Show, Don’t Tell: When Star Wars relies too heavily on the books

by Arezou

*Spoilers for various Star Wars books as well as Chapter 16 of The Mandalorian below!*

“OK, but in the books…” is not something I should ever have to say when talking about Star Wars. It is, after all, a series of movies first and foremost. The theatrically released films are how most people experience this story, and for some of them, that is the only part of the story they will ever see. Second to the films come the TV series, both live-action and animated, particularly now that Disney+ has made them widely available. Less widely consumed are the books and the comics.

The books and comics occupy a weird place, in that they are definitely “canon” - excluding the publishing run now known as Legends - but are almost secondary in nature. There is no expectation that the audience will, or even should be familiar with the books before they sit down to watch one of the movies.

For those that do choose to read the books, there is the added benefit of knowing that these books share the same continuity as the movies. Though I’m not a Legends reader myself, my impression is that those books were less internally consistent. For me personally, if I am going to be investing the ancillary materials of a film franchise, I like to know that it is all part of one large story, and takes place within the same continuity. This is why, for all that I love the MCU movies, I have not read any of the comics. The characters might be the same, but it isn’t a deeper dive into the story I’m already invested in. 

The new run of Star Wars books are exactly that: a deeper dive into the world of the story we are all already familiar with. As of right now, the timeline for the books spans from just before the events of The Phantom Menace up to shortly before The Rise of Skywalker. When The High Republic publishing program drops in the new year, this will mark a departure for the Star Wars books, because these will be the first stories not to overlap with the movies as far as time period, or main characters are concerned. Yes, Yoda is set to appear in the books, but the size of his role is currently unknown.

But for now, a deeper dive into the universe via the books comes with information that invariably affects the way those who’ve read them view the movies. 

This isn’t always a bad thing. The prequel-era books, for instance, contain no information required to understand the movies. Though the Clone Wars series does provide further insight into how Anakin fell to the Dark side in Revenge of the Sith, it is still addressed enough in the movies that it makes sense to the audience, an audience that went into The Phantom Menace knowing it was going to happen anyway. The series also introduces the character of Ahsoka, whose realm up until now has been the animated television series. It will be interesting to see how she is incorporated into the live-action series, as she is rumoured to appear in most, if not all of the upcoming television projects, and how she is introduced to an audience that may not be familiar with the Clone Wars series. 

There are very few novels set in the prequel era, and all of them focus on characters the audience would already be familiar with. Nothing in those books is required knowledge to enjoy the films. This is impossible anyway, simply by virtue of how much later the books were written. Reading Claudia Gray’s Master and Apprentice for instance, you learn that Qui Gon and Obi Wan’s relationship used to be a difficult one. Neither felt that they were a right fit as master and apprentice, and the book is how they overcame that and become the rock solid team we meet in The Phantom Menace. While knowing all this definitely makes it even more heartbreaking when you watch Qui Gon die in Obi Wan’s arms, it is not required knowledge to appreciate that scene. All you absolutely need to know about their relationship is what you see unfold in front of you. Learning about Dooku’s disillusionment with the Jedi in Cavan Scott’s Dooku: Jedi Lost is both informative and fascinating, but it is not necessary reading in order to understand that he is a pawn in a scheme bigger than he can comprehend when you meet him in Attack of the Clones. 

The original trilogy era is frankly nothing short of a comfort zone for Star Wars. Two-thirds of the current run of books are set in this period. The books set before or during the events of the original trilogy are much like those set during the prequel era. While they contain character and story beats that are important to characters we love, they are not essential to our understanding of the movies. Knowing that Princess Leia first joins the Rebellion at 16 in Claudia Gray’s Leia: Princess of Alderaan isn’t necessary for us to know that by the time we see her in A New Hope she is a vital cog in the rebel machine. How and why Galen Erso developed Death Star tech is extensively covered in James Luceno’s Catalyst, but any information the audience absolutely needs is provided in Rogue One. 

So why did I feel the need to adopt “but in the books…” into my Star Wars vocabulary?

Well, much like the logic behind the reboot of Star Wars’ publishing program, it all comes down to the sequel trilogy. The books that cover the time period from the end of Return of the Jedi to before The Rise of Skywalker are given the impossible task of setting up a rich, immersive world that we do not have time to delve into onscreen. 

And that’s a problem.

