sith informs policy in the Empire, the tendency to “deal in absolutes” (if I may paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi in III: Revenge of the Sith) underlies everything. The Rebels in the original trilogy (and, in some ways, the sequel trilogy’s Resistance) do not seem to live by these notions. Their language revolves much more around freedom and that oh-so-American idea of democracy; their talk of peace is never an act of intimidation. Because the Rebel Alliance is not composed of an official military—it is a small underground faction resisting the Imperial establishment—it most often resorts to classic guerrilla warfare, employing hit-and-run tactics, surprise attacks, ambush, and sabotage to harass and demoralize

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the enemy. During the Galactic Empire, war in Star Wars is guerrilla warfare versus classically organized warfare. Especially in the novels, the Empire repeatedly uses classic, by-the-book maneuvers to win battles. The Rebellion and the Resistance win battles by their irregularity. In the few instances when the Empire resorts to “irregular” military behavior, the tactics are closer to paramilitary action, as with Sergeant Kreel’s SCAR troopers in Marvel Comics’ Last Flight of the Harbinger (Aaron, Molina, et al.), or they are a desperate, last resort, like Admiral Natasi Daala’s rampage in Kevin J. Anderson’s novel Dark Apprentice. But the Rebels’ and Resistance fighters’ relationship to war can still be thorny. If indeed most of them take up arms in order to end (or, in the case of the Resistance, forestall) an authoritarian, military regime, their modus operandi perpetuates militarized conduct and culture. As we see in the original trilogy and in Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars, the destruction of the (first) Death Star is a military master stroke, but it does not end the Imperial regime. When Poe Dameron, at the beginning of VIII: The Last Jedi, disobeys General Leia Organa and destroys a massive Dreadnought in order to “hurt” the First Order, the act does not translate into a victory for the Resistance. The figure who best embodies the ambivalence of what war is and what war does to so-called good guys

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is the outlier Rebel Saw Gerrera. Unfolding across television, film, and fiction, the story of Saw Gerrera complicates the simplifying dichotomy of war. During the clone wars, Saw fights against the Separatist droid army. During the Galactic Empire, he joins the rebellious forces for a time but soon becomes frustrated by the careful tactics and slow results of the newly formed Rebel Alliance. He refuses to join the Alliance and, without abandoning the cause, forms his own group of renegade Rebels who quickly set aside the moral consequences of their actions. Saw Gerrera fights in the name of the oppressed and against the evil forces of the galaxy, but he does so in ways that many of his fellow Rebels consider, frankly, immoral. Following the tradition of symbolic names in Star Wars, Saw’s last name is almost exactly the Spanish word for “warrior,” guerrero. The name also recalls the Spanish word guerrilla, which simply means “little war” and was originally adopted in early nineteenth-century Spain to describe the small groups of fighters resisting the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. Saw’s military tactics are, indeed, guerrilla strategies, though pushed beyond moral limits. We first meet Saw Gerrera on television in a multi­ episode arc of The Clone Wars in which none other than Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker is training a group of fighters who are resisting the Separatist invasion of

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their home planet, Onderon. The first two episodes of that story line, “A War on Two Fronts” and “Front Runners,” all but quote Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s classic manual Guerrilla Warfare—as the Jedi Council debates the nuances between terrorism and rebellion and again as the Onderon cell discusses the importance of securing civilian support. From the moment we meet Saw, he is impatient and forceful and focused on recapturing the planet at any cost. This rash attitude is solidified by the tragic death of his Rebel sister, Steela, toward the end of The Clone Wars story arc, and it will govern his actions thereafter. Saw will resort to betrayal, violent interrogation, and murder, repeatedly and without remorse. Saw’s final days appear in the film Rogue One, but it is in two YA novels connected to the narrative of that film that we gain a better insight into his relationship with war. In Greg Rucka’s Guardians of the Whills, Gerrera deliberately betrays the trust of his newly made allies in order to further his offensive against the Empire, sacrificing civilians in the process. In Beth Revis’s Rebel Rising, during an argument about his tactics with his friend and fellow Rebel Idryssa Barruck, Saw is unfazed by being called an anarchist and a terrorist; he puts an end to the heated discussion by asserting, “War is war and it never ends” (53). Saw also appears in seasons 3 and 4 of Rebels, trying madly to figure out what the Empire is building (it’s

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the Death Star). Once again, on a mission with Jedi Ezra Bridger and Mandalorian Sabine Wren, Saw chooses to sabotage the Empire rather than save the prisoners who are held in an Imperial cargo ship (“In the Name of the Rebellion, Part 2”). War for Saw Gerrera is not about the restoration of peace; it is about hurting the enemy and making them pay. Had he been alive during the Battle of Yavin, Saw would have rejoiced in the destruction of the first Death Star with vengeful satisfaction. He is not without a tender, sympathetic side: his love for his sister and his protective affection toward Jyn Erso later in his story make him a layered character. But as a warrior, he muddies the moral waters of those who fight the Empire. War does not necessarily define all social relations in Star Wars; but the franchise is permeated by war, and most characters must face its consequences. Of course, how different societies, groups, and factions view war and how they put it to use vary widely. War in Star Wars is not homogeneous—it is always polyphonic. War is cacophony as well—like the distraught voices of clone troopers that we hear at the beginning of the pilot film for The Clone Wars, voices in the midst of a battle trying to survive and bring order to the chaos that surrounds them, voices that we hear before any image appears on the screen.

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In multiple episodes spread across six of the seven seasons of The Clone Wars, the political and military conflict on the planet Mandalore serves as a useful example of the polyphony and cacophony of war. The first sentence of Sunzi’s The Art of War could summarize the Manda­ lorian conflict: “War is a grave affair of State” (3). What’s remarkable about the war narrative of Mandalore is the way it shows the tangled connections among government, politics, and military conflict. Historically a warrior society, Mandalore chose to pursue the path of peace after lengthy wars devastated most of the planet. Duchess Satine Kryze became the leader of the Mandalorians, and during her peaceful reign, Mandalore prospered economically. But the clone wars revived the desire among some Mandalorians to resurrect their warrior past. They form Death Watch and secretly ally with the Separatists, wreaking havoc through terrorism and intimidation in their attempt to overthrow the Duchess and restore the warrior traditions of old. The twists and turns of the televisual Mandalorian narrative exemplify the many instances when Star Wars lingers on war as a multifaceted event, affecting all levels of society. It also lays out the conflict between a rhetoric favoring war and a rhetoric opposing it. Duchess Satine abhors war, having experienced it firsthand as a young woman. She is a political figure grounded in pacifist

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policies. The ultranationalist Death Watch justifies war as a natural element of Mandalorian culture and believes it is a righteous means for overthrowing the Duchess. War for Death Watch happens also to be politically convenient. These contrary ways of portraying war were already present during the prequel trilogy—“I will not condone a course of action that will lead us to war,” Queen Amidala firmly proclaims in I: The Phantom Menace. And this tension appears even in the late-1990s fiction connected to the prequel, but it moves to center stage in The Clone Wars. During the clone wars, even when a planet or a culture decides to ally with the Republic to avert war or invasion by the Separatist army, the alliance still means militarizing its society. There are several episodes in season 1 of The Clone Wars (“Ambush,” “Defenders of Peace”) that end with an ominous low-angle shot of massive Republican cruisers and hundreds of troops landing on the surface of the planet in question. War is not ended by an alliance with the official government of the galaxy, even if that government is deemed righteous and good. Is Star Wars, then, a critique of war? There certainly are moments when it seems so. Many of the narratives are about trying to avoid war, about ending it as soon as possible, or about stopping those who want to initiate or continue it. Duchess Satine exclaims during the conflict with Death Watch, “War is intolerable!” (“Voyage

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of Temptation”). In a promotional video for the “Luminous Project”—a Star Wars authors workshop to brainstorm what became The High Republic series of fiction books—there is a quick shot of a white board containing a list of what Star Wars is and is not; in one of the columns, someone has written “not pro-war” (Star Wars, “High”). And yet, while the franchise portrays war as an abhorrent state, it also uses war as an element of narrative spectacle. War in Star Wars is thrilling—in the way that it is written and storyboarded, in its suspenseful music and awesome special effects, and in the dramatic tension of battles and escapes. The Battle of Yavin in IV: A New Hope, the attack on the Rebel base in Hoth in V: The Empire Strikes Back, the numerous clashes between the Grand Army of the Republic and the droid army in the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars—the list goes on. This is not exclusive to audiovisual Star Wars. Comics and fiction also partake of this depiction of war as intoxicating spectacle, as we see in Marvel Comics’ Poe Dameron series. War is the adrenaline of Star Wars. Though the stories emphasize how disturbing the act of war is, the critique of war is very often accompanied, and potentially undermined, by the excitement of war. It is no exaggeration to say that the body count in Star Wars is astronomical. Nonetheless, the multiverse is persistent about containing the disturbing effects of

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war. How can we enjoy IV: A New Hope if we truly understand what the destruction of a populated planet means? Star Wars is exceedingly shy, for example, about violence against females of any species. There is never an explicit rape. Harassment against children does exist but always in the mildest form possible. (The murder of the padawans at the Jedi Temple in III: Revenge of the Sith is a shocking exception, but it is not graphically depicted.) I have always been intrigued by the clone wars because they are fought mostly by two armies that were explicitly manufactured for battle: the droid army and the clone army. The destruction of battle droids is never seen as killing per se. The “deaths” of the droids, as mechanical beings programmed to kill and perceived as nonsentient, are emotionally inconsequential to their opponents— and to audiences or readers. This in a way buffers the shock of war, the shock of violence, the shock of death. Because Star Wars often points to the humanity of the clones, especially on the television shows and in some novels of the prequel years, we respond differently to them. But clones were bred and trained specifically to fight; thus, both sides of the war try to distance themselves from the atrocities of battle by sparing their citizens from becoming actual soldiers. Of course, war still affects everyone—absolutely everyone—as the Star Wars multiverse repeatedly shows.

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A STATE OF ORDER

At one point in a Marvel Comics series, Darth Vader tells a group of stormtroopers, “You will destroy the attackers. You will teach them the meaning of Empire” (Soule, Camuncoli, Orlandini, et al.). In that scene, what Vader means by “Empire” is deadly force. Clearly, one of the ways the Galactic Empire keeps control of the galaxy is through military might. But in the larger context of Star Wars, “empire” is more than battlecruisers and blasters. Empire is all-encompassing, ideological, authoritarian; violence is only the most obvious element. There is nothing like comedy to make us understand the key features of an idea. Here is Christian Blauvelt’s How Not to Get Eaten by Ewoks and Other Galactic Sur­ vival Skills: “The Empire’s reach spans the whole galaxy from the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim. Its business is maintaining order, and order is good for business. As long as you obey its laws, accept the authority of its troops to go anywhere and do anything, and report the first sign of rebel activity you see, you’ll be fine. Remember: being a hero can be hazardous to your health” (28). It is hard to disagree with this: the Galactic Empire is omnipresent and unforgiving. But there’s one element of the quote that is fundamental for understanding empire: “its business is maintaining order.” The Empire’s objective is to establish

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a lasting order in the galaxy so as to prevent “chaos.” This is how it justifies its existence. The names of the imperialistic military organizations in the sequel trilogy are not gratuitous: the word “order” in the First Order and the Final Order refers both to an institutional form and to political, social, and military control. Chaos is seen by the Empire (and the Orders) as the result of opposition, defiance, and rebellion. It is the deadliest of social illnesses. This binary opposition of order and chaos permeates Star Wars, though it is articulated more explicitly in recent narratives. General Armitage Hux’s speech before the activation of Starkiller Base in VII: The Force Awak­ ens begins with the following statement: “Today is the end of the Republic, the end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder.” Of course, the disorder that Hux refers to is the messy business of democracy, the uncertain process of negotiation and consensus. In Zahn’s first novel of the new Thrawn trilogy, the Chiss Grand Admiral coolly admits that there are problems in the structure of Empire, but he still finds it effective: “Certainly the Empire is corrupt. No government totally escapes that plague. Certainly it is tyrannical. But quick and utter ruthlessness is necessary when the galaxy is continually threatened by chaos” (Thrawn 389). In comics, Imperial stormtrooper TK-603, who later becomes Agent Terex for the First Order Security Bureau, thinks of empire as an ideal form:

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“The Empire represents everything the galaxy should be. Stability, order, discipline. Law. Safety. It holds things together. Without it .  .  . chaos” (Soule, Noto, et al.). Even in The Mandalorian, the nameless client (played by Werner Herzog) uses similar language: “The Empire improves every system it touches, judged by any metric: safety, prosperity, trade, opportunity, peace. Compare Imperial rule to what is happening now. Look outside. Is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death and chaos” (“The Reckoning”). The last two quotes are almost a primer for Star Wars’ notion of empire: the call for discipline as a mechanism to crush dissent; the desire for stability as an imperative for prosperity; the promise of protection as a blanket statement of security. The client’s use of the word “peace” is pure rhetoric. Imperial peace is always a mask for order and social control and never a conduit to freedom. The conversation between Imperial Director Krennic and the scientist Galen Erso about the Death Star in the film Rogue One is precisely a conversation about the use of terror to achieve a particular notion of peace, one that is maintained through intimidation and violence. In fact, all of these words are used rhetorically: they function as generalized ideas emptied of complexity. Who benefits from the law that Agent Terex is referring to? Who or what is protected under empire? Stability at what cost?

