Lit Books Comics A/V Star Wars Zeitgeist: The spirit of the times

Agreed. I think HR might be more confusing since NJO has Luke, Leia, Han, etc, plus kids. While the others don't.

 

Well for one thing there a certainly ALOT of characters in HR while NJO seemed to follow the same set

 

NJO is a story HR is a setting.

NJO is about Luke, Leia, Han, Jacen, Jaina, Tahiri and Anakin. These are the leads, HR doesn't have that really. Though I don't think there is a deeper reason for this, they just wanted to do different things.

 

@AusStig
To answer your earlier question about how I think today’s spirit of the times is affecting Star Wars:

I think the culture has become very confrontational. People are drawing lines in the sand and aligning themselves into groups that seem all too eager to fight, even if they don’t know too clearly what they are fighting for. Nuance or introspection are lost in the effort to combat an idea of the enemy. And there’s little actual understanding of the greater outer and inner forces that drive these confrontations.

What this means for Star Wars creators is that we’re getting weak representations of good and evil, while the characters who get the most attention are those that fall somewhere in the middle. The average person is being glorified in a way that seems almost commercial (appealing to your customer), but which is likely simply morally unchallenging. The reader or viewer is not asked to go above and beyond what they’d normally do. The passive evils that we contribute to are not really being questioned; instead we’re just being asked to have the bare minimum of decency and bravery and to be on the right side of history.

And I’m not saying that making Star Wars about good and evil is bad or unusual; that’s the franchise’s bread and butter. My problem is that good and evil characters have no strength or depth. They are vaguely explored surfaces rather than meaning-rich mythical roles. Instead all the emphasis is on the gray characters in the middle, who are not being pushed into greatness or its opposite because those sides are not really being explored well enough.

I think it’s mainly the sequel trilogy that gives me this impression. It doesn’t give us a good look at why the good characters are good, it just pits them against the obviously evil ones. And this is unlike the original or prequel trilogies, where the more “normal” characters are put on trial for passively contributing to either the decline of goodness (the Republic) or the preservation of evil (the Empire). Characters had to rise beyond their lives, they had to strive to be good and to be better than they were simply to have a chance at stopping the evils that were at work around them.

Meanwhile the characters in the sequels just seem to go along with the roles they have and which are already aligned to one side or the other. There are some hints at nuance and introspection (Finn, Luke), but they’re either abandoned or never fully explored. Perhaps it’s because creators don’t want to upset people and want to appeal to as many people as possible. But I think it’s also possible that they have their own views of things, of themselves, and don’t think they need to explore or question their ideas further and to make themselves vulnerable and raw onscreen or on the page. And the result is a sort of tepid and complacent storytelling, rather than an invigorating living mythology.

 

@AusStig

I'll add that because of the Zeitgeist I grew up in i have found Anakin and Rey more appealing characters personally to my sensibilities then I have Luke.

Anakin for his attachment issues, strong connections to his mother, and his anger issues and dislike of change very related

Rey for being a genuinely decent and likable human being

 

And how is Luke not a decent person? He saves Leia and goes to rescue his friends, he even saves his father by believing in him.

Anakin is flawed, though not to the extent of other 90s type leads (maybe if he had been more 'flawed' he might be more popular).

Rey is an attempt to make a new Luke. Though I think this is more an attempt to return to the OT, which might reflect a greater desire to return to an earlier time.

 

oh I think Luke is a decent person I just never connected to him on a deep level

 

Yeah it would be very interesting if they took a deeper look. In NJO the heroes have to deal with the difference between doing the bare minimum to win and doing the extra mile to make peace.

I don't even think it is 'average' person as none of them are really average in the way Luke was (just sitting down and letting the Empire rule) or even directly enabling the system (like the Jedi in the PT).

The closest the ST gets is the arms dealers, but the message there is that they sell to the heroes as well. So what is the message there? The people who enable evil also enable good? It felt like an attempt at 'both sides' which honestly fell flat with me, because we already a whole set of stories about both sides, in the PT and it's concurrent EU.

I don't think they cared. I mean they didn't mind upseting people with how they "treated" Luke. As to why they didn't dwell on the nuance, I don't know. It did seem to be something that was happening at the time (season 8 of GoT is a good example of removing nuance), but given the reaction to both I don't think it was in line with the view of the times.

