When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot more.
Posted by Joshua Tyler | Published
Star Wars is the biggest science fiction franchise ever. It works best, and it’s great if it adheres to a certain set of core rules.
I’m not talking about Jedi rules against dating here. That’s just a corporate rule. I’m talking about the basic rules that make the Star Wars universe work.
That’s what separates a great, enduring fictional universe like Star Wars from a flash in the pan, which flares up and fades away. These rules make Star Wars feel like Star Wars instead of like another science fiction universe. Star Trek, for example, has its own set of very different rules.
These are the rules of Star Wars.
First Rule: Space is Small
The space is small. In some science fiction franchises, there are long distances to cover and long periods of time involved in travel. In Star Wars, everywhere in the galaxy can be reached with a short hop through hyperspace.
There are places with names that make them seem far away, like the Outer Rim, but even those places are easily accessible by anyone with a flying hunk of junk and a semi-operable hyperdrive. It’s not bad to write. It’s part of the style and tone of the Star Wars universe, built around adventure and excitement, not exploration and introspection.
When you enter the Star Wars universe, you’re in for a fast, fun ride. No, on a slow journey through infinity. It’s something Star Wars should never deviate from.
Rule Two: Best Left Unsaid
Star Wars works best when the people and places in it just exist. We’re always jumping into a place where, just like in our everyday lives, people don’t spend a lot of time sitting around thinking about why their world works or how it works. Not only does that make this universe feel more real, but it also makes Star Wars more fun.
We are free to continue the journey with Han Solo without worrying about the economics of smuggling. He probably knows everything about how it works to do his job, but we don’t need to, and that’s good enough.
We didn’t need to know how the Force worked either, and trying to tell us took a lot of the fun out of it and set Star Wars back. Writers who can’t think of better strategies often resort to interpretation rather than execution, and when it comes to Star Wars, that probably doesn’t work.
Star Wars is such a world. The people who live there know how it works, and as we look at them from the outside, we don’t. That’s good.
Rule Three: Technology and Magic Are the Same
It may seem like Star Wars is about the collision between the invisible world of the Force and the technological world of the Empire, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both are different types of magic.
When you see a Jedi looking down on a stormtrooper with a blaster, it should and often feels like two magicians of different philosophies and skills facing off in a magic show. Star Wars technology is more well defined than The Force. We don’t know how they both work, only that they do.
The ships seem to be tied together by pieces of sheet metal, ropes, and determined will. The Force is something that works if you want it, hard enough.
Getting lost in the explanations of how these things work is a waste of time. The only important thing is that they look the same and match.
A force must have a certain look and feel and a certain list of things it can do. Blaster bolts should always look and function the same. Lightsaber abilities must fit within a certain range of facts. Starships should all have the same basic components such as a hyperdrive, a cockpit or bridge, and a light engine.
Consistency in how your magic works is important. Check how it works, and it should be avoided.
Rule Four: People Are Everywhere and They Are Nowhere
In Star Wars, every species has a home planet. Wookies from Kashyyk. Guns remain on Naboo. Mon Calamari comes from Mon Cal.
All species have a home. All types except the most common ones.
People are everywhere and they come from nowhere. There is no human planet. There are people living on planets, and in some cases, even hiding on planets of other species, as happened on Naboo.
The Mandalorians are from Mandalore… but not at first. That’s just another planet that people live on and start calling it something else.
Humans don’t have a home planet, and their origins have never been explored in Star Wars. That is much better. It’s not interesting, and the franchise doesn’t need those kinds of details. Those methods are best left to big-picture sci-fi like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Rule Five: Species Doesn’t Matter
Although most of the people living in the Star Wars universe tend to look human, it doesn’t really matter. No one in Star Wars seems to care if the person standing in front of them is a person or something with giant crab tentacles and claws. No one cares.
The species rarely appear, unless, of course, there is a situation where having large crab claws can be beneficial. Then someone will say: Hey! We are lucky! You have great crab claws to use!
Most people can’t understand the word Wookies being said, but without realizing that they are big and aggressive, they are still treated the same as everyone else. If the Wookies are punished, as they were by the Empire, it’s not because they’re Wookies but because they ripped off a bunch of stormtroopers’ arms.