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Discipline at whose expense? Opportunity to do what? Empire loves empty words because it can fill those words however it desires. A similar issue happens with another word: power. Palpatine triumphantly shouts, “Power! Unlimited power!” as he murders Jedi Master Mace Windu at the end of III: Revenge of the Sith, a cry that inaugurates the regime of empire in the galaxy. In Star Wars, the ideology of empire is inextricably connected to totalitarianism, which favors a rigid hierarchy and the repudiation of democratic ideals; this is why in Star Wars military structure and empire go hand in hand. (This is also why Imperial Star Wars borrows so heavily from the language and visual pomp of Nazi Germany.) One of the effects of totalitarianism is the erasure of individuality, something embodied in the stormtrooper uniform, which covers body and face to depersonalize the soldier. As the Resistance fighter Venisa Dozu tells the recent First Order recruit Tamara in the television show Resistance, “Individuality isn’t a trait the First Order tolerates” (“Rendezvous Point”). You can ask Finn, who at the beginning of VII: The Force Awak­ ens is reprimanded by Captain Phasma for taking off his helmet; she probably sees Finn’s misconduct as an affront to the imperial ideals of the First Order. Finn’s narrative arc is about the restoration of his individuality, not unlike Jannah and her fellow ex-stormtroopers in IX: The Rise of

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Skywalker, who live on the planet Kef Bir and fight in the Battle of Exegol. But the attitude of Emperor Palpatine, the Galactic Empire, and the First Order toward power involves some major wishful thinking. Power, as a social and political force, does not reside purely in the state. What’s more, dividing all subjects into those with power and those without is an unsustainable construct. Transgression, subversion, disruption, resistance, disobedience, rebellion—all these actions express power in some way. Yes, some are more successful than others, but they all enact power. When Grand Admiral Thrawn says to the young Rebel Ezra Bridger in Rebels, “Who deserves what is irrelevant. What matters is who has power” (“Family Reunion—and Farewell”), Thrawn is assuming that power is unilateral and unidirectional. Emperor Palpa­tine does not have (and will never have) unlimited power. That is an impossibility. Star Wars as a narrative persistently demonstrates the instability and multidirectionality of power. There’s another important issue: empires (and, for that matter, any state) cannot remain in power exclusively by the use of force. Some degree of consent is imperative. Citizens need to be persuaded—through education, through media, through culture, through language—that this form of government, this particular administration,

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is their best option. Throughout the first season of Resis­ tance, the young mechanic Tamara repeatedly argues with her friends that the First Order occupation is good because the troops keep the station safe from pirates. At the end of the season, it is not surprising that she joins the First Order, given that she has willingly accepted their rhetoric as truthful. (She realizes her mistake in season 2.) But scenes like this, in film, television, or fiction, are very rare. The Empire and the First Order are portrayed again and again as brutally, spitefully violent. It is no wonder that they ultimately failed.

A STATE OF EXPLOITATION

But wait, there’s more. The idea of empire is inherently an economic venture, especially with regard to expanding its territory for the extraction of resources to benefit the metropolis. That, simply put, is colonialism. Is the Galactic Empire colonialist? Emperor Palpatine, perhaps because of his dedication to the ethics of the Sith, doesn’t seem to be personally interested in the colonial venture. The Empire itself, as a political and economic institution, dabbles in it. Star Wars never focuses on the complications of colonial economics, but it occasionally inserts into its narrative indirect references to settler colo-

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nialism and mercantilism. As the scholar Kevin Wetmore states, “What is the invasion of Naboo by the Trade Federation in Phantom if not direct colonization? . . . What is the imperial presence on Tatooine, or for that matter, the human presence on Tatooine, a planet whose only indigenous sentient species are Jawas and Tusken Raiders, if not direct colonization through settlers?” (20). The galaxy seems to exist in a constant state of acquisition, appropriation, and subjugation. Though the exploitation of resources, the transformation of populations into laborers, and the environmental disasters that may follow are a little harder to find in Star Wars, they are definitely there. The explicitly colonial nature of the Galactic Empire seems to be described with more detail in fiction than in any other platform in Star Wars. We do have a sense of colonial power here and there in the movies, but it is intermittent. Although in Rogue One, Jedha City is depicted as an occupied space, with a hovering Imperial military presence and passing references to the Empire’s extraction of kyber crystals, in Greg Rucka’s novel Guard­ ians of the Whills, we get a closer examination of the colonization of Jedha and the exploitation of its resources: “The Imperial machine never stopped working, and that meant that the mines never closed” (28). The first chapter of the novel presents a world that has drastically changed: “Where once kyber crystal mines had made modest

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profit for those who worked them, now the Empire tore open gashes in the surface of Jedha, greedy for more and more. This, in turn, brought more pollution and filth into the atmosphere. Food and clean water, never abundant but always adequate, became scarce, and in some cases toxic. Illness and injuries became commonplace” (8). In the novel Lost Stars, Imperial officer Ciena Ree returns to her home planet and barely recognizes it; the Empire’s mining activity has completely transformed the environment: “Thick fog seemed to have settled permanently on the ground, and the air was thick with grimy soot. The mines that had carved gouges in so many of the mountains did not attempt to filter the byproducts of the work, so people simply walked through it, coughing, some with kerchiefs or light masks over their mouths and noses” (Gray 359). No landscape of this sort is ever depicted in the early films. The one mining establishment that we encounter is in V: The Empire Strikes Back when the Mil­ lennium Falcon makes a stop at Cloud City, but all we see is the administrative center with its slick, gleaming, white interiors. The labor involved in harnessing and processing tibanna gas is never shown. We only see the “front” of the business: Cloud City is squeaky clean. Now, situations in which the Empire is directly involved in colonial exploitation are not all that common in Star Wars, and the language of colonialism is barely

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present in the Empire’s rhetoric. More prevalent are situations of resource exploitation and territorial control by commercial or criminal organizations: the Offworld Mining Corporation in the Jedi Apprentice series, Crimson Dawn in the film Solo, spice mining everywhere. In the novel Jedi Search, Han Solo and Chewbacca are forced by thugs to work in horrifying conditions at a spice-mining facility in Kessel; these chapters are a gruesome rendition of slavery and the cruel treatment of miners. The practice and ideology of colonialism in Star Wars is not exclusive to imperial or totalitarian states. The conflict in The Clone Wars episode “Trespass” between the space-faring Pantorans and the nomadic Talz revolves around the paradigmatic colonial project of territorial control, along with the familiar situation of a metropolis assigning a primitive, even animalistic, status to a technologically simpler culture. When the Jedi discover the Talz on a planet that is under the jurisdiction of the Pantorans, one that was thought to be uninhabited, the self-­righteous Chairman Chi Cho uses the language of colonialism to declare the Talz trespassers on Pantoran territory. Dismissing them as savages, he wants the Jedi and the clone army to attack them. All of these examples imply an intriguing paradox. Why is the authoritarian might of the Galactic Empire so rarely connected to the exploitative actions of colonial-

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ism? In the films, why is colonialism hardly shown? Why does Star Wars usually assign the evils of colonialism to criminal organizations, corporations, and non-Imperial states? Why is economics a silent topic? I believe Star Wars wants to distance totalitarianism from colonialism, locating the idea of imperial government squarely within the mechanisms of undemocratic rule but far from the imperatives of economic profit. Separating financial gain from the objectionable ethics of empire sidesteps an uncomfortable reflection on the ideologies of US capitalism. To keep the abuses of territorial expansion and colonialism safely disassociated from profit, it’s better to leave “colonial” actions to questionable entrepreneurs, pirates, thugs, and gangsters.

PEACEKEEPERS, GENERALS

The brief title sequence of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars contains no music, just three consecutive sounds: the marching footsteps of the clone army, the firing of blasters, and the familiar hum and clash of lightsabers. These are the sounds of war. And war in Star Wars so often includes the Jedi Order. Technically a religious order of Force-sensitive beings who follow a strict code of conduct, the Jedi are not monks secluded in perpetual meditation. Throughout

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the ages, the Order has always had some degree of involvement in politics and matters of state. In the legends junior series Jedi Apprentice and in Claudia Gray’s novel Master and Apprentice, readers get a closer look at their peacekeeping missions throughout the galaxy—acting as negotiators or voices of reason, armed with tolerance and intelligence, and using force mostly to protect others or in self-defense. Like a mantra, the back cover of each Jedi Apprentice book solemnly declares, “Peace over anger. Honor over hate. Strength over fear.” While it is true that these missions demonstrate the nobility of the Order, Wetmore suggests a different take on them: “In a larger sense, the Jedi are colonial administrators—they keep the peace, resolve local disputes, and take punitive action, if necessary” (64). This is an intriguing view because from this vantage point, the Jedi would seem to defend the galactic status quo of that era, acting as representatives of the Republic. The Jedi are not radical revolutionaries (the radicals in Star Wars are the Sith), and this stance shapes their choices when they reluctantly go to war. I: The Phantom Menace begins with one of those peacekeeping missions—one that will indirectly trigger the escalation to the clone wars. Eventually, the Order finds itself in the middle of an imbroglio, facing civil war with an army at its command. If the clones were manufactured

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and trained for war, the Jedi are tossed into it. My earlier notion of war as a state of exception applies particularly well to the Jedi: the clone wars will be an interruption not just of their duties but of their Code. Even though Jedi Master Mace Windu reminds the Council in II: Attack of the Clones, “We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” the peacekeepers become generals of the Grand Army of the Republic—soldiers in spite of themselves. The padawans who are training to be Jedi in the midst of war are the ones who feel this contradiction most acutely. Throughout The Clone Wars, the young Ahsoka Tano functions as the voice of conscience for the Jedi, doubting and prodding, inquiring and questioning, though as a padawan, she doesn’t have much leverage. At one point, Ahsoka is asked to go on a mission with another padawan, Barriss Offee. During a lull in their adventure, Ahsoka expresses her misgivings, and Barriss tries to reassure her: BARRISS: Master Windu said we are keepers of the peace, not

warriors. However, once the war is over. it will be our job to maintain the peace. ASHOKA: Yes, but will we do so as keepers of the peace or war-

riors? And what’s the difference? (“Brain Invaders”)

Ahsoka hits the nail on the head: the dilemma of the Jedi is the potential transformation of the Jedi Order itself.

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She fears that war will permanently change the social function of the Jedi. After the fall of the Republic, Jedi Knight Kanan Jarrus in the show Rebels will feel similarly ambivalent about the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. In the show’s first episode, Hera, Kanan, Zeb, and Sabine are a kind of a Robin Hood gang, taking from the Empire and giving to the needy (“Spark of the Rebellion, Part 1”). When they join others in what will become the Rebel Alliance, Kanan has doubts about inserting himself into a military operation (“The Siege of Lothal, Part 1”). Kanan fought in the clone wars and witnessed Order 66, by which the Jedi (including his master) were assassinated en masse. While Kanan Jarrus agrees with the objectives of the Alliance, he is also uncomfortably aware of the consequences of the Jedi turning into soldiers and generals. The Jedi Council during the war is not without arguments about this paradox. “How we conduct war is what distinguishes us from others,” says Kenobi in one of those meetings (“A War on Two Fronts,” The Clone Wars). Warmongering is never the Jedi way, not even in military conflicts; the restoration of peace in the Republic is the Jedi’s primary goal. But pacifists they are not; a pacifist would not be personally attached to a weapon. The lightsaber is the “constant companion” of the Jedi, as Luke Skywalker describes it in Anderson and Moesta’s novel Young Jedi

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Knights: Lightsabers (17). Obi-Wan reminds Anakin in II: Attack of the Clones, “This weapon is your life.” But for all the allure of the lightsaber and its powerful connections to the Force, it is still a weapon. Older Obi-Wan might describe a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age” (IV: A New Hope), but it exists specifically for a violent response, even if it is self-defense. That violence has real consequences. In the final season of The Clone Wars, viewers meet the orphaned sisters Rafa and Trace Martez, whose parents, mere bystanders, were killed during a Jedi raid in the lower levels of Coruscant (“Dangerous Debt”). Perhaps because the Jedi see the war as a temporary crisis, they at times resort to rather unscrupulous tactics. The Jedi do not torture per se, but in “Brain Invaders” (The Clone Wars), Anakin Skywalker loses his patience and extracts information from a Geonosian prisoner by strangling him. It goes without saying that Anakin is a loose cannon within the Jedi Order, but he is not the only one behaving dubiously. The plot of Christie Golden’s novel Dark Disciple revolves around the decision of the Jedi Council to resort to assassination in order to bring an end to the clone wars. The idea, suggested by the otherwise cautious Mace Windu, is to send Jedi Master Quinlan Vos to murder Count Dooku, with Assaj Ventress as an ally (or accomplice?).