The first time I saw The Force Awakens, one major thing confused me. If the New Republic is in power, why do they even need a resistance? And for that matter, how does the First Order fit into all of this? The reason we were able to seamlessly drop into the prequel and original trilogies without needing a political crash course is because the system in power remains the system in power until that trilogy ends. We have three movies worth of time to understand the ins and outs of the system in power just by watching how our characters engage with it and live their lives. The Force Awakens has us watching the complete - and literal - destruction of a political system we’ve barely had an hour to wrap our heads around. I’d later come to understand that the First Order are a well-funded fascist group who have been making power grabs for some time, hence the need for a resistance. But I wondered why something like how the world works was left up to audience inference.

Granted, this is the kind of omission/lack of detail that a keen viewer can make up for on repeated viewings. Where the sequel trilogy, and the franchise as a whole, really suffers for developing the books and films in tandem is with the characters. I don’t mean to drag or shame any of the authors. They are contributing works I have loved to this galaxy, and are only working with the materials available to them. But this is where a long term plan would have come in handy.

In a few cases, the additional knowledge the books provide about the characters aren’t strictly necessary. For instance, in Princess of Alderaan, when we meet a teenage Amilyn Holdo, we see that she is the type to jump from point A to point D and rarely explains herself. While this helps the reader see how she became the adult that we see on screen, we don’t actually require any knowledge beyond what we get in The Last Jedi. 

Unfortunately, for the younger characters, much of what defines and motivates them is left entirely to the ancillary material. 

Neither Rey nor Finn appear in the books much. Both have a short story from their point of view in Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka, Rey is in Justina Ireland’s Spark of Resistance and both appear in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Resistance Reborn, Finn as a secondary character while Rey barely makes a cameo. Rey, the heroine of the entire trilogy is largely absent from the books, likely because they had no idea what was going to happen with her, and didn’t want to set up anything that wouldn’t pay off later. This is, again, where a plan might have helped. Finn’s role in Resistance Reborn makes sense to an extent. He is on a mission with Poe, is involved in all the action, and his friendship with Poe is developed. The only reason I call him a secondary character in that book at all is because he isn’t one of the point of view characters. 

Someone who is a point of view character in Resistance Reborn is Poe Dameron. Of the new younger characters, Poe has the most material written about him. Pretty impressive for someone who was supposed to die in the first act of The Force Awakens. But maybe that’s part of the reason it was done that way. He was not initially conceived as one of the main characters, so his story could be moved to ancillary materials without losing anything. Then when he did shift into a more prominent role, anything the audience needed to know about him was there on screen. He is one hell of a pilot who grows into a confident leader onscreen, and none of his trajectory is left up to interpretation. 

Then there’s Ben Solo. Oh, Ben Solo. I’m not even sure where to start with this. His first appearance outside of the movies was in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath series. While he isn’t technically in the books, he is referenced a lot as Leia is pregnant with him during the second and third books. This is where we see the tendrils of the dark side beginning to take hold of him, because Leia can sense it too, though she attributes it to her own inner darkness. By this point, the film audience knows that Snoke seduced Ben to the dark side, though no one knows when that started. The book tells you when that is - it was before he was ever born. In both the novel Last Shot by Daniel José Older and the novelization of The Last Jedi by Jason Fry, readers are shown a little Ben Solo who is generally a happy kid, loves his parents, wants to spend time with and be like his dad, which is a stark and heartbreaking contrast to the broken Kylo Ren we see on screen, torn between light and dark.

So here’s the thing.

I was always going to root for Kylo Ren’s redemption. Not only am I a fan of the redemption arc in general, the character is also the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa. Their only child, who’s redemption they fight for, who they want more than anything to come home, dying moments after his return to the light is not only devastating it kind of taints the original trilogy for me a bit. I see a young Han and Leia embrace on Endor and all I can think is that their only child is going to die in less than 30 years.  This gets more and more haunting, especially since I am older than the character will ever be. 

This is not to mention how tiresome I find the “redemption via death” trope. One aspect of Ben Solo’s character, made extremely explicit onscreen, is how much his family wants him back, wants him home. For his entire family to find some kind of peace in death once Ben also dies is extremely ghoulish and doesn’t track with the wishes of his parents onscreen or in the books. 