Even the State, which seems to be a very people-based organization, does not follow all that as a rule. Their soldiers are happy to follow Grand Admiral Thrawn and he is blue. The kingdom is good to anyone who is willing to serve the kingdom. The Rebels are ready to hire anyone who hates the Imperials.
What color is your skin or, oh, your neck isn’t weirdly long, it doesn’t stick out too much. When it does appear, it is usually a recognition of the truth rather than some form of xenophobia.
Rule of thumb: Droids are Pets
In the Star Wars universe, species don’t matter, but living or not. All the lack of bias and discrimination used against creatures based on their species is bottled up and heaped upon the droids, who, while seemingly intelligent, are rarely handled better than a used toaster.
To be fair, most droids seem to ignore this, and perhaps that fact alone is enough to justify their treatment. That’s what Star Wars droids are for. They like who they are, so they enjoy being treated like machines. It is fulfilling.
It’s also important to note that not all droids have emotions. The little folding box that sweeps the floor of a Star Destroyer is probably less intelligent than a Roomba. Droid intelligence exists on a spectrum, with some, like the R2 units, being the equivalent of biological intelligence and others being various colors below that.
Do protocol droids have feelings? The answer depends.
Droids are often sentient and still treated like slaves and rightfully so. The Star Wars universe only works as long as the droids are second-class citizens in it, and everything falls apart the minute they aren’t.
The franchise has dabbled here and there in the idea of droid rights, but it shouldn’t. The last thing we need is to rebrand Princess Leia as a slave owner.
If the droids were somehow freed, the entire Galaxy would starve without the droids to do most of the work. No one wants a TV show about the Great Star Wars Droid Famine. Droids should always be portrayed as loyal pets, and there shouldn’t be a deep exploration of that.
Rule Seven: Everyone Can Change
People often talk about Star Wars in terms of light and dark, as if it’s a franchise about good guys fighting pure evil. But it was never about that.
From the beginning, Star Wars has been about the moral conflict within all of us. Vader did horrible things, but in the end, he was redeemed because he was never completely evil; there was always something good in him somewhere.
Anakin did good things, but later in life, he changed and started killing children. Han Solo was a bully, a thug, and a nice guy once you get to know him.
Most of the franchise’s villains also have the ability to do good, and most of their good guys have the same ability to be evil. Those are the two things that make them so attractive.
Rule Eight: The Real Criminal
The true villain of Star Wars, the constant face of evil throughout the franchise, has never been, and never should be, Palpatine or the Dark Side of the Force. The real villain of Star Wars is the government bureaucracy.
The Death Star, in the first film, was a great representation of that. The last form of what happens is when many bureaucrats loot the wealth of their subordinates and use it to build huge, impossible, completely flawed weapons of war. When it doesn’t work, the same inflexible, largely ineffective structure, run by Imperial DMV employees who only care about keeping their jobs so they can’t admit they’re wrong, turn around and do the same thing again.
That’s what makes Luke Skywalker’s journey so interesting. He was not fighting against a person, he was fighting against the system of oppression, corruption and oppression of officials. The same one we all suffer from when we go down to pick up new license plates for our truck. It’s the same thing we get harassed about when we fill out IRS forms.
Luke was fighting an army of lazy public school teachers and code violation inspectors on behalf of all normal people who want to be left alone in hell.
The best of the latest Star Wars series is Andorand Andor, the latest Star Wars series that’s best because it makes that arrogant administration the show’s villain. Andor is about guys in cubicles and meetings plotting the destruction of the innocent. They don’t do it because they are bad but because that is how they earn.
Star Wars should only have one villain. It is not Palpatine and never has been. The true villain of Star Wars is Palpatine’s damaged headquarters.
Applying the 8 Rules of Star Wars
Those are the 8 most important, fundamental rules of the Star Wars franchise. It doesn’t always follow perfectly, but Star Wars makes an effort to stick to them when it works.
When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot more.
Future Star Wars writers take note and start creating with these 8 rules as a compass that points the way to greater creation in a galaxy far, far away, not an obstacle to it.
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