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The Jedi are not impervious to the pressures of war. Some even betray the Jedi Order and the Republic, going to the dark side like Jedi General Pong Krell or sabotaging the Jedi like Ahsoka’s friend and fellow padawan Barriss Offee (after she loses faith in the Jedi as an effective force for bringing peace to the galaxy). But these are exceptions. As a religious order, the Jedi retain a moral compass, grounded in the ways of the Force. They are—on balance—a force for good in the galaxy. There is some truth to what Thrawn says to the Jedi-in-training Ezra Bridger at the end of Rebels: “You chose to be a Jedi. You follow a long history written by the Jedi where they choose what they believe to be morally correct, instead of what is strategically sound” (“Family Reunion and Farewell”). The Jedi’s decision to engage in war is, indeed, fraught. The “amusing contradiction” that Duchess Satine Kryze ironically points out in “The Temptation Voyage” (The Clone Wars)—that the Jedi fight for peace—is at the core of the Jedi paradox. I don’t disagree with Adam Kranz when he concludes in his blog that “the Jedi’s task is . . . fundamentally impossible.” But in Thrawn’s pronouncement about the Jedi, he misses one important consideration. The Jedi worldview functions as a rampart against the military authoritarianism of the Empire. The Jedi notion of order is closer to the idea of balance than to social control. This is why Kanan

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Jarrus, as a Jedi, joins the Rebellion. This is why Luke Skywalker and later Rey can be Jedi without being soldiers and can still manage to defeat the corrosive longing for totalitarianism.

CONCLUSION: IMPERIAL IMPULSES

The way the fan base connects with Star Wars characters sometimes surprises me. The franchise seems to assume that audiences and readers will identify with and cheer for the noble heroes, while rejecting the “baddies.” The reality is quite different. It is impossible to ignore the gazillion fans of Darth Vader and Darth Maul, the fascination with stormtroopers, and the attraction to Sith Lords. The cosplay organization 501st Legion is composed exclusively of villains; Jedi and Rebels are excluded from the group (they consequently formed their own cosplay organization, Rebel Legion). Perhaps the attraction to bad guys is, in part, a reaction to the starry-eyed optimism of Star Wars, but the fact is that many fans are drawn to the ways of the Empire and the First Order. These fans seem to be fascinated by order, by an authoritarian political system that does not tolerate dissent, by the comforting feeling of discipline and the social advantages of obedience—not unlike the characters themselves.

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A longing for control permeates Star Wars—in the absolutist policies of the Galactic Empire and the First Order, in the philosophy of the Sith, and, to a certain extent, in the impatient attitudes of some members of the Jedi Order. When war upends society, characters can act on their desire for control. This desire reaches beyond the narratives and into the creative process: the film scholar Will Brooker has convincingly argued that George Lucas is attracted to the authoritarian strategies of empire, in “his preference for an ordered system” (82), in not only overseeing the films and television shows but also writing and directing the prequel trilogy, and in constantly tweaking his films through “special editions.” Lucas cheers the Rebels while acting the emperor in filmmaking. Is Star Wars, then, imperialist in nature? I wouldn’t put it in such absolute terms, but I believe the idea of empire, like the dark side, is always lurking in Star Wars, tempting its characters and alluring its leaders.

4 BEYOND PRINCESSES AND FLYBOYS Gender and Sexuality in Star Wars

Always lively, sometimes prickly or even heated, at times frankly disturbing, fans’ discussions about gender in Star Wars, both online and off, reveal much about our culture’s assumptions. What does it mean to be masculine or feminine? How do we think about the categories of woman and man? Curiously, the debate hasn’t focused on gender itself (that is, on issues of masculinity and femininity) but has mostly revolved around the increasing presence of women in the Star Wars franchise. Discussions focusing on men and masculinity are scant, though they do exist in a few scholarly publications. Fans have been quick to talk about sexuality in Star Wars (a major topic in fan art and fan fiction), but debates on gender—at least online— don’t usually address sexuality in any serious way. 96

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When it comes to gender, Star Wars is neither revolutionary nor reactionary. Regarding sexuality, it is basically heteronormative. Though war can enable a transformation of gender norms—think Rosie the Riveter—I would not go so far as to say that Star Wars offers an example of this. Still, the Star Wars multiverse seems interested in configurations of masculinity and femininity that point to a progressive awareness of gender coupled with attempts to alter certain traditional notions—but only to a point. Star Wars is definitely populated by masculinities, in the plural. Soldiers and troopers constitute a mostly traditional masculinity. The Jedi offer a different model. Even female masculinity exists here and there. Any one of these masculinities can veer into toxic territory. In comparison, femininity in the multiverse is far less diversified. Star Wars avoids submissive, domestic roles but not traditional notions of docility. Women—whether feminine or masculine—tend to exhibit strong personalities, often with a healthy measure of “badassness.” In Star Wars, grrrly-­ness is a persistent quality in women. Star Wars is exceedingly reticent when it comes to sexuality, and nonnormative sexuality is barely visible in the multiverse beyond a few same-sex romances that the fandom has wished into being and a few fleeting appearances that are not as openly queer as certain audiences might want.

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A perfunctory look at Star Wars reveals refreshing examples of gender equality. There are female and male Jedi of many species. Both the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance have a balance of men and women, and both organizations have female leaders (Senator Mon Mothma and General Leia Organa). In IX: The Rise of Skywalker, even the First Order has women in its military ranks, including as stormtroopers. This does not mean, however, that misogyny and patriarchy have disappeared. Governor Pre Vizsla, the leader of the ultranationalist Mandalorian group Death Watch, has this to say about Duchess Satine Kryze: “For generations, my ancestors fought proudly as warriors against the Jedi. Now, that woman tarnishes the very name Mandalorian” (“The Mandalore Plot,” The Clone Wars). This type of corrosive language is typically reserved for “bad guys,” but on occasion some of the “good guys” can be dismissive or condescending to women as well. One of the difficult issues with gender and sexuality in Star Wars is that we’re dealing with a phenomenon more than four decades old. Since 1977, the American consensus on gender and sexuality has shifted repeatedly, with feminism contributing to the debate at every point along the way, as Valerie Estelle Frankel has argued in her work. Therefore, the ways that gender and sexuality have played out in Star Wars, from its beginnings to today,

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are neither monolithic nor consistent. Taking that into consideration, this chapter examines how masculinities, femininities, and sexualities tend to manifest themselves throughout the multiverse.

VARIATIONS ON BADASS

It might be difficult to understand today how refreshingly different Princess Leia Organa was from other female characters in American action/adventure films of the 1970s. I can’t say “leading female characters” because back then there weren’t any. Hollywood dramas had strong roles for women—Faye Dunaway in Network springs to mind—but in action/adventure (or science fiction, for that matter), the Star Wars princess was on her own. Leia is a threshold. As Megan O’Keefe points out, before Leia, there was Jessica Lange in King Kong (1976); after Leia, there’s Ripley in Alien (1979). Since Leia’s appearance in IV: A New Hope, the Star Wars multiverse has gradually grown more interested in including women. But Leia is pretty lonely in the beginning. The original trilogy is populated mostly by white men (Wetmore 37). Frankel, who has published the most comprehensive monograph on women in Star Wars to date, carefully surveys the presence of women in the original trilogy. Aside from Leia, there are precious few

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speaking roles: Luke Skywalker’s Aunt Beru in IV: A New Hope (she has a few more lines in the radio-play version of the movie; 29); a single Rebel stationed in Hoth in V: The Empire Strikes Back, whose only line is “Stand by, Ion control. Fire” (32); and Mon Mothma in VI: Return of the Jedi, indeed a leader but not a leading character— audiences barely get to know her in that film (35). Leia is a military commander during the Rebels’ escape from Hoth, but there are no active female soldiers in the Rebellion; in the mission to the forest moon of Endor, she is the only woman. And in the original trilogy, the Galactic Empire is exclusively male (and white). Slowly but surely, women were added to the stories. Women in cockpits show up for the first time in I: The Phantom Menace. The prequel trilogy adds Queen Amidala and several female Jedi of various species. In the television series The Clone Wars, women are quite prominent: besides the leading role of padawan Ahsoka Tano, women appear as political figures (Padmé Amidala and Duchess Satine Kryze), as Jedi (Shaak Ti, Ayla Secura, Luminara Unduli), and as complex antagonists (Assaj Ventress). In legends fiction, more women were a significant part of the Star Wars narrative much earlier than in the films: the Force-sensitive Mara Jade; Han and Leia’s daughter, Jaina Solo; Imperial Admiral Natasi Daala; and many, many more. Since Star Wars’ acquisition by Disney, it has added

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numerous women in film, fiction, comics, and television, including several leading characters. The inclusion project in Star Wars is important and necessary—and refreshing—but simply quantifying women misses the point. What fascinates me are the ways women are represented, how notions of masculinity and femininity play into that representation, and how women’s participation influences the narratives. There might be one generalized trait in the portrayal of most Star Wars women: they are badass. This flexible term can refer to the toughness of MMA fighters or WWE wrestlers or to Charlize Theron playing Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Badass can be someone who is uncompromising or someone who is formidable; it can be understood as either positive or negative. Badass­ness has roots in the objectionable, but in American popular culture, it has become an admirable trait. Leia and Ahsoka Tano are genuine badass; Padmé is badass at times; Rey is definitely badass. So are Jyn Erso and Hera Syndulla. Assaj Ventress? Without a doubt. Badassness provides women an aura of confidence and strength, of strong-willed determination. More importantly perhaps, badassness sets in motion the blurring of the masculine/feminine divide, gnawing at traditional notions of femininity in women, especially in regard to female archetypes.

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At times, Star Wars inserts women into traditional constructs: the princess, the queen, the witch, the mother. These appear in Star Wars in different forms, occasionally as predictable roles, sometimes with adjustments that give women agency in terms of social or political power. In The Clone Wars, Mother Talzin of Dathomir is a stereotypical witch; in the prequel trilogy, Shmi Skywalker is depicted as a classic earth mother. But Leia Organa and Hera Syndulla, Assaj Ventress and Queen Amidala, even the Jedi librarian Jocasta Nu rewrite traditional womanness. Princess Leia Organa is the foundational figure of these reconfigured archetypes, though she almost never behaves as a princess in the traditional sense. Even in the final scene of IV: A New Hope, at her most regal, Leia is not standing as a ceremonial figure witnessing the event; she is personally awarding the medals to Luke and Han. Across seven films, Leia is less a princess and more an underground leader. As Paul Booth explains, “As a princess, Leia has always tended to differentiate herself from the stereotype, . . . but in doing so often had to disavow that title” (183). In Claudia Gray’s novel Leia, Princess of Alderaan (2017), the author portrays the formalities of her royal upbringing, but even there Leia’s duties are more political and diplomatic than courtly. Neither is she a traditional fairy-tale princess: Leia is not dainty or helpless or fragile. She does not exist for marriage—though she

