#it feels a lot harder to start than like dimension 20 or an audiobook | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gffa · 6 years

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So, I started reading Canto Bight, but I pretty quickly (once I got to that fetish scene) realized this is another one that works better as an audiobook and I think hearing Kedpin (the hapless Wermal who won a free trip to Canto Bight and then is scammed out of just about everything he has for every moment he’s on the planet) gave it a lot more charisma. It’s a perfectly well-written story for what it is, I enjoyed listening to it while I worked on graphics and played Farmville! That’s all I can ask from it! But then I started getting into the second story, which is also perfectly fine for what it is and part of what bugs me about Canto Bight is coming into focus--I just don’t buy it. My problem with it in The Last Jedi was that I’m supposed to believe that this galactically famous casino planet (that we’ve never heard of before, of course, which is understandable) doesn’t have a single recognizable alien or anything to tie it to the galaxy it came from? I could buy that it was famous in that sector or whatever, but the more the supplementary material tried to push that, oh, even someone like Finn, a brainwashed child soldier from the First Order had heard of it! All in a series of movies that seem to be desperately trying to pretend Coruscant and the other Core Worlds no longer exist? Mehhhhhh. The supplementary material does some work on this, there were recognizable aliens in that DJ comic and I think in the Legends of Luke Skywalker book, and even here the Wermals aren’t new, there’s references to Alderaanian artifacts on the planet, a woman from Naboo is basically a slave there in all but name, etc. But the harder Star Wars tries to push Canto Bight as this big, glitzy city of dreams that everyone knows about, that it’s this big, central hub of culture or whatever, the more I just don’t buy that it sprung up organically in the narrative. Give me some mentions of how the planet only came to prominence up in the last ~20 years or so, because, hey, I get it, you can’t exactly go backwards in time and put it into the original movies or the prequels. But this pretending that it’s a huge, important, famous place when it was only ever mentioned for the first time in audiences’ eyes in TLJ? Leaves me with this cognitive dissonance that I’m having a lot of trouble getting over. It’s not helping that the book is really pushing the whole Evil Capitalism thing (which I’m onboard with!) but doesn’t really seem to do anything with it. It’s just sort of there, in amongst how Super Important Really this place is. Examples:

Canto Bight, the city of dreams, the destination of uncounted sentients, all of them following one legend or another, most chasing a lie.

"Come to Canto Bight, the greatest city of pleasures the galaxy has ever known," they cried, and if they lied in the beginning, the ones who carry the cry now are telling the complete and utter truth. They crafted reality out of story.

All guests [of Canto Bight] are among the most honored, at least as long as the credits keep flowing, as long as they can pay. When the money runs out, that's when they join her and the others like her on the subservient side of the counter. A quick, bitter thought crosses her mind: She very much looks forward to the day the Grammus twins are forced to don some cheaply made, objectifying uniform and force a smile for someone clever enough not to lose everything they have to the great greedy beast that is Canto Bight, city of dreams, city of schemes, city of nightmares.

Canto Bight is not only a destination for gamblers. There are a thousand pleasures to be had here, a million opportunities for decadence or deprivation. But it cannot be denied that most who come seeking the shining city do so because they yearn for the roll of the dice, for the turn of the cards. They follow the lady across the stars, and when she opens her arms to pick their pockets, they laugh from the sheer delight of her presence.

The manager blusters. "We are not—you must understand—Cantonica does not condone slavery. Canto Bight is subject to the rules of the planetary governing body." The planetary government is controlled by the city, which represents most of the world's population, and even more of its wealth. To claim that it acts independently of the interests of Canto Bight is to indulge in a fantasy even wilder than the rumor the clerk has heard whispered behind the backs of the Grammus sisters. She's heard people say the sisters come not from another world—everyone comes from another world; save for the street urchins and stable children, no one is born in Canto Bight—but from another dimension, something on the far side of hyperspace, as impossible and untrue as the Force of the old Jedi Order. Some even say that they come from the dimension where the Force retreated after the fall of the Jedi, that they have crossed impossible distances to see what happened to their gifts. It would only make sense for them to wind up in Canto Bight, if all those lies were true. Everything comes here sooner or later, to shrivel and forget itself beneath the bright and shining sky.

This story is not the only one who does it, I don’t mean to pick on it more than other stories that use Canto Bight, it’s just the one I happen to be reading right now. Where, after awhile, I start to feel like, “Can no one describe this place without trying to tell me that it’s the biggest and most legendary place that’s ever been in the GFFA?” The capitalism and indentured servitude/slavery thing is noted and then is just sort of there. Which, you know, fair enough, that’s probably what it’s meant to be, used to show that the Galaxy Far, Far Away is kind of a fuck-awful place in a lot of ways and that only a handful of people are really trying to do something about it as best they can, that’s Star Wars’ thing. It’s this trying to push Canto Bight as this hugely important thing, without having given it time to grow organically in my mind, as an audience member, that leaves me feeling cold, no matter how much I otherwise like what they’re doing with it. I just can’t get over how it was so very clearly about creating something new and original, rather than building on what had come before in George Lucas’ established Star Wars, that all I ever see is the very obvious stitching of where they tried to staple the two together. (Also, I’m kind of over using Naboo and Alderaan as the only two planets in a galaxy of TENS OF THOUSANDS IF NOT MORE planets as beautiful and rich and lovely. Just ONCE I’d like someone to have something that came from one of the noble houses of Serenno or something.)

#canto bight #star wars meta #meta #novels

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