I love Star Wars. I know that probably sounds treasonous since I wrote for Star Trek, but truthfully Trek in its later iterations was just too clean, too antiseptic, too boring, frankly, for my tastes. Give me the world of rogues and scoundrels, Hutt mafia bosses, pirates, and cantinas that don’t look like a nightclub on Fifth Avenue; give me some grunge. Oh and space wizards, can’t forget the space wizards. Star Wars also has Darth Vader, Alexsandr Kallus, Kanan Jarrus, Han Solo, Hera Syndulla, and Princess Leia.
Finally Star Wars (and Yoda) helped me realize that I really, really, really didn’t want to be a lawyer but wanted to pursue my dream of telling stories.
Naturally I’ve seen all the movies, but it was thanks to strong recommendations from my friends Stephen Boucher and Travis Ritchey I started watching first Clone Wars and then Rebels and I was hooked.
In addition to becoming hooked on the animated shows I also read Timothy Zahn’s extremely well done Thrawn novels. Now granted I read Alliances because it had both Anakin and Vader interacting with Thrawn, but I then went on to read Thrawn and Thrawn: Treason because that blue bastard is just a great and fascinating villain… or is he a villain? Certainly in his eyes and the eyes of his crew he is a man trying to hold back anarchy and chaos fo two galactic empires.
What I noticed in Tim’s novels is that he personalizes the Imperials. The commander of Vader’s beloved 501st division is a real person. He interacts with his troops. They interact with each other. They are proud to be Vader’s crack troops. Thrawn’s command staff aboard the Chimera are presented as fully formed characters with attitudes and opinions and true admiration for their admiral.
I loved Clone Wars because it rehabilitated Anakin Skywalker. His behavior in Revenge of the Sith suddenly made a lot more sense after watching his journey with Asoka and Obi Wan. And yeah, the Jedi are really kind of creepy with their whole “no attachments” thing. And I loved the clones — Rex, Wolffe, Gregor, Fives, Echo, 99 and Hevy. These warriors were so beautifully drawn. I had a real sense of their personalities even though they all wore the same face.
The relationships between the clones were deep and meaningful. They took pride in the Jedi they served. They looked out for each other. They were bred to be expendable, but Anakin never treated them as expendable, and they never treated each other that way. They were comrades, friends…. brothers. And when they died it mattered and it hurt.
So then I start binging Rebels, and I’m watching Kanan casually toss a grenade into the hands of some poor schmuck of a stormtrooper on a speeder bike. In subsequent episodes the crew of the Ghost are busily shooting, exploding, and slashing their way through the troopers, and it started to bug me. Why didn’t these deaths matter? Why weren’t the stormtroopers granted the same dignity as the clones in the earlier series? Or for that matter the hundreds and probably thousands of people serving aboard the Star cruisers and destroyers, or the pilots of the Tie fighters who died aboard their ships?
The men and women behind those white helmets and aboard the ships were people who had either enlisted or been drafted. They weren’t bred to be soldiers like the clones. They were just people who had decided that the Empire was worth fighting for. Some of them probably just wanted three hots and a cot, maybe a chance to see the galaxy, needed a steady job, but the point was that they were ordinary people from a multitude of worlds. Many of them had wives and husbands and children, and most of them probably thought they were patriots.
And there would have been strong incentives to join the Imperial navy and army. The galaxy was coming off years of a brutal war where tens of millions if not billions of people had died, planets had been razed and destroyed, trade and commerce were devastated, pirates and rapacious guilds made it almost impossible for ordinary people to make a buck, raise a family, live their lives. Suddenly the beloved chancellor, who survived an attack by the evil Jedi, ends the war. The sense of relief and gratitude would have been profound. And the average schmo on all these other planets, even on Coruscant, wouldn’t have a clue that Emperor Palpatine was a Sith Lord. Probably most of them didn’t even know what a Sith was.
War is brutal and everyone is a hero in their own story. I know Star Wars is swashbuckling adventure, but I don’t like stories which seem to mirror the Stalin quote “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” And for those Imperial deaths not to feel like statistics I needed to have a sense of their lives.
You’ve got five or six thousand people on a Star Destroyer wouldn’t there be a game night, a glee club, movie night, a Friday night folk dance group? Humans are gregarious critters I don’t think they’d all just be standing around with their hands clasped behind their backs, and snarling about “rebel scum”. Even the top bass would be having dinner at the admiral’s table and talking politics. Or maybe they’d have their own glee club.
Modern entertainment — television, movies, games — has embraced science fiction, fantasy and comics, and I love all of these genre’s. I’m working on bringing Wild Cards, George’s and my version of a prose comic to television, but I think it would be helpful for all of us providing this entertainment to find the humanity in our stories. One absolute rule of Wild Cards is that death is permanent. There is no do-over, no miraculous resurrection. Death should have consequence, it should mean something. If we ask a reader or a viewer or a player to care, to have an emotional reaction then we shouldn’t take it back a scene or two later and say it didn’t matter.