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does eventually marry. With her “natural” 1970s makeup, Leia Organa presents a strong woman with a capacity for leadership: bossy when she needs to be, stubborn when the situation calls for it, maternal and compassionate when she wants to be. Throughout the pages of the Little Golden Book Star Wars: I Am a Princess (Carbone and Martinez), young Leia and older Leia are drawn again and again with a similar facial expression: tight-lipped, brows knitted in determination—badass, indeed. Leia, as many people have pointed out, is a product of Carrie Fisher at least as much as of George Lucas. Will Brooker makes reference to Lucas originally thinking of Leia Organa “as the annoying little sister” (45); Carrie Fisher’s performance made sure Leia grew out of that role, fast. If Leia manages to slip away from the princess archetype, Queen Amidala of Naboo in I: The Phantom Men­ ace is royalty incarnate, with all the pageantry a monarch could want. If Leia can run around in one costume through most of IV: A New Hope, with makeup (lip gloss aside!) barely noticeable, Amidala the Queen must be concealed behind extravagant makeup and wrapped in lavish outfits for every official appearance. But Queen Amidala is no Barbie. These feminine (royal) trappings do not reduce her to a mere figurehead, nor do they diminish her political power. Leia, as a princess, is not a ruler (though she is a military leader in later films). The

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Queen of Naboo commands at home and in the Galactic Senate; she even leads the recapture of her planet during the Battle of Naboo. Amidala also uses her cosmetics, headdresses, and garments strategically: since they conceal her actual appearance, the queen can move un­noticed when not in full regalia. Thus, Amidala the Queen enables Padmé “the handmaiden” to exist, and decoys of the Queen can be easily created. But after Padmé ceases to be queen, she does start to resemble a Barbie. Lest we forget, the overtly feminine Amidala was part of a Lucasfilm marketing ploy to attract “girls” to Star Wars (inadvertently attracting quite a few gay “boys” along the way). In the rest of the prequel trilogy, even in many of her appearances on the animated television shows, Padmé continues to change costumes: as senator, as Naboo royalty, and as lover and wife of Anakin Skywalker. In II: Attack of the Clones, she waffles painfully between feminine girliness and badass grrrly-ness. As movie critics, fans, and scholars have noted, the no-nonsense queen of I: The Phantom Menace and the kickass fighter from II: Attack of the Clones’ Battle of Geonosis devolves to a girlish “damsel in distress” in III: Revenge of the Sith. Jeanne Cavelos points out, “As the war escalates and the Republic threatens to crumble, she brushes her hair, musing about how to decorate the baby’s room” (qtd. in Frankel 96).

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Making women “badass” in Star Wars does not equal a complete female emancipation or an ideal state of equity and equality. Assertive femininity does not erase prejudice, misogyny, or stereotype inside the narratives or in the creative process that constructed those narratives. Nor does badassness make women invulnerable or entirely self-sufficient. Contrary to what a certain T-shirt might say, Leia does need some rescuing in IV: A New Hope. And yet this is not grounds for dismissing the many moments of agency driven by women, including Leia. Luke and Han might get her out of the cell, but Leia is the one who gets them all out of Detention Block AA-23. While Anakin and Obi-Wan are trying to figure out how to avoid being massacred by wild creatures in the Geonosian arena, Padmé has already freed herself. Regarding women, Star Wars straddles a line between self-­determination and determinism, liberation and convention. Then there is the infamous bikini that Jabba the Hutt—and George Lucas—gave Leia to wear in VI: Return of the Jedi. “Slave Leia,” as the look is popularly called, could easily be seen as female body exploitation. Jabba is punishing Leia for trying to steal Han Solo from his “menagerie,” so Leia’s silk drapes and metal bikini are meant to demean her. Slave Leia is unmistakably an image of subjugation. (Check out the scene again: here

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and there Carrie Fisher looks pissed!) Those who object to this representation of badass Princess Leia denounce her transformation into a sexual object—corroborated by glamour shots of Fisher made during the promotion of the film. Other fans and scholars, however, have understood Slave Leia differently. For them, Leia’s attire makes sense in the context of the reprehensible behavior of the Hutt; moreover, Leia uses the chains that enslave her to strangle and kill Jabba, escaping from a life of bondage (Dominguez; Travis). As Mara Wood explains, “The bikini and slavery act as an example of oppression that can be overcome through strength of character and determination to mete out justice” (69). Cosplay, as an arena of interpretation and resignification, also has something to say about Slave Leia. While some women wear the costume as an assertive means of flaunting their sexuality, others approach it as an empowering paradox. The cosplayer blogger Liana Kerzner explains, “The metaphor of choking the slave master with his own chain is at the core of why I chose to wear Leia’s metal bikini. It’s a huge part of the reason it makes me feel beautiful. It’s a reminder to me that I still have power even when I’m being dismissed as a bimbo. Again.” I haven’t yet wrapped my head around the parodic Slave Leias played by hairy, plus-size men, but even in those cases, I believe the metal bikini and flowy silks still stand for

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ballsy assertiveness and badassness, even if they refer less to Leia and more to the cosplayers themselves. Not all female archetypes go through such transformations as the queen and the princess, but some appear in Star Wars with interesting adjustments. Take, for example, the mother. Star Wars does not make the deterministic assumption that all women must be mothers, but a few of the central female characters do fit into that role at some point in their stories. Leia becomes a mother (of three!) in the legends novels, and she has one (highly problematic) son in the sequel trilogy. Amidala is a mother for a short second and then promptly dies. Leia’s adoptive mother, Breha Organa, is an important character in Leia, Princess of Alderaan. In Rebels, Hera Syndulla— whose name echoes the Greek goddess Hera, protector of mothers and childbirth (Wood 77)—behaves like a mother to her crew. In the final season, she becomes a mother herself. But in none of these cases does motherhood define the characters; motherhood is an element of their lives, not the core element of their existence. The notable exception in Star Wars is Anakin’s mother, Shmi, who does exist purely as a mother. Recent Star Wars continues this trend. In The Mandalorian, while the former shock trooper Cara Dune responds to carrying little Grogu with “I don’t do the baby thing” (“Redemption”), the episode “Sanctuary” gives us Omera, a mother who

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is genuinely badass: strong and nurturing, never self-­ effacing or self-sacrificing, a self-sufficient widow and a great shot. But simply examining how women in Star Wars relate to female archetypes overlooks a plethora of characters that exist outside of those traditional constructs. Jocasta Nu, the mild-mannered librarian and archivist at the Jedi Temple, is presented as an unremarkable older woman in II: Attack of the Clones and on The Clone Wars television series. But in a series of Marvel comics set after the end of the clone wars, Nu—as the awesome archivist that she is—does everything in her power to safeguard from the Empire data containing the identity of Force-­sensitive children, even fighting none other than Darth Vader in a stunning lightsaber duel (Soule, Curiel, et al.). The no nonsense droid L3-37, Lando Calrissian’s copilot and buddy in the film Solo, is presented as female, not simply because a woman actor does the droid’s voice but also because L3’s body has been designed to look like she has wide hips. She is included in the official video “Celebrating Women of the Star Wars Galaxy” (Star Wars)—the only droid in it. But L3 is no sexualized fem-bot; she is a brilliant engineer and pilot and a fierce activist for droid rights. Partially inspired by the female characters in the groundbreaking television show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

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(Barr 62), Assaj Ventress is one of the most complex female antagonists in Star Wars. A Dathomirian turned padawan turned Sith turned assassin turned Nightsister turned bounty hunter turned Jedi ally, Ventress is a tenacious, relentless woman trying to survive in a galaxy that treats her with cruelty and contempt. She also embodies a particular trait that is not uncommon in Star Wars: her clothes and her demeanor access masculinity as much as femininity. Other women in Star Wars deliberately deploy traditional markers of masculinity in the ways they present themselves. Sometimes it is a small gesture, like Padmé lowering the register of her voice when she is in full regalia as Queen Amidala. Other times it appears as moderately butch behavior, like hulky-muscular Pash Davane in the Marvel Star Wars comics (Thompson, Laso, et al.), Tam the mechanic in Resistance, or even Cara Dune in The Mandalorian. Captain Phasma radiates power by accessing masculinity. In contrast, Assaj Ventress appropriates both masculinity and femininity to the point that one blends into the other. If Queen Amidala adds a lower voice to her otherwise feminine appearance, Ventress picks and chooses, with skirts and strides, voice and body, to produce simultaneously a feminine masculinity and a masculine femininity. Perhaps it is not surprising that women in Star Wars reconfigure femininity and at times access masculinity.

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Not unlike our Terran world, different patriarchies (Mandalorian, Imperial, Hutt, and more) fix particular meanings to specific behaviors, and women may respond to and resist these meanings. There are two female characters in Star Wars that I have often wondered about. How do Rey and Ahsoka fit within these configurations? They certainly do not blend masculinity and femininity the way Assaj Ventress does; neither do they transform feminine or masculine markers the way Padmé or Leia do. I realize this is a radical notion, perhaps too radical, but I would venture to approach them as nonbinary women, at least gender fluid. To me, Ahsoka and Rey never feel masculine or feminine, nor do they feel not-masculine or not-feminine. In any case, I don’t think those categories, and their variations, help us in understanding these two women. Whether the term “nonbinary” applies to them or not, Rey and Ahsoka point to yet another way in which women negotiate gender in Star Wars. The different patriarchies in Star Wars equally affect men. So, are their reactions similar? Do the men of Star Wars employ gender strategies anything like the women’s? Does Star Wars treat masculinity in men the same way as femininity in women? Not on your life.

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ALT-MASC

Luke and Finn and Chewie and Din, Boba and Vader and Poe, Obi-Wan, Kylo, and Maul—men in Star Wars manifest masculinity in wildly varied ways. They may be stoic, compassionate, murderous, tender, angry, fragile, strong. Star Wars has men who are soldiers, pirates, smugglers, pilots; it has fathers and sons; it has anxious adolescents and older veterans; it has Sith Lords and Jedi Knights. If the women of Star Wars share a common badass quality, there is no single trait that is characteristic of the men. At times, the narratives openly criticize certain masculinities as objectionable. At other times, Star Wars offers alternatives to traditional masculinities. And not surprisingly, sometimes traditionally masculine behavior is simply naturalized, depicted as a “matter of fact” in men. Perhaps because war is so prevalent in the franchise, violence weaves through most Star Wars masculinities— even the Jedi. But it would be incorrect to assume that violence in Star Wars automatically indicates an objectionable masculinity. This is most evident with soldiers. Whether they are clone troopers serving the Republic or stormtroopers following the directives of the Empire or the First Order, masculinity rules their behavior. Even the addition of female troopers in IX: The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t alter the dynamic; they also display a masculine

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demeanor. Clones and stormtroopers, however, are presented quite differently from each other. The aggressiveness of the clone troopers signifies a commitment to a just cause (that is, until Order 66); that same aggressive behavior in stormtroopers feels abusive. In the last season of The Clone Wars, even the hawkish, testosterone-filled behavior of Clone Force 99 (aka the Bad Batch) is never depicted as damning. The language of stormtroopers toward civilians is disparaging, while clone troopers rarely treat nonmilitary cruelly. But both groups still express their masculinity in similarly combative, pushy behavior. The irregular soldiers fighting in the Rebellion and the Resistance are less boastful in their displays of masculinity—except at the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One, where the Rebels do attack with gung-ho bravery. Soldiers follow a traditional masculinity, but with other men, the situation is less straightforward. Though Star Wars draws on ancient epic narratives, many Star Wars men who are identified as “good guys” do not follow the models of Mesopotamian or Greek heroes. Take Luke Skywalker: he doesn’t have the bulging muscular body or the super physical strength of a Gilgamesh; he doesn’t ooze swaggering manliness like Achilles. Luke’s strength lies in precision and focus, in careful observation and awareness of his surroundings, in compassion. Luke’s power is not devoid of violence, but it is never impulsive

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brute force. Like many Jedi men, Luke doesn’t rely on his masculinity as the defining principle of who he is . . . unlike his father. Star Wars “baddies” resemble those classic epic heroes more closely. Either as the reckless Anakin or the brutal Darth Vader, a belligerent masculinity pervades Luke’s father. His endless demonstrations of power through intimidation and physical force, along with his superhuman strength, bring him much closer to Gilgamesh, Hercules, or Achilles. But Vader is a villain; his aggressive masculinity is not depicted as heroic. We are appalled by the carnage at the end of Rogue One, the purge of padawans in III: Revenge of the Sith, and the many bloodbaths in the Marvel series Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith. Star Wars morality reserves a masculinity of ruthless domination for villains. Grand Moff Tarkin in IV: A New Hope and in James Luceno’s novel Tarkin; General Grievous in III: Revenge of the Sith; Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian; General Pryde in IX: The Rise of Skywalker; Sergeant Kreel in the Marvel Star Wars comics; even the somewhat ridiculous General Armitage Hux in the sequel trilogy. These men are ruled by greed, anger, and vengeance, by a caustic desire for power achieved by any means. These men are utterly toxic. Kylo Ren tells Rey in VII: The Force Awakens, “You know I can take whatever I want.” Through most of the

