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One or Several Amidalas

While visiting my family for the holidays I decided to take another crack at E.K. Johnston’s young adult Padme novels. I’d briefly dipped into the third book a little while ago, curious about the trans clone trooper, with the vague intention of reading the first two at some indeterminate point in the future. Well, this was the week, and I knocked out Queen’s Shadow and Queen’s Peril in short order.

These were quick reads-- they have the cushy line-spacing of a lot of YA and are not terribly long to begin with, and have a nice brisk pace. What struck me the most how comfortable they were with being a bit uneventful. I loved this. Even Queen’s Peril, which takes place in the stray interstices of The Phantom Menace and is, ostensibly, a thrilling story of wartime resistance and espionage, seems most at home when puzzling over issues of quotidian personal exigency-- the fit of a gown, the dull pain of a tightly pulled-back braid, the myriad questions of decorum and interpersonal empathy that crop up between Padme and her responsibilities and the young women imbricated in that labor.

This gives the frankly somewhat deranged customs of Naboo as seen in the movies-- elected child monarchs! with body doubles! who all have names riffing on their ruler!-- a sense of ingrained habit and custom, which modern women like Padme and Sabe and the rest can rankle at or push back against while still being part of the rhythms of those customs. Much like Charles Soule’s and Claudia Gray’s wonderful work with Leia, this all makes a character left somewhat thin in the movies (Padme much moreso than Leia, to be fair) pop as a complicated and conflicted person hurled into a rapidly escalating and chaotic situation.

A few things I like:

-Panaka is a huge weirdo, and somewhat ominous-- Johnston seems to be working backwards from the reveal that he eventually became moff of the sector. 

-Padme comes off as shrewd and intelligent but a little too eager to see the best in people. There’s a fascinating runner in Queen’s Shadow where almost every time she interacts with Palpatine she gets the clear sense that he’s lying, but she keeps rationalizing benign reasons why that might be the case.

-Sabe is fantastic, and Johnston sells the peculiar psychosexual dynamic between her and Padme with a beautiful candor and prickliness. There are moments of real discomfort and poetry surrounding Sabe’s desire to be, you know, a sexual human being, and her sense of obligation to Padme, which often takes on a heavily eroticized sense of awe and fealty. Padme herself comes off as repressed, eager to deny herself a love life, but still kind of inchoately jealous of Sabe’s freedom to flirt and mingle and fuck Richard Armitage. It makes her eventual romance with Anakin feel a bit more plausible-- they’re both deeply repressed people, unable to grapple openly with their sexuality (albeit in different ways), and so when they come together there are lines of communication that just aren’t available to them. Two profoundly weird kids locked in a depressing and tragic mess of a marriage. C’est la (star) guerre I guess!

-Sabe-- bi queen, love her, and this makes Pak’s strong work with her in Darth Vader even more compelling. The rest of the handmaidens are a bit sketchily drawn in Queen’s Shadow, but Peril does a nice job of delineating each of them more clearly. Sache in particular is another stand-out, and Rabe the little rat-fink criminal.

-For all of the verisimilitude and crunchy textural stuff Johnston gives to Naboo and life in the Coruscant political milieu, the nitty gritty of the Trade Federation still feels floaty to me. Palpatine’s stakes in the scheme and his pirouetting from position to position is super lucid and crisp in these books-- Johnston does a splendid job with an elusive character-- but the Neimodians themselves still feel a little rote. I think a lot of writers struggle with this-- it’s not like the movies give a ton to work with. 

-Every time Johnston dropped a nugget about the gungans I had to go double check it because it felt so wild. For what it’s worth she gives Jar Jar a peculiar sense of quiet dignity, and a weirdly pointed emphasis on his aesthetic sensibilities. I’m more than happy with this! It’s high time the dude caught a break and got his moment of sober poise. 

Anyway! My wife went whole hog this Christmas since we’ve both been having fun talkin’ Star Wars together, along with our sister-in-law and her best friend’s husband, and so I have on my docket: the first two books of Phase II of the High Republic, the High Republic short story collection, Dooku: Jedi Lost, and the little omnibus of novels about Hera & Kanan and Tarkin. She also had on the audiobook of Thrawn on the drive down to my mom’s house, but frankly I spent much of that trip napping and could not tell you much about the travails of Thrawn and his twink. 

[pykestowatchoutfor]

“Sky Command”Sucks!: A Note on Art and History on the Margins of the High Republic

This is an expansion of some thoughts I brought up in the wonderful Cerebro discord so credit to my interlocutors over there for bouncing some of this stuff back and forth!

