gffa: Star Wars: Age of Rebellion - Special - “Stolen Valor” | by Jon Adams FIRST OF ALL

gffa:Star Wars: Age of Rebellion - Special - “Stolen Valor” | by Jon AdamsFIRST OF ALL, EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS HILARIOUS.  DARTH CHOKETHROAT MADE ME LOSE IT, BUT THEN SEEING THE EMPIRE AND THE UTTER SOUL-CRUSHING BANALITY OF IT MAKE ME LOSE IT AGAIN, BUT ALSO.I loved this a lot because it’s a point about the two different types of approach stories within Star Wars, especially as this is set during the Galactic Civil War, during the original trilogy of movies.  George Lucas definitely designed his movies to be a fairy tale, that the underlying message was that there was good and there was evil, that you had a choice between them.But you also had characters like Han and Lando, who were clearly living complicated lives and had complicated situations to struggle through.  You had Darth Vader ultimately being tragic and sympathetic, when you saw underneath the mask.  You had Luke struggling with his anger and making mistakes when he rushed into things.  The good vs evil dynamic is not mutually exclusive to complicated, difficult nuance and ambiguity.  They can co-exist within the same story!A lot of people want to give Star Wars shit for not being more morally ambiguous but I would argue that there’s plenty of it, both in Legends and in Canon.  You only need to pick up the Doctor Aphra comics or pretty much any Darth Vader comic, to see characters who are doing terrible things, but you feel for them.  You only have to watch Rebels to see characters like Zare Leonis or read Lost Stars to see Ciena Ree or read the Aftermath books to see Rae Sloane, all characters who are part of the Empire and have to struggle with the morality of it.  You also have Battlefront’s Iden Versio and now Alphabet Squadron’s Yrica Quell.  Those Aftermath books and the Bloodline book show that the New Republic was absolutely a hot mess and faced a lot of impossibly shitty choices.  The Poe Dameron comic furthers that as well.  Pretty much everything about the Republic (pre-Empire) shows what complicated morally ambiguous situations that good people are trying to navigate their way through or characters who had fallen to the dark side could still be sympathetic.AND, COME ON, ANAKIN SKYWALKER IS THE HEART OF THE STAR WARS STORY AT THE CENTER.  AND HE IS THE MOST MORALLY AMBIGUOUS CHARACTER AND SUBSEQUENT MEDIA HAS DRIVEN THAT HOME AGAIN AND AGAIN.Ambiguity and complexity has always been part of the franchise, it’s still part of the franchise, and it always will be.  It may not be the way people like it (see all the complexity and ambiguity of The Last Jedi is stuff a lot of people really hated, for various reasons–some totally valid, some less so), as well as it’s not grimdark and it’s not meant to portray that morally gray characters are actually the narratively approved good guys (but that they are really fascinating to read about sometimes!), but instead that there’s a choice between good and evil, one that’s very difficult sometimes, one that there may not even be a right answer to or one that’s reasonably possible to discover, because the variables are too massive and unpredictable, that it really sucks to be in this galaxy full of heart-breaking ambiguity and no right answers sometimes, but that coming from a good place and trying to do your best to help others still makes the galaxy a better place.And that’s why I loved this comic.  It was hilarious, but it also made a really great illustration for how fucking awful this galaxy is and how difficult it is to make the right choice, not because you’re a bad person, but because the circumstances aren’t clear-cut.  Because everyone you know is dying and it’d be easier to think of the enemy as less than human, but they are and that doesn’t mean you can just let them keep hurting others, but you can never know when sparing them might lead to them hurting more people or it might be the mercy they need, that the mercy you show might get you needlessly killed or it might save you down the road.That’s how Star Wars has always been and it’s not about celebrating people being assholes, but about sympathizing with the struggle to find the good path through the shitstorm and how close to impossible that is to achieve perfectly. -- source link

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