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sequel trilogy, the son of Leia and Han Solo is a villain with a brutal and noxious masculinity. The scholar Nicole Veneto describes him in that film as “reckless, petulant, and brimming with an angst-fueled entitlement to power” (30). Her description is particularly meaningful because it points to a crisis in Kylo, an anxiety that unmasks the fragility of his persona. Veneto identifies Kylo Ren as a man desperately grasping for power. He attacks, he slashes, he murders, he tortures to make his power tangible, but some characters see through his masculine veneer. Both Rey and Supreme Leader Snoke call his helmet a “mask.” The head gear is meant to intimidate, but in fact it hides Ben Solo, the good boy, a boy whom Kylo Ren is doing everything in his power to eradicate. Kylo’s masculinity is adolescent—immature, impulsive, impatient, and enamored with the performance of power. Even though Kylo Ren ultimately abandons this version of masculinity, somewhat like his grandfather Darth Vader in the original trilogy, Kylo’s trajectory is more than just the rejection of toxic masculinity; it is an open critique of it. The dark side of the Force finds its purest embodiment in the masculinities of the Sith, as we witness in Darth Vader, Darth Plagueis, and Darth Sidious. Darth Maul, even after he ceases to be a Sith, is driven by hatred and revenge in The Clone Wars and Rebels. His brother,

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Savage Opress, like Ren, lashes out in murderous rampages. These masculinities are shaped by the imperatives of the dark side of the Force. In contrast, the Jedi moral code encourages the development of an alternative masculinity. Tenderness and vulnerability are part of the Jedi character. The compassionate Qui-Gon Jinn, the swashbuckling Kit Fisto of The Clone Wars with his disarming smile, even the brooding Mace Windu—these men are an antidote to Sith masculinity. At the end of The Only Witness in the Jedi Apprentice series, Qui-Gon Jinn and the teenage Kenobi have a beautiful exchange: Qui-Gon placed a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “I am grateful for your efforts to help me through my pain. For a long time I was not ready to hear your words, but you were still right to speak them. Thanks to you I have found myself again—I have found a way to go on. Your words . . . You are a comfort to me. Thank you.” Obi-Wan let out a deep breath and smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said. (Watson 118)

This type of bonding does not exist among the Sith. The Jedi do share some aspects of other masculinities. Jedi men may display, and even flaunt, their physical strength and confidence, like audacious Quinlan Vos or Jedi Master Kirak Infil’a—a big-muscled hunk from the Darth

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Vader Marvel comics, shown bare to the waist in nearly every appearance (Soule, Camuncoli, Smith, et al.)—but their bodies do not define their Jedi persona. The Jedi are not the only alternative to objectionable masculinity. Rough, scruffy, fierce, and adorable, Chewbacca has a no-nonsense masculinity, light-years away from toxicity. Some Star Wars men project a masculinity that doesn’t read as off-putting, like Din Djarin, the protagonist of The Mandalorian. He is brooding, strong, and determined. His helmet intensifies the markers of his masculinity: without facial expressions, Din can remain distant and stoic, regardless of how he feels. We come to see his soft heart, but he is never seen as “soft.” I would say that part of the wide appeal of The Mandalorian is that his masculinity remains traditional and pretty much intact. Though “Mando” is surrounded by objectionable masculinity, he is somewhat less interested in participating in it. There are instances in which certain social roles attached to masculinity are idealized without complexity. Fathers are rarely aggressive or abusive: Han Solo as Ben’s father (and Rey’s father figure), Galen Erso as Jyn’s father in Rogue One, Senator Bail Organa in Claudia Gray’s novel about young Leia. Even Vader and the Mandalorian, with their questionable parenting skills, display a dose of paternal affection. Unless the fathers are portrayed as antagonists in the narratives (and those

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exist only as truly minor characters), fathers are never im­ patient, unreasonably demanding, or threatening. Things gets a bit thornier regarding relations between men and women. Leia and Han’s bickering in the original trilogy, peaking with the famous “Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!” (V: The Empire Strikes Back) inaugurated a bit of a trope in Star Wars. When it comes to interactions with women, men seem to be oblivious to their actions and responses, often bordering on cluelessness. Finn at the beginning of VII: The Force Awakens is constantly grabbing Rey’s hand and asking if she is all right, as though he were a knight in shining armor helping a damsel in distress—even though it’s clear, from the moment he meets her, that Rey is in control of the situation. In season 2 of The Clone Wars, ObiWan Kenobi repeatedly butts heads with Duchess Satine; she rightfully loses her cool when the Jedi Knight refers to avoiding “hysterical” behavior regarding the crisis on her planet (“Duchess of Mandalore”). Their bickering is not unlike Han and Leia’s; Obi-Wan and Satine had been lovers in the past. There does seem to be a tendency in Star Wars to connect such quarrels to romantic relations. The interchanges between Leia and Han have the delightful feel of Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado about Nothing. The run-ins of Poe Dameron with Leia and Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo in VIII: The Last Jedi

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do not. The lighthearted tone of “your worshipfulness” and “flyboy” is absent here and for good reason: this is a power struggle between conflicting strategies, with life-or-death consequences. When Holdo uses “flyboy” with the demoted Poe, she is calling him out as rash and trigger-happy—and we have already seen good evidence in the film that this is true. But among some audiences, Holdo is a polarizing figure. For them, it’s cute when Leia and Han argue because it’s flirtatious, but it’s annoying when Poe and Holdo argue and the film sides with Holdo. Poe misjudges Holdo by equating leadership with traditional masculinity, and VIII: The Last Jedi calls him out for his erroneous assumptions. But exposures of this sort are not very common in the multiverse. Women are sometimes allowed striking departures from norms, but men are not. Star Wars is very conservative when it comes to transfiguring masculinity, though this seems to be gradually changing. Still, Star Wars is not a reactionary world. While the multiverse doesn’t overhaul masculinity in men, it does depict men who rethink it. Star Wars does not have a consistent critique of toxic masculinity, but it refuses to glorify it.

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CONCEALING BODIES

As Carrie Bradshaw used to say, I couldn’t help but wonder . . . about a particular complication in Star Wars: How do gender (masculine and feminine) and sex (female and male) play out with the numerous characters who cover their entire bodies, including their heads and faces? Think of Imperial and First Order stormtroopers as well as clone troopers; Mandalorians and some bounty hunters; Captain Phasma and the Knights of Ren. There are also species that don’t wear helmets but wear clothing that hides their bodies and especially their faces, such as Tusken Raiders with their turban-inspired head gear or the hooded Jawas. As I discussed earlier, sometimes covering the face is a form of intimidation; sometimes wearing a full helmet erases individuality. There are also moments in Star Wars when concealing the body and face masks the identity of the wearer. Leia impersonates Boushh, an Ubese bounty hunter, in VI: Return of the Jedi. In IX: The Rise of Sky­ walker, Lando Calrissian conceals his identity behind a Taloraan wind raider’s helmet (Hidalgo, Rise 108–9). But what about sex and gender? Concealing the entire body has the advantage of removing assumptions about who you are. While there are visible differences in clothing between male and female

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Tusken Raiders (as we briefly see in II: Attack of the Clones), this is not the case with Jawas. Sex has no outward visible marker in them, at least not in ways that we humans can determine. Since the bounty hunter whom Leia impersonates at Jabba’s palace is male, the gendered Ubese clothing allows an apparent change in her sex. The Galactic Empire, as far as we know, only has male soldiers in its ranks, but the First Order recruits both men and women. Because the stormtrooper armor and helmet are not gender specific, the gear effectively conceals sex, an effect accentuated by the fact that all stormtroopers perform masculinity, regardless of their sex. At least since VII: The Force Awakens, the actors portraying troopers are not exclusively male, as we see in the making-of documentary (“Secrets”). But in VII: The Force Awakens, we never hear female stormtroopers, only males; therefore, even though some of the actors are women, we assume that the characters are male. By contrast, during the raid on Kijimi in IX: The Rise of Skywalker, we actually hear female stormtroopers shouting at the inhabitants. Some of the troopers who capture Poe, Finn, and Chewie in the Star Destroyer above the planet have female voices as well. This detail is key: the gear might visually erase these characters’ sex, but the voice reinstates it. While allowing female stormtroopers to speak undermines the

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ungendered look of the stormtrooper, it makes apparent a certain gender diversity in the First Order. Women are now present, alongside men. The visibility of gender and sex includes the body. Sometimes concealing the body in clothes and head gear doesn’t erase sex. Sabine Wren in Rebels wears a helmet that covers her face, but her body is still visibly female; Zorii Bliss’s tight-fitting clothes in IX: The Rise of Sky­ walker have the same effect. This is not the case with Captain Phasma. Gwendolyn Christie, the actor who plays that character, has pointed out that the armor and the “chrome dome” of the captain were not feminized for the films (Star Wars, “Evolution”). Originally, the character was going to be male (“Phasma”), which makes it even more interesting that the shape of the armor remained ungendered. Making Phasma a woman didn’t translate into giving her a stereotypical female body. The effects of concealing your body apply outside the narratives as well. In cosplay, anyone can be any kind of trooper (stormtrooper, snow trooper, death trooper, clone trooper); anyone can be a Mandalorian. In fact, characters like Chewbacca and C-3PO equally allow the concealment of sex. Your sex does not matter in these types of cosplay; the neutrality of these “costumes” creates a democratic space. More than once, I have found myself

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startled (and then embarrassed for being startled and then delighted) when a stormtrooper or clone trooper cosplayer removes “his” helmet and reveals a woman.

STORMPILOT

Let me say it in the nicest way possible: Star Wars is un­ realistically hetero. The multiverse is home to an outlandish menagerie of beings and one type of sexuality. Throughout this book, I have been pointing out the ways in which our world frames the Star Wars multiverse, and this is no exception: nonnormative sexuality is practically invisible. Only very recently have LGBTQ representations started to appear in audiovisual Star Wars. But if the franchise has been timid about gayness and queerness, the fan base has not, creating films and art that display many possibilities beyond heterosexuality in the galaxy far far away. Star Wars has never been shy about depicting violence and seems unconcerned with body count, but sex has always been out of bounds. There is a meme that identifies “the first sex scene in Star Wars,” using the shot from VIII: The Last Jedi of Rey’s and Kylo Ren’s fingers lightly touching—this gives you an idea of “graphic sexual content” in the multiverse. In light of this, the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney makes sense. “Family friendly”

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and Star Wars have a long history together. But the total absence of sex is true only in audiovisual Star Wars. There are several postcoital scenes in fiction, even YA novels. Though sex itself is never described (at least as far as I have read), there is recognition that sex has occurred. But sex is not sexuality. Sexuality is less about the act itself and more about the ways in which we express our sexual orientation and desires. Like so much mainstream media, Star Wars generalizes heterosexuality throughout the multiverse, though Star Wars at least refrains from implying that gender behavior (masculinity or femininity) points to a particular sexuality. Assaj Ventress’s deployment of masculinity doesn’t signify same-sex desires. Tam’s butch demeanor in Resistance doesn’t either. My earlier suggestion that Ahsoka doesn’t conform to either traditional masculinity or femininity is unconnected to her sexuality; at least in The Clone Wars, she seems to be attracted to boys. Tam’s case is harder to determine, since her sexual orientation is unknown; whom you are attracted to is not typically a trait identified in most Star Wars characters, but the default is heterosexuality. There are moments that point to sexualities beyond the norm, all of them from recent works. The young Lando Calrissian, played by the actor Donald Glover in Solo, was described by one of the film’s screen­ writers as “pan­sexual” (qtd. in Romano). Glover does

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perform Lando with a slightly flirtatious demeanor toward women and men, especially when playing cards, and the female character Qi’ra finds his passion for capes a dubious hobby; but his pansexuality is all but shut in the closet. Still, the hint is there, which makes it a new gesture in Star Wars. Thinking of Lando this way is not new. His open-ended sexuality was more than hinted at in the hilarious Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars, a short film from the late 1990s made with Star Wars action figures by the stop-motion animator Evan Mather and Tarantino himself. As Luke goes through various detention cells on the Death Star looking for Leia, he opens one and discovers Lando with a Mon Calamari, dancing? making out? (it’s hard to know with toys). This is probably the action figure of Admiral Ackbar, who is male; whatever it is they’re doing is definitely romantic in nature, since the music that’s playing in the cell is “Love’s Theme” by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. The scene reveals Lando’s open-mindedness about sexuality on two counts: he is “playing” with a male and with a nonhuman. The film Solo runs with this idea as well: Lando’s copilot, the female droid L3-37, mentions to Kira that Lando has feelings for the droid. Pansexuality, indeed. A man apparently “having feelings” for a droid is less traumatic for some audiences than having feelings for a man. And, after all, the droid is female.