I think the ST was deliberately trying to NOT be part of the times, though some of that did come through with how it treated the first order.

I never connected to Rey, she just didn't interest me, until a bit in TRoS where she was struggling with evil. I found Anakin interesting.

 

So I actually been thinking about this, and while I do agree for the most part I wonder how much this actually is the case though. Sure things like the clean Wehrmacht are gone in the current Zeitgeist but at the same time I´ve begun to noticed something like a "Clean Red Army" Myth growing stronger in recent portrayals. Ranging from things like Georgi Shukow being presented as this cool, badass who is genuinley concerned for the Russian People in works like "The Death of Stalin" (where he is incidentially also portrayed far more attractive than the real guy was) glossing over his massive IRL corruption(he filled an entire train with loot from germany that he wanted to enrich himself with) and just how brutal of a general he really was.

Meanwhile the majority of the crimes are blamed soley on Beria and the NKVD. Just as with the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth pretty much all crimes where blamed on Himmler and the SS.

And then that Red Army Soldiers are these days actually presented as ordinary people trying to defend their homeland and not at all complicit with the crimes of the Sovjet Regime. Actually recreating that divide that you mentioned. Plus Red Army Crimes like the massive rapes all over Eastern Europe are glossed over, or at least severaly downplayed.

Certianly a far cry from how they where portrayed in the Cold War era, as basically inhumane monsters.

Now obviously both portrayals are extremes that don´t really hit the truth. But I just feel, that many of the tropes you mentioned are still around in the current media, just applied to different people.

 

Well even during the Cold War there were people who supported the soviet soldiers, even while they crushed freedom protesters (they support the tanks, so people called them "tankies").

Death of Stalin is an interesting movie, but it gets almost everything about Georgi Shukow wrong (he had been non-lethally purged by Stalin).

And yeah it is the same thing and I think comes from the same source, a desire to put the crimes on 'special' people not normal ones. I don't think it has had the same affect though due to the different circles it comes from (somewhat).

 

@AusStig

I got one

something i've seen a lot in recent Star Wars that obviously is very much the opposite especially of 90's Star Wars is notions of "The State" and just in general "Factions"

Obviously in things like the Thrawn Trilogy it was New Republic vs Imperial Remnant, State vs Buffer State (Or in some cases just a State) two governments fighting each other. A lot like how Star Trek did things with the Kliongs, Federation, Romulans, Domion etc etc.

Lately though and you can see this at the end of Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars Resistance, and Rise of Skywalker is the idea of at the end of the day factions, states etc aren't battling these evil forces it's just people.

I think a lot of this comes from how in the late 2000's from Occupy Wall Street the Arab Spring, we see a lot of leaderless just people movement spring up with no real structure to them what so ever and this has been emulated a bit in a lot of the more recent Star Wars stuff.

Maybe not even how notions of "The State" have changed but more just the notion of organizations especially of a top down nature and how everything is loosed

 

@AusStig

Sorry for the DP but couldn't edit my last post to add a few more ideas.

High Republic is kiiiinda building on this zeitgeist too with the villains since as of the 2000's Villains have not been "Enemy States" and have for the most part been stateless.

I'd also argue that we see more stories now were it's less Politican= Bad Military officer =Good but more just ...Person belonging to ANY insinuation is bad since i think the general feeling these days is that are institutions are failing us.

 

I mean stuff like that, focusing on a small group of heroes with no state support, goes back the the Bacta War books.

Even LotF (which predates the occupy protests for the most part) was more about a small band of rebels.

It might be part of the shift away from military sci-fi. But I think the move did accelerate post take over.

 

Fair point, forgot about the Bacta War and obviously small group of hero's without no state support is a tale as old as time i mean heck that's kinda what the OT is all about.

Although unlike the OT i do think a shift from even non-organizational support and just random citizens taking on tyranny has been more common of late.

 

it may be. But only happened very late in canon, since TCW was all about a big war and Rebels went from a small group into a large one. The ST does have the small group and resistance also has a small group though it is part of a larger group, somewhat.

 

I don't know.