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I’m in the middle of catching up on phase one of The High Republic, and finding myself really more engaged than I expected with these younger-reader novels. I’ve found that the distinction between the main novels and the YA novels is very thin, and seemingly predicated more on where the books’ senses of scale fall than on differing degrees of sophistication (the YA novels being a bit more interested in close studies of a smaller cast of characters and their difficulties with the contradictions of their milieus versus the larger scale ensemble stuff in the adult novels), and while the junior books are definitely very much pitched towards a younger audience, they still feel substantial and interesting enough to justify a read, particularly since they breeze by.

Anyway, I was struck by this brief scene from Chapter Nine of Justina Ireland’s Mission to Disaster. Avon Starros, a precocious young genius held captive by the Nihil, is with a bunch of other kids when their captors drop off a little treat:

So-- narratively, this is important because Avon, being a precocious young genius, is able to cobble these shitty old video game consoles into a means to have the ship’s doors and gain temporary freedom. But it struck me-- throughout the High Republic material, we’re told with some frequency about stuff people do for fun, and more tellingly, pieces of mass media that they enjoy. Holochron movies and serials, musical recordings, and here, even video games with enough cultural cachet that even a century on this disparate grab-bag of young hostages recognize them! 

It occurred to me that the original trilogy is very much a product of its time in terms of the horizons it imagined for telecommunication, mass media, and entertainment in a sci-fi universe with otherwise fantastic technology. Off the top of my dome, peoples’ pleasures are mostly low-tech, local, and non-professionalized. In the first six movies, and again I’m making no pretense to rigor here, people fill their spare time with:

1. Shooting rats in the desert 2. Shooting the shit at Tosche Station 3. Drinking 4. Listening to jizz wailers 5. Playing space rock ‘em sock ‘em robots 6. Fine dining 7. Bloodsports 8. Watching dancers 9. Yacht ride 10. Podracing 11. Fucking 12. Death sticks 13. Whatever strange opera Sheev and Anakin go to 14. Oh, I forgot sabacc! 

With the exception of the opera and the Boonta Eve Classic these largely seem to be provisional, unsanctioned affairs done by people who momentarily find themselves with nothing super urgent to attend to. We don’t know if Max Rebo is the best musician in the galaxy or just the guy who can blow jizz better than anybody else immediately on hand. We don’t know if kids on Tatooine and kids on Alderaan are reading the same books, hearing the same fairy tales, listening to the same music, etc., and it seems eminently plausible to me that most people live in pretty tightly circumscribed spheres in the world imagined by the original trilogy to the extent that people could become quite hazy on what the jedi order was like in the space of a generation. So much of A New Hope is about the perils and precarity of getting information from one place to another-- Vader choking Ozzel through the screen in Empire Strikes Back is as much about the unworldly miracle of video conferencing as it is about the unworldly miracle of the Force.

So it’s interesting to me that in the “golden age” of the High Republic there does seem to be not only more consistent and widespread galactic-scale communication technology, but also more (and more widely disseminated) culture. Avon and Petri and their fellow prisoners are from a grab bag of planets and a grab bag of species but they all find a common distaste for the tacky, outdated games dropped at their feet by their captors.

I think that’s a cool little way of telling me something about the world these kids live in-- what they can afford to take for granted, what common cultural coin they hold in common.

 And what’s more-- that they can appreciably manage to assess and dismiss this game for being old and out of style is extraordinary. One of my little qualms with KOTOR and SWTOR-- games which to me range from a fun enough MMO to a masterpiece of the medium-- is that despite taking place thousands and thousands of years before the movies, fashion, architecture, and engineering design seem frozen in time. The bad guys wear chic black and grey-tone Hugo Boss-ish numbers, the jedi wear their demure brown tunics and cowls, regular joes and josephines run around in their dusty, well-worn flight suits-- same as it ever was, same as it ever was. And I get the utility of this-- it communicates to a casual player “hey, this is Star Wars!” with a ruthless efficiency, AND it suggests something about cyclicality and repetition on the visual level that is reinforced and challenged by turn in the script. But all this only makes sense to me on the level of myth-- in the real world, of course, art changes, fads come and go, taste mutates and meanders along. A videogame from a century ago would be demode to a little kid, no less than a videogame from a mere decade ago might turn off a child in the real world. This feels so beautifully in keeping with the OT’s lived-in, patch-work look-- it implies a kind of relationship between people and their objects that is subject to change, and suggests that we can learn about the people by observing the changes closely enough. Time doesn’t stand still, and people rush to keep up with it-- our machines break down, our hip new kitchen remodels gradually fade into kitsch, and no shit Petri does NOT want to play FUCKING Sky Command!!!!