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Mather and Tarantino’s short film is not the only place where we get a playfulness with sexuality. Since 1977, there has been Star Wars “slash” fiction, typically written by women, that is “queer romantic fanfic written about male characters who are presented as straight in the story­line” (Romano). Fan films play with sexuality as well, as we see in the monumental Star Wars Uncut (Pugh), a re-creation of IV: A New Hope in fifteen-second minisegments created by hundreds of fans. In one brief segment, the two thugs in the Mos Eisley cantina obviously have the hots for Luke Skywalker, and he responds with sheepish approval—before Kenobi comes over and spoils the fun. These moments, however, are there for comic relief, something that media have frequently done with “homosexuality.” The case of slash is a bit more complicated, though there is still debate about whether that literary genre should be read as queer. Comic relief is what we get when the first gay couple arrives in canon audiovisual Star Wars. I had always had my suspicions about Orka and Flix, male shop owners in the animated television show Resistance. Flix has a very active limp wrist and moves with subdued effeminate mannerisms, and at one point they go off together to visit Flix’s mom. My suspicions were confirmed in 2019, when the executive producers of the show announced in the podcast “Coffee with Kenobi” that Orka and Flix were

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“absolutely a gay couple” (Convery). The television show doesn’t openly say this, but the clues are everywhere, with indirect recognitions of love by Orka and even the approval of the couple by Flix’s cousins, who say that Orka is a “good find” (“Dangerous Business”). They are a mixed-species couple—Orka is a rodent-like ChadraFan, short and stout, while Flix is long legged and tall, a bird-like Gozzo; in many ways, they recall Laurel and Hardy, so the comedic element is purposefully integrated in who they are (and, of course, Laurel and Hardy have their own gay subtext). If perhaps not as explicit as the same-sex desire in the live-action rendition of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017), Orka and Flix do represent a serious attempt at diversity regarding sexuality. Even if they are used as comic relief, the show doesn’t dismiss their authentic relationship. There are a few other moments with explicit same-sex relations. In the Knights of the Old Republic role-playing game, there are potential lesbian couples, though some of them depend on the gender that the player chooses for their avatar (EckhartsLadder). In the YA novels by E.  K. Johnston about Padmé Amidala, Queen’s Shadow and Queen’s Peril, two of her handmaidens have romantic feelings for each other. In film, we finally get a genuine kiss between two human females at the end of IX: The Rise of Skywalker, though we know nothing about their

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relationship. As is usually the case, comics can get away with more. The fan favorite Captain Aphra is openly lesbian, with direct references to a past relationship with Sana Starros in “Rebel Jail” (Aaron, Gillen, et al.). If Lucasfilm and Disney remain shy about gayness and queerness, some audiences have gone out and identified characters that could potentially work as LGBTQ representations. StormPilot is the name for the sequel-­ trilogy romance between Finn (ex-stormtrooper) and Poe Dameron (pilot extraordinaire). Dozens of art pieces and videos have been made celebrating that relationship. StormPilot has even been endorsed by the actors who play the characters, and they openly expressed their disappointment when the gay romance was not pursued in the last film of the saga (Sharf). Less prominent, though still present in art and memes, was the creation of a PoeFinn-Rey ménage à trois, though Rey was pretty quickly paired off with Kylo Ren after VIII: The Last Jedi. Some fans have also identified a couple in the former guardians Baze Malbus and Chirrut Îmwe from the film Rogue One, especially after the publication of the YA novel Guardians of the Whills, which details their daily living and which some people have read as married life. I personally do not see any clear signs of a deliberate project of inclusion regarding sexuality in Star Wars. Disney and Lucasfilm have not embraced that possibility—

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at least not yet. Perhaps, as happens in Vicente Bonet’s Love Wars (2012), a Spanish fan film in which two gay stormtroopers stationed on the first Death Star discuss their closeted life in an intolerant Empire, sexuality will remain in the margins, or hidden in coded language, for a while longer.

CONCLUSION: THE TURN TO GENDER

Popular culture simultaneously perpetuates stereotypes and provide possibilities to upend those stereotypes. It disseminates traditional mores while also offering progressive practices that refashion those mores. Star Wars, as part of American popular culture, participates in that double articulation, and gender in the multiverse is one of the elements entangled in it. Starting with Princess Leia, every major addition of women to Star Wars has been “news,” and especially of late, it has received a spectrum of strong reactions. The addition of male characters to Star Wars does not get the same kind of attention—unless those men are added to reflect the actual diversity of our population. This is a telling reflection of our culture: for some people, more women and greater diversity in men are a cause for celebration; for others, adding women to Star Wars is a dis-

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ruption to the narrative, while introducing (masculine, white) men is perceived as natural. I believe the presence of women in Star Wars is a deliberate attempt on the part of the creators to address gender in progressive ways, as are the alternative masculinities presented throughout the multiverse. The additions of other sexualities, timid as they are, are another small part of that project. This endeavor has produced a fascinating paradox. It is the women in Star Wars, and not the men, who actively challenge gender norms. Women move beyond traditional archetypes; men largely accept them. We applaud badass behavior in Star Wars women; in Star Wars men, such behavior is expected but may be problematic. Still, I believe that the women and men of Star Wars are doing something right. Ahsoka, Chewie, Finn, Leia, Lando, Flix, Assaj Ventress, and Quinlan Vos might not be categorically restructuring gender and patriarchy, but they are at least providing new possibilities for thinking and rethinking those social categories.

CONCLUSION Star Wars, Seriously

As I trust this book has demonstrated, Star Wars is a vast and complex multiverse of storytelling and spectacle. As genuine Americana, it mirrors our social, cultural, and political views, including the assumptions and contradictions of our world. The wide appeal of Star Wars— spanning age, sex, nationality, race, sexuality, even politics—is due to both effective marketing and compelling storytelling. But Star Wars is not simply determined by profit and the imperatives of commercial entertainment. The multiverse is porous, as readers, audiences, and fans creatively transform Star Wars into commentary, critique, celebration, satire. In the narratives, Star Wars is neither utopic nor dystopic. Its films, television shows, comics, and novels are not interested in depicting an idealized society, nor do they present an apocalyptic hell. Instead, the stories of 130

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Star Wars spring from the tension produced between these two worldviews—and in the friction between the light and the dark side of the Force, between authoritarianism and democracy, between war and peace, and between freedom and oppression. Even though the most repeated sentence in Star Wars is “I have a bad feeling about this,” optimism permeates the multiverse, an optimism that good will win out. Star Wars pairs the threatening presence of war and destruction with a predilection for happy endings. John Williams’s fanfare, which begins and ends all nine films of the Skywalker saga, is a musical expression of that heartening positivity. The odds are never good—as audiences realize in the first shot of IV: A New Hope, when the Rebel ship Tantive IV is dwarfed by the ginormous Star Destroyer that takes eleven seconds to fly over the camera—but there is always the anticipation of an uplifting resolution. The trilogy format allows for dark sequences, which make the happy endings all the more gratifying. But stand-alone films do this as well; Rogue One is a journey to hope—even if most of the characters ultimately perish in their successful mission to steal the plans of the Death Star. On television, The Clone Wars and Rebels are not afraid to portray the dire impact of war and totalitarianism, but they never fall into pessimism. The cynicism of a Saw Gerrera is an exception; it is the optimism of Luke

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Skywalker or Ezra Bridger that is closer to the Star Wars ethos. Ezra keeps saying he wants to do what is right—an attitude that is as much American idealism as Jedi—and the multiverse encourages that attitude. As others have pointed out before me, in Star Wars hope is it. The optimism of Star Wars is accompanied by a sense of innocence: the excitement of Ani in I: The Phantom Menace, the exuberance of the Ewoks after the Battle of Endor, Leia at the end of Rogue One with the Death Star’s plans in hand, the Force-sensitive young boy imagining a better future in the last scene of VIII: The Last Jedi. This ingenuous quality, however, never lasts long. Star Wars is fundamentally about the loss of innocence, as characters face the consequences of not being truly aware of or in tune with the complexities of their world. That world is bent on refusing them a happy ending; the stories are about getting them there anyway. There is another tension in Star Wars that has to do with the act of experiencing the many layers of the multi­verse. Watching the movies or reading the fiction, even cosplaying or making fan art, we experience a constantly shifting combination of entertaining distraction and critical engagement. Star Wars relies on spectacle, on cuteness, on badassness to draw audiences and readers back again—and again and again. Similarly, Star Wars relies on nostalgia; IV: A New Hope is a nostalgic

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mashup of westerns, swashbucklers, war movies, and science fiction. Since the successful construction of the franchise, Star Wars has also become self-reflexively nostalgic, creating more narratives and more characters in more formats to help pass the fan torch from generation to generation. The Mandalorian functions as a nostalgia machine, outside of its excellent storytelling and characterization. At the same time, the multiverse allows both newcomers and hardcore fans to meditate on what they experience. By consuming Star Wars, they are exposed to the complex social interactions of a huge variety of cultures, to the effects of dictatorial governments, and to the development of political consciousness. Perhaps Star Wars is not exactly a space of deep intellectual examination, but it can be a potent space for interpretation and discovery. The fans’ artistic production of art, film, and fiction and the serious fun of cosplay are all part of that examination. But we can lose track of how our own world is reflected in the world of Star Wars and how our human history gets reconfigured onto this fictional world. It is my hope that this book helps those who want to dig into Star Wars and that it makes the galaxy far far away feel even more interesting—and more complex. I see this book as an exercise of responsible media literacy, detecting, uncovering, and exposing the intricacies of the multiverse.

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At the end of Star Wars Block, a board book for toddlers that teaches these future consumers the one hundred words necessary for getting up to speed on Star Wars, the main characters of the Skywalker saga are divided into two groups: the villains are placed under the word “fear,” while the good guys are placed under “hope.” But even this Manichean little book undercuts the seeming simplicity of Star Wars. Darth Vader is on the page with the villains, naturally, but as Anakin Skywalker, he is also on the “hope” page, both as little Ani, next to Qui-Gon Jinn, and as padawan Anakin, next to his “future” son, Luke Skywalker. The way Star Wars presents itself always seems simple, but as I hope this book has demonstrated, it rarely is.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I like giving thanks. It recognizes the community that forms around the writing of a book. This book ceased to be just an idea at Star Wars Celebration Chicago after Victoria Verhowsky pointed me to Rutgers and the Quick Takes series. She has earned her place in Star Wars heaven. I want to thank my editors, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Wheeler Winston Dixon, and Nicole Solano, who were huge supporters of my project from the very first email, and to Andrew Katz, who copyedited the manuscript with the astuteness of a Jedi librarian. The biggest hugs ever to my Star Wars buddies Brett King and Rebecca West, who were my sounding boards and metaphorically held my hand as I put the manuscript together. And a Purrgil-size truckload of thanks to my husband, Joseph Myers, who did extra chores so I could write and went over my manuscript word by word with love, patience, and a variety of funny voices.

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FURTHER READING

Bould, Mark. Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2012. Breznican, Anthony. “Ahsoka Tano: A Star Wars Oral History.” Vanity Fair 24 Apr. 2020. Web. . Brode, Douglas, and Leah Deyneka, eds. Sex, Politics and Religion in “Star Wars”: An Anthology. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow, 2012. Brooker, Will. Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans. New York: Continuum, 2002. Brooks, Max, John Amble, M. L. Cavanaugh, and Jaym Gates, eds. Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Military Conflict. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2018. Crewe, Dave. “Cinema Science: Using the Force of Star Wars.” Metro 204 (May 2020): 86–91. De Bruin-Molé, Megen. “‘Does It Come with a Spear?’: Commodity Activism, Plastic Representation, and Transmedia Story Strategies in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Destiny.” Film Criticism 42.2 (2018): 1–18. Decker, Kevin S., and Jason T. Eberl, eds. Star Wars and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. DeVega, Chauncey. “Our New Post-Obama Star Wars: Race, the Force and the Dark Side of Modern America.” 137

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Salon 20 Dec. 2015. Web. . Duncan, Paul. The Star Wars Archives: 1977–1983. Cologne: Taschen, 2018. Elovaara, Mika. Fan Phenomena: Star Wars. Chicago: Intellect Books, 2013. Feichtinger, Christian. “Space Buddhism: The Adoption of Buddhist Motifs in Star Wars.” Contemporary Buddhism 15.1 (2014): 28–43. Fisher, Carrie. The Princess Diarist. New York: Blue Rider, 2016. Flotmann, Christina. Ambiguity in Star Wars and Harry Pot­ ter: A (Post)Structuralist Reading of Two Popular Myths. New York: Transcript Verlag / Columbia UP, 2013. Henderson, Mary. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth. Exhibition catalog. New York: Bantam, 1997. Kapferer, Bruce. “Star Wars: About Anthropology, Culture and Globalisation.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 11.2 (2000): 174–98. Katz, Brandon. “Racism, Misogyny, and Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side.” Observer 16 May 2018. Web. . Kenny, Glenn, ed. A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on Twenty-Five Years of Star Wars. New York: Holt, 2002. Langley, Travis. Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind. New York: Sterling, 2015.