The first really political stuff I read growing up were Tom Clancy novels and from what I remember, there was already quite a lot of "clean Red Army" vibing in there that I'd noticed. The rivalry between Red Army and KGB is a plot point multiple times, and while it's not 100% clear-cut, on the whole the military is portrayed as the good guys, relatively speaking, compared with the backstabbing opportunists in the KGB. I'd already noticed at the time that this was similar to the way the Wehrmacht and SS were portrayed in World War Two movies, so I figured Clancy was just running on the same logic. Don't know how many other Cold War era pieces of pop culture are like that, but the "clean Red Army" thing has been around for a while in some form or other.

It makes more sense in the Nazi context, since the SS were generally more aligned with the Party and the Wehrmacht was where you had a lot more resentment for these upstart Nazi plebs, and more deviation from Nazi orthodoxy (even though both of them tend to be massively oversold in pop fiction). With the Red Army vs the KGB that dynamic was, if anything, reversed. Both times a KGB director got to the top (Beria and Andropov) they tended to be more pragmatic/moderate, which is one reason so many people in the party weren't sorry to see them go. But they mostly don't get credit for that in fiction.

 

By the way -

You ever notice how much this "clean Wehrmacht" type myth in fiction gets applied not just to places like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia but to, well, America?

Stargate SG-1 was on this for most of its run, with the heroic main characters from the Air Force versus the shady unaccountable NID (fictional, but pretty clearly a shout out to the CIA and similar three-letter agencies, and, explicitly, civilian). The Iron Giant; the Army guys are crusty and ill-tempered, but at the end of the day, sensible, while Mansley the (civilian) federal agent is the paranoid nuke-happy lunatic. Transformers had the good guys in the military who side with the protagonists in the end versus the shady and ultimately inept men-in-black types in Sector 7. JAG and NCIS aren't as clear-cut as the above but still, generally, pretty hagiographic towards the military, while skeptical and sometimes more than that towards agencies like CIA...

It isn't universal, but it's quite widespread. The regular U.S. military is portrayed as good and, at worst, let down by its civilian superiors who give it dishonorable jobs or refuse to give it the support it needs. And if the security state gets portrayed as the bad guys, that'll fall disproportionately on the spies, and, more recently, private contractors.

 

I think honestly it's just a wider idea of Regular Miltiary= Honorable

Secret security forces who do stuff in the shadows = Bad.

 

"clean Wehrmacht" is more about warcrimes. So I agree with you about the USSR, in 'normal' troops v KGB.


As to the US, well that is similar, but it is more the 'military officers = good, politicians = bad' stuff that military fiction has done since, the beginning. Maybe it comes from how people view the people who defend them (the armed forces) vs the people who lead them (the politicians), they can blame the latter for any problems of the former.

Transformers is interesting, in the first one, the civilians are generally treated as good as the military, except for s7, while later on they move away from this Bumblebee does come back to what you are talking about.

But yeah I think @Jid123Sheeve has the right of it, sneaky = bad, that kind of thinking has been around since the middle ages.

 

Star Trek's Section 31, vs "regular Starfleet" also showcases this.

 

Yeah, I'd agree with this. But I think it's gotten more pronounced in the last few decades.

 

Do you mean since 9/11? Or since the GFC?

 

@AusStig

in general the military has been glorified since the beginning of civilization

Ceaser taking on those senators. Heck even before hand too.

Napoleon in France

The Prussia army pretty much running the state

etc etc

 

Ceaser was a class struggle where he appealed to the lower classes against the Senate, who were the upperclass. Heck the main defender of the senate was a man not unlike Ceaser.

Napoleon is interesting as he came to power slowly and in the middle of wars.

Prussia is an army with a state yes.

It might be because these people are the only ones allowed to kill by the nation so we like to think they are better than others. While Politicians in a democracy are nothing special.

 

I think maybe it stems from somewhat false notions that War on the Battlefield is both honorable and simple. The basic premise SHOULD BE two armies fighting each other and then whoever is the best wins. Of course in reality that is never true since regular armies do kill civilians, pillages and do other horrible things.

While in pop culture naturally Spies, Security Forces, Politicians from the get go are meant to compromise, wheel and deal and sometimes backstab since that is just the nature of their business.

Indeed. Although i'll give Ds9 credit it did show the faults of Starfleet with Admiral Ross and the Earth Arc when a coup almost occurred.