The choice to end Ben Solo’s arc in this way is made infinitely worse by the fact that the books (and the Rise of Kylo Ren comic by Charles Soule) go out of their way to show how he’d always had corrupting voices in his head. And not just any voice, it turns out it was indirectly Palpatine whispering in his ear the entire time. The Rise of Kylo Ren comic even makes it clear that it was not Ben Solo who destroyed Luke’s Jedi temple. It was Snoke. 

But the general audience doesn’t know any of this, because absolutely none of this is in the first two movies. Some vague language of being “seduced to the dark side” is not enough information for a general audience who isn’t already invested in the character’s redemption. This issue recently spiked in relevance after the season two finale of The Mandalorian, when Luke Skywalker arrived to answer Grogu’s call, and took the little baby away to train in the ways of the Force. A major question circulating on social media then became whether or not Ben Solo is responsible for Grogu’s death. This is the type of information the audience - the general audience - should have had from the beginning. The interpretation of Ben Solo’s character changes drastically when people have the necessary backstory. 

I recently had a conversation with my mother, herself a huge Star Wars/sci fi fan. Somehow the idea of Kylo Ren came up, and she dismissed him as “soulless” for having killed his own father. A brief explanation of what I outlined above was enough to change her dismissal to a look of abject horror. She had NO idea about any of this, and she is not the kind of person to passively consume media. Any information the general audience needs to empathize with Ben Solo is wholly absent from the movies, and the creators have to know that. You shouldn’t require a research deep dive through multiple sources in order to generate empathy for a character. Fans shouldn’t have to have TED talks on Ben Solo’s redemption ready to go because their friends (understandably) didn’t see that kind of empathy-stirring nuance onscreen.

Even more minor characters like Hux don’t escape unscathed. The character is minor enough that his first name, Armitage, is never once uttered onscreen. Fair enough, he’s supposed to be the radical First Order foil to Kylo Ren/Ben Solo’s more sympathetic tortured sadboy. Except that the books also go to great lengths to portray Hux’s relationship with his father as a toxic abusive one. His father made him the man he is, because bullying and abusing younger kids was the only way Armitage could get any kind of reprieve from the torment. For the Avatar: The Last Airbender fans among us, if Kylo is Zuko then Hux is Azula. What this then means is that an expression of sympathy for Hux from someone who has read the books results in an accusation of fascist sympathizing from someone who hasn’t. 

If the heroes suffer from a lack of detail, the villains suffer from any and all of their redeeming/sympathy-inducing qualities being relegated to a medium few people will consume. 

So what happens once we reach the end of the film saga? 

I had assumed that all the books were building up to the finale of the saga. That the Rise of Skywalker would come out and it would somehow culminate in a way that was emotionally resonant for the general audience, the people who read all the books, and everyone in between. 

That…did not happen.

There is a very big difference between an Easter egg, and a crucial piece of information. A single panel in a comic book showing that Elan Sleazebaggano (the Death Sticks guy from Attack of the Clones, yes that is his real name, I checked) really did go home and rethink his life is a nice Easter egg. The above-mentioned aspects of Ben Solo’s character, and yes, even Armitage Hux’s are crucial pieces of information. 

I recognize that it’s impossible to please everyone. I also recognize that a small percentage of the global general audience is familiar with the content of the books leading up to Episode 9. But I keep coming back to the question I’ve been asking myself since December 18, 2019: Why include it in the story if it doesn’t matter? These character beats in the books are not just Easter eggs. They should matter. 

Why paint Poe as a Leia-like pilot and a leader if you’re going to try and make him Han Solo 2.0 later?

Why have Leia constantly and actively choose to focus on politics and leadership, and have her explicitly reject the idea of Jedi training only to make her a Jedi in the last act of the last film for a literal 3 seconds? It made a nice contrast to Luke, that she chose to serve the galaxy and use her skills in a different way, and the books really fleshed out that decision.

Why make the case for sympathy for the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia if your ultimate goal was to kill him while he’s still a young man even though none of his loved ones wanted that fate for him? Why would you take the time to make me care if you’re just going to kill him off?

Rey and Finn will find their stories continued in the ancillary materials at some point, I’m sure of it. They have to, their onscreen finale left too much open to interpretation. However they choose to continue the story, it will necessarily come with a lot of heavy lifting from a character standpoint. But with that also comes the knowledge that however they choose to end their stories, the majority of the audience will never get to hear that ending.