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Leong, Tim. Star Wars: Super Graphic. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017. Lyden, John C. “Whose Film Is It, Anyway?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80.3 (Sept. 2012): 775–86. MacGregor, Jeff. “Robot Love: How a Fussy but Brave ‘Protocol Droid’ Give the Star Wars Franchise an Unlikely Dash of Humanity.” Smithsonian 48.8 (Dec. 2017): 26–30. MacMullan, Terrance. “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi.” Journal of Religion & Popular Culture 31.1 (Spring 2019): 101–13. McDowell, John C. The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. Parisi, Frank, and Gary Scheppke. The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. Pollock, Dale. Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. Hollywood, CA: Samuel French, 1990. Proctor, William, and Richard McCullouch, eds. Disney’s Star Wars. Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2019. Rinzler, J. W. The Making of Star Wars. New York: Del Rey, 2007. Rius, Marcel. Fanatic Wars. Mexico City: Trilce Ediciones, 2013. Rose, Alexander S. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens [the Western Pleasure Principle].” Cinema Journal 7.2 (2019): 48–81. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Solitary Pleasures of Star Wars.” Sight and Sound 46.4 (1977): 208–9.

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Rotenberg, Celia. “Jewish Commentaries on Star Wars: Theology, History, Debate.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 19.2 (2020): 164–80. Shefrin, Elana. “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 21.3 (Sept. 2004): 261–81. Stevens, Craig. The Star Wars Phenomenon in Britain. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. Sturgis, Amy H. “Star Wars, Remixed.” Reason 47.8 ( Jan. 2016): 46–51. Sunstein, Cass R. The World According to Star Wars. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Tao, Stephen. “Star Wars Eastern Saga.” Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 21–48. Taylor, Chris. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Wright, Jonathan. “The Fantasy of Star Wars: Reconsidering Genre in Hollywood’s Biggest Space Movie.” Film Matters 9 (2018): 125–31.

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Kranz, Adam. “Heisenberg’s Principle for Peace and Justice: Why the Jedi Never Seem Very Good at Their Job.” Elev­ en-ThirtyEight 13 Jan. 2020. Web. 8 Apr. 2020. . Lamerichs, Nicolle. “Stranger than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011). Web. 13 Feb. 2020. . Luceno, James. Star Wars: Tarkin. New York: Del Rey, 2014. Macri, Thomas. Star Wars Aliens, Creatures and Beasts. Illus. Chris Kennett. New York: Golden Books / Lucasfilm, 2018. Mather, Evan, and Quentin Tarantino. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars.” 2000. Posted by StarWarsKod. YouTube 26 July 2013. Web. 27 Oct. 2019. . McDowell, John C. Identity Politics in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. ———. The Politics of Big Fantasy: The Ideologies of Star Wars, The Matrix and The Avengers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Nicholas, Christopher. Star Wars: I Am a Hero. Illus. Eren Unten. New York: Golden Book / Lucasfilm, 2017. O’Keefe, Megan. “Star Wars: Princess Leia Changed How We Think about Film Heroines Forever.” Decider 25 May 2017. Web. 29 Mar. 2020. .

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Science Fiction and Fantasy 50. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Thompson, Kelly, Emilio Laso, et al. “Annual 2.” Star Wars 5, “Yoda’s Secret War.” Marvel Comics, 2017. Travis, Erika. “From Bikini to Blasters: The Role of Gender in the Star Wars Community.” Fan Phenomena: Star Wars. Ed. Mika Elovaara. Chicago: Intellect Books, 2013. 48–59. Veitch, Tom. Star Wars: Dark Empire Trilogy. 1991–95. Illus. Cam Kennedy. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2010. Veneto, Nicole. “‘That Lightsaber: It Belongs to Me.’: Patriarchal Anxiety and the Fragility of White Men’s Masculinity in The Force Awakens.” Film Matters Winter 2017: 30–35. Vorel, Jim. “The Star Wars Alien Issues: Where Are the Non-human Characters?” Paste Magazine 2 Jan. 2017. Web. 11 Oct. 2019. . Watson, Jude. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 5, The Defend­ ers of the Dead. New York: Scholastic, 2000. ———. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 6, The Uncertain Path. New York: Scholastic, 2000. ———. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 13, The Dangerous Rescue. New York: Scholastic, 2001. ———. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 14, The Ties That Bind. New York: Scholastic, 2001. ———. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 15, The Death of Hope. New York: Scholastic, 2001.

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Watson, Jude. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 16, The Call to Vengeance. New York: Scholastic, 2001. ———. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 17, The Only Witness. New York: Scholastic, 2002. Wetmore, Kevin J. The Empire Triumphant. Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Whitten, Sarah. “Disney Bought Lucasfilm Six Years Ago Today and Has Already Recouped Its $4 Billion Investment.” CNBC 30 Oct. 2018. Web. 12 Aug. 2019. . Wolverton, Dave. Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice. Vol. 1, The Rising Force. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Wood, Mara. “Feminist Icons Wanted. Damsels in Distress Need Not Apply.” A Galaxy Here and Now: Historical Readings and Cultural Readings of Star Wars. Ed. Peter Lee. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. 62–83. Zahn, Timothy. Star Wars: Dark Force Rising. 1992. New York: Del Rey, 2016. ———. Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. 1991. New York: Del Rey, 2016. ———. Star Wars: Specter of the Past. New York: Bantam, 1997. ———. Star Wars: The Last Command. 1993. New York: Del Rey, 2016. ———. Star Wars: Thrawn. New York: Del Rey, 2017. ———. Star Wars: Thrawn: Treason. New York: Del Rey, 2019. ———. Star Wars: Vision of the Future. New York: Bantam, 1998.

FILMOGRAPHY THE SKYWALKER SAGA (IN ORDER OF RELEASE)

The Original Trilogy A New Hope (Episode IV). Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977. The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V). Dir. Irving Kushner. Lucasfilm, 1980. Return of the Jedi (Episode VI). Dir. Richard Marquand. Lucasfilm, 1983.

The Prequel Trilogy The Phantom Menace (Episode I). Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1999. Attack of the Clones (Episode II). Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 2002. Revenge of the Sith (Episode III). Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 2005.

The Sequel Trilogy The Force Awakens (Episode VII). Dir. JJ Abrams. Lucasfilm, 2015. The Last Jedi (Episode VIII). Dir. Rian Johnson. Lucasfilm, 2017. 149

150 

• 

F ilmography

The Rise of Skywalker (Episode IX). Dir. JJ Abrams. Lucasfilm, 2019.

OTHER FILMS

“A Star Wars Story” Films Rogue One. Dir. Gareth Edwards. Lucasfilm, 2016. Solo. Dir. Ron Howard. Lucasfilm, 2018.

Animated Films The Clone Wars. Dir. David Filoni. Lucasfilm, 2008.

TELEVISION (IN ORDER OF RELEASE)

Star Wars: Ewoks. 2 seasons. Developed by Paul Dini and Bob Carrau. ABC, 1985–86. Star Wars: Clone Wars. 3 seasons. Created by Genndy Tartakovsky. Cartoon Network, 2003–5. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. 7 seasons. Created by George Lucas. Supervising dir. David Filoni. Cartoon Network, 2008–13 (seasons 1–5). Netflix, 2014 (season 6). Disney+, 2020 (season 7). Star Wars: Rebels. 4 seasons. Created by Simon Kinburg, Dave Filoni, and Carrie Beck. Disney XD, 2014–18. Star Wars: Resistance. 2 seasons. Created by Dave Filoni. Disney XD, 2018–20. The Mandalorian. 2 seasons. Created by Jon Favreau. Disney+, 2019–20.

INDEX

accent, 34, 57, 58, 59, 64; American vs. British, 58, 59 Ackbar, Admiral, 124 Alderaan, 15 “alien,” 43, 44, 45 Amidala, Padmé, 14, 30, 50, 61, 76, 100, 107, 126; and femininity, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110 Anderson, Kevin J., 13, 71; and Rebecca Moesta, 13, 91 Aphra, Captain, 48, 127 Attack of the Clones (Episode II), 5, 6, 27, 41, 50, 61, 62, 90, 92, 104, 108, 120 Bad Batch (Clone Force 99), 112 Basic (language), 34, 38, 48, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64; as lingua franca, 57 BB-8, ix, 53, 54, 56 Beauty and the Beast (film), 126 Binks, Jar Jar, xi, 37, 44, 60 Bodhi, 38; and cosplay, 27 Bridger, Ezra, 18, 61, 74, 83, 93, 132

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (TV show), 108 Calrissian, Lando, 53, 108, 119, 129; and sexuality, 123, 124 canon, 2, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 30, 47, 125 Chewbacca, 37, 47, 48, 62, 63, 87, 111, 116, 120, 121, 129 Chiss, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 36, 44, 68, 80 Chopper (C1-10P), 53, 63 Clerks (film), 15, 16 clones, 5, 39, 55, 58, 64, 78, 89, 90; and individuality, 40, 41, 42; and masculinity, 111, 112 clone wars, 4, 5, 6, 35, 37, 40, 47, 55, 58, 67, 68, 72, 75, 76, 78, 89, 90, 91, 92, 108 Clone Wars (TV show; Tartakovsky), 4, 6, 7, 9, 68, 88 Clone Wars, The (TV show; Lucas), ix, 7, 8, 9, 14, 37, 58, 61, 64, 72, 73, 87, 90, 92, 114, 115, 117, 123; and clones, 39, 40, 41, 42, 112; and droids,

152 

• 

I ndex

Clone Wars, The (continued) 55; and music, 45, 46, 67; and war, 7, 8, 9, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 131; and women, 98, 100, 102, 108 colonialism, x, 34, 35, 43, 50, 69, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 comics, xi, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 19, 20, 37, 41, 47, 48, 49, 77, 80, 81, 127, 130; Marvel, ix, 3, 29, 53, 71, 77, 79, 81, 108, 109, 113, 116 Coruscant, 6, 15, 30, 35, 36, 46, 67, 92 cosplay, 1, 3, 26, 27, 28, 29, 66, 94, 121, 133; definition of, 26; and Slave Leia, 106, 107 C-3PO, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 63, 64, 121 cuteness, ix, 49, 61, 132 Dameron, Poe, 53, 55, 62, 71, 77, 111, 117, 118, 120, 127 Dark Disciple (novel), 10, 92 Dark Empire (comics), 19, 20 Death Star(s), 15, 16, 17, 68, 71, 74, 81, 124, 128, 131 Death Watch, 75, 76, 98 Disney, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 19, 21, 27, 38, 43, 49, 63, 100, 122, 126, 127 diversity, 27, 33, 38, 39, 44, 46, 51, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 121, 126, 128 Djarin, Din, 41, 50, 51, 55, 111, 116

Dooku, Count (Lord Tyranus), 10, 92 droids, ix, xii, 33, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 64, 78, 108; vs. robots, 52 Dune, Cara, 107, 109 empire, xi, xii, xiii, 31, 36, 68, 69, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95 Empire, the. See Galactic Empire Empire Strikes Back, The (Episode V), 23, 60, 68, 77, 86, 100, 117 Endor, 35, 66, 67, 100, 132 Erso, Galen, 81, 116 Erso, Jyn, 58, 74, 101, 116 Ewoks, ix, 28, 35, 45, 48, 49, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 132 Expanded Universe (EU), 2, 3, 11, 20 fans, xi, xiii, 2, 12, 20, 28, 29, 37, 57, 66, 94, 96, 104, 106, 122, 125, 127, 130, 133; fan art, 1, 3, 26, 96, 132, 136; fan fiction, 1, 26, 96; fan film, 125, 128 Favreau, Jon, 29 femininity, xii, xiii, 96, 97, 99, 101, 105, 109, 110, 123 Fett, Boba, 111 fiction, xiii, 1, 3, 6, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 24, 37, 47, 49, 72, 76, 77, 84, 85, 100, 101, 123, 125,