We see this quite a bit in the High Republic stuff really! People talk about cheesy holovids and compare their real life experiences to the fiction they grew up consuming, Bell and Burryaga help defuse their fear creeping through the dark underbelly of Starlight by cracking jokes about  “fright holos” (I imagine Claudia Gray and I are on the same page about “horror holos” being a mouthful). There’s a ruefulness to this-- these are all suggested to be kids’ stuff, fantasies that act as a contrast to the all-too-serious situations the characters find themselves in. They outgrow art on a personal trajectory too-- or expect that they should-- but keep calling back to these really tangible cultural touchstones-- a tension that feels kind of rich and delicious as a grown-ass woman reading Star Wars novels and finding them frequently delightful. Just as much as the gleaming, pristine temple garments and the spectacle of the Starlight Station itself, this sense of a wide-spread, easily accessible, and historically mobile aesthetic culture does so much to convey that something between here and the Prequels was lost, something which did meaningfully bind people across the galaxy together.

[pykestowatchoutfor]

Pyke Drop

Hi!

I’m Holly, a writer and teacher, and this is my little hovel to talk about Star Wars stuff. 

2021 and 2022 were big, rough, exciting years for me-- I finished my doctorate, bought a house, moved hundreds of miles, and dealt with the death of my father-- and I found myself really wanting something like intellectual comfort food. I spent the better part of a decade always “on,” always measuring almost every book I picked up against how useful it would be for my dissertation, for conference papers, or other projects, and I wanted to remember what it felt like to just pick something up and sink into it.

I was in Pennsylvania this Spring, killing a bit of time in a suburban Barnes & Noble just to get a minute away from funeral planning and corralling family members, when I spotted this:

I knew a bit about Star Wars-- I’d sporadically liked it as a kid, in that that you bounce from thing to thing depending on what your friends are into, what fleetingly captures your interest, what common ground you can latch onto to shoot the shit with a distant cousin for a few hour, I’d kept up with (most) of the movies, and had dipped into the Marvel comics on the strength of a few writers I liked. But I didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about Star Wars, let alone keeping tabs on it. It was, perhaps, more of my wife’s thing-- her locus of fond nostalgia and something I vaguely enjoyed looking at from the outside in. So I had no real idea what was going on in the above cover. I knew Soule’s name from his very strong comics work, but more than that I really loved the look of these guys-- the clean, almost luminous robes, the fun image of a lightsabre-wielding wookie, really, more than anything, the lightness and etherealness but sense of confidence in the warm, golden palette of the image. 

So I took it home, and in between all the heaviness and grief of that trip home, I read it, and then ducked out to buy Into the Dark, and liked that too, and even went so far as to, you know, talk to my friends about it. In the months since, I’ve had a lot of fun talking about this silly universe with people, bouncing ideas around, poking around inside this sometimes thrilling, sometimes goofy, sometimes exasperating, sometimes transcendent texts. Why not make a permanent dumping ground here for my thoughts as I work my way through the disparate odds and ends of the Star Wars universe?

My other, dumber motive? Well, my first big post-dissertation “I’m doing this JUST FOR ME” project was to read every X-Men comic ever published, from 1963 to 2022. And I did. It was a lot of fun, and I took very few notes, which I strongly regret. C’est la guerre! I don’t want to make that mistake twice. 

Right now I plan on focusing on the canonical Disney stuff, although I have a fair bit of fond feeling for the grab-bag of Legends books I read as a kid. I’m going to jump right in where I am in my big Star Wars read, and take my time or rush through as my whims take me. My intention is to focus on the comics and novels, MAYBE working in the shows, PROBABLY taking a peak at the actual movies. Games? I dunno. I’m an adjunct professor, I don’t have that kind of money. 

I have one more agenda here-- I’m a lesbian English teacher, I have my own little ways of reading and things I like to see in a text on a visceral, reflexive level. I like stuff that risks being ambitious or ridiculous, I like textual contradictions in theme or structure or motif to latch onto, and I like seeing queer people in my fiction. And so far my little foray into Star Wars fandom has been one big opportunity to talk about these things with other queer people, which is always an exhilarating source of joy, especially when you can lace the conversation with hot takes on blue milk. And I hope to keep that frisson running here too!