I ndex  

132, 133; fan fiction, 1, 26, 96; YA fiction, 13, 14, 15, 123 Filoni, David, 7, 30, 68 Finn, 27, 38, 41, 62, 82, 111, 117, 120, 127, 129 First Order, 36, 38, 41, 66, 69, 70, 71, 80, 82, 83, 84, 94, 95, 98, 111, 119, 120, 121 Fisher, Carrie, 103, 106 Fisto, Kit, 115 501st Legion (cosplay), 28, 29, 94 Flix, 125, 126, 129 Force, the, ix, x, 13, 28, 42, 88, 92, 93, 100, 108, 114, 115, 131, 132 Force Awakens, The (Episode VII), 2, 13, 33, 42, 62, 80, 82, 113, 117, 120 Galactic Empire, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 37, 39, 41, 58, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100, 108, 111, 120, 128 Galactic Republic, 5, 9, 30, 35, 37, 40, 46, 76, 77, 80, 89, 90, 91, 93, 104, 111; New Republic, 20 gender, 27, 28, 31, 52, 96, 97, 98, 110, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128, 129 Geonosians, 45, 61, 64, 92 Gerrera, Saw, 72, 73, 74, 131

• 153

Ghost (spaceship), 37 Gideon, Moff, 113 Gray, Claudia, 14, 15, 17, 18, 30; Leia: Princess of Alderaan, 102, 107, 116; Lost Stars, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 71, 86 Greedo, ix, 19, 61 Grievous, General, 113 Grogu, ix, 49, 107 Guardians of the Whills (YA novel), 73, 85, 86, 127 Gungans, 46, 59, 60 heterosexuality, 122, 123 Holdo, Amilyn, 117, 118 Hoth, 77, 100 humans, xii, 17, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 120; and human supremacy, 35, 36 Hutts, 44, 45, 110; language, 61. See also Jabba the Hutt Hux, Armitage (General), 80, 113 Îmwe, Chirrut, 14, 127 Infil’a, Kirak, 115, 116 Jabba the Hutt, 33, 42, 61, 105, 106, 120 Jarrus, Kanan, 91, 93, 94 Jawas, 28, 32, 60, 64, 85, 119, 120 Jedha, 35, 85, 86

154 

• 

I ndex

Jedi, 6, 10, 13, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 60, 69, 72, 74, 82, 87, 94, 98, 100, 102, 109, 117, 132; Jedi apprentice, 9, 18; Jedi Council, 33, 35, 73, 91, 92; Jedi Order, xii, 5, 9, 13, 14, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95; Jedi Temple, 78, 108; and masculinity, 97, 111, 113, 115, 116; and war, 9, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94 Jedi Academy (novel trilogy), 13 Jedi Apprentice (junior novel series), 13, 14, 54, 55, 87, 89, 115 Jedi Search (novel), 13, 87 Jinn, Qui-Gon, 13, 14, 44, 115, 134 Kaminoans, 39, 44 Kenobi, Obi-Wan, 5, 13, 14, 27, 32, 44, 70, 92, 105, 111, 115, 117; in Star Wars Uncut, 125 Kessel, 13, 87 Knights of Ren, 119 Knights of the Old Republic (game), 30, 126 Kryze, Satine, 75, 76, 93, 98, 100, 117 languages, xii, 34, 43, 45, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 83; and swearing, 63. See also accent; subtitles Lasats, 37, 45, 46

Last Jedi, The (Episode VIII), 2, 13, 18, 33, 71, 117, 118, 122, 127, 132 legends, 3, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 28, 30, 62, 89, 100, 107 Leia: Princess of Alderaan (novel), 102, 107, 116 Little Golden Books, x, 29; Star Wars: I Am a Hero, 64; Star Wars: I Am a Princess, 103 Lost Stars (YA novel), 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 71, 86 Lothal, 35, 91 Loth cats, 49 Love Wars (fan film), 128 L3-37, 53, 56, 108, 124 Lucas, George, 7, 10, 19, 30, 95, 103, 105; Star Wars (1977 novel), 10 Lucasfilm, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 29, 38, 43, 49, 66, 104, 122, 127 Malbus, Baze, 14, 127 Mandalorian, The (TV show), ix, 4, 5, 10, 28, 29, 33, 38, 41, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 64, 81, 107, 109, 113, 116, 133; and 501st Legion, 28, 29 Mandalorians, 28, 35, 59, 67, 74, 75, 76, 98, 110, 119, 121; armor, 27; helmet, 41 Marvel comics, ix, 3, 29, 53, 71, 77, 79, 108, 109, 113, 116

I ndex  

masculinity, xii, xiii, 96, 97, 101, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 123; female masculinity, 97, 109, 111 Maul, Darth, 27, 94, 111, 114 men, 15, 16, 38, 40, 96, 98, 99, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124, 128, 129 migration, 35, 46 Mon Cala, 35 Mon Calamari, 33, 44, 124 Mos Eisley cantina, 32, 46, 54, 124 Mothma, Mon, 98, 100 multiverse, 3, 97 music, 45, 46, 49, 56, 67, 77, 88, 124 New Hope, A (Episode IV), 5, 10, 17, 19, 22, 27, 32, 37, 38, 47, 50, 51, 54, 58, 61, 63, 67, 68, 77, 78, 92, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 113, 131, 132; and Star Wars Uncut, 125 Nu, Jocasta, 102, 108 Omera, 107, 108 Opress, Savage, ix, 115 Order 66, 6, 91, 112 Organa, Bail, 116 Organa, Breha, 107 Organa, Leia, ix, 14, 27, 28, 47, 62, 71, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 124, 128, 129, 132; as Boushh,

• 155

119, 120; and Slave Leia, 105, 106 original trilogy, xii, 10, 16, 18, 28, 37, 47, 63, 64, 70, 71, 99, 100, 114, 117 Orka, 125, 126 padawan, 9, 11. See also Jedi Palpatine (Emperor), 19, 24, 36, 57, 82, 83, 84 Pantorans, 57, 87 Phantom Limb, The (comics), 53, 56 Phantom Menace, The (Episode I), xi, 5, 33, 37, 38, 44, 46, 59, 60, 63, 76, 86, 89, 100, 103, 104, 132 Phasma, Captain, 82, 109, 119, 121 Plagueis, Darth, 114 Porgs, ix, 49 prequel trilogy, 5, 6, 14, 18, 37, 40, 63, 68, 76, 77, 95, 100, 102, 104 Qi’ra, 124 Queen’s Peril (YA novel), 126 Queen’s Shadow (YA novel), 126 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars (short film), 124 Rebel Alliance, 15, 20, 24, 35, 48, 70, 71, 72, 91, 94, 98, 100, 112

156 

• 

I ndex

Rebel Legion (cosplay), 94 Rebel Rising (YA novel), 73 Rebels, 15, 16, 17, 21, 45, 70, 71, 72, 94, 95, 100, 112 Rebels (TV show), 8, 10, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 37, 40, 46, 53, 54, 59, 61, 63, 73, 74, 83, 91, 93, 107, 114, 121, 131 Ren, Kylo, 66, 111, 113, 114, 115, 122, 127. See also Solo, Ben Republic. See Galactic Republic Resistance, 35, 67, 70, 71, 82, 98, 112 Resistance (TV show), 41, 82, 84, 109, 123; Orka and Flix, 125, 126 Return of the Jedi (Episode VI), 20, 33, 45, 48, 100, 105, 119 Revenge of the Sith (Episode III), ix, 5, 6, 7, 18, 67, 70, 78, 82, 104, 113 Rey, 27, 28, 56, 62, 66, 94, 101, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 127 Rise of Skywalker, The (Episode IX), xiv, 2, 62, 82, 83, 98, 111, 113, 119, 120, 121, 126 Rodians, 32, 61 Rogue One (film), 2, 14, 45, 58, 67, 68, 73, 81, 85, 112, 113, 116, 127, 131, 132 Rose, 27, 38 R2-D2, ix, 53, 54, 56, 63, 64

Sebulba, 63 Secura, Ayla, 100 Separatist Alliance, 37, 75; Separatist droids, 33, 40, 55, 72, 76 sequel trilogy, 2, 38, 64, 70, 80, 107, 113, 114, 127 sexuality, xiii, 27, 96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130 Shiriiwook, 62 Sidious, Darth, 114. See also Palpatine (Emperor) Sith, 10, 11, 70, 84, 89, 94, 95, 109, 111, 114, 115 Skywalker, Anakin, ix, 6, 9, 18, 27, 38, 50, 53, 68, 72, 92, 104, 105, 113, 132, 134. See also Vader, Darth Skywalker, Luke, 5, 13, 18, 19, 33, 42, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 66, 91, 92, 94, 100, 102, 105, 111, 112, 113, 124, 125, 131, 132, 134 Skywalker, Shmi, 102, 107 Skywalker saga, 4, 33, 47, 51, 67, 131, 134 Snoke, 114 Solo (film), 2, 13, 47, 50, 53, 56, 87, 108, 123, 124 Solo, Ben, 18, 114, 116. See also Ren, Kylo Solo, Han, 13, 27, 42, 47, 62, 66, 87, 100, 102, 105, 114, 116, 117, 118

I ndex  

Solo, Jaina, 13, 100 spectacle, 7, 8, 30, 31, 52, 64, 77, 130, 132 Starros, Sana, 127 Star Trek, x, 65 Star Wars Block (children’s book), 134 Star Wars Celebration, xiv, 66, 67 Star Wars Uncut (fan film), 125 StormPilot, 127 Stormtroopers, 17, 36, 40, 41, 47, 59, 70, 79, 80, 82, 94, 119, 120, 127, 128; cosplay, 25, 27, 28, 29, 66, 67, 121, 122; and masculinity, 97, 111, 112; women, 98, 120 subtitles, xii, 34, 38, 61, 62, 63, 64 Syndulla, Hera, 37, 53, 55, 59, 91, 102, 107 Talz, 32, 87 Tamara, 41, 82, 84, 109, 123 Tano, Ahsoka, 2, 9, 14, 27, 28, 37, 55, 58, 90, 93, 100, 101, 110, 123, 129 Tantive IV (spaceship), 131 Tarkin, Gran Moff, 113 Tartakovsky, Genndy, 4, 6, 7, 9, 68, 88 Tatooine, 30, 32, 35, 50, 66, 85 television, ix, x, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14 19, 21,

• 157

22, 24, 27, 37, 40, 41, 45, 49, 61, 63, 68, 69, 72, 75, 78, 82, 84, 95, 100, 101, 104, 108, 125, 126, 130, 131 Thrawn, 2, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 36, 37, 47, 80, 83, 93; cosplay, 28. See also Zahn, Timothy Ti, Shaak, 39, 100 Togrutas, 9, 58, 33 Trandoshans, 44, 49 Tusken Raiders, 44, 50, 60, 85, 119, 120 Twi’leks, 37, 53, 57, 59 Ugnaughts, 51 Unduli, Luminara, 100 Vader, Darth, ix, 6, 18, 79, 94, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116, 134. See also Skywalker, Anakin Vanto, Eli, 36, 44 Ventress, Assaj, 9, 10, 92, 100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 123, 129 Vizsla, Pre, 98 Vos, Quinlan, 92, 115, 129 war, x, xii, 8, 9, 10, 15, 31, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 104, 111, 131 Watson, Jude (aka Judy Blundell), 13, 30, 54 Williams, John, 49, 67, 131 Windu, Mace, 82, 90, 92, 115

158 

• 

I ndex

women, 16, 35, 38, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 106, 109, 110, 117, 118, 124, 125, 128, 129; and badassness, 97, 99, 101, 105, 111; and female archetypes, 102, 107, 108; stormtroopers, 98, 111, 120, 121 Wookies, 28, 33, 35, 47, 48 Wren, Sabine, 59, 74, 91, 121 xenophobia, x, 22, 36, 39, 44 Yoda, 37, 42, 59, 60, 62

Young Jedi Knights (junior novel series), 13, 91. See also Anderson, Kevin J. Ysalamiri, 28 Zahn, Timothy, 11, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 36, 37; Dark Force Rising, 20; The Hand of Thrawn, 20; Heir to the Empire, 20, 62; The Last Command, 20; Thrawn, 22, 23, 24, 36, 44, 68, 80 Zeb, 46, 91

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmelo Esterrich is an associate professor of humanities at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies, from Gilgamesh to Bjork. His scholarship has focused on the artistic production of twentieth-century Latin America, specifically film, literature, the visual arts, and popular music. He is from San Juan, Puerto Rico.