The Recycling Machine

One of the reasons Star Wars feels like it is dying for many is the endless recycling machine that the new movies keep churning out. They will keep taking bits of lore, characters, props, vehicles, Legacy plotlines, and other parts of the old lore and absolutely waste them in the new timeline, to the point where they make no sense there.

Grand Admiral Thrawn belongs in the series in which he was written, that story, and that tale. Tell that story, please. Cheaply using him as a toss-in character for a random TV show is so wrong, like the writers couldn't be bothered to come up with a new character, so they pull in something people are familiar with to fill a spot they need filled.

And it never works.

We end up hating the new thing because we were never given the old thing, which we were promised.

And they purposefully threw out "the old things" since they did not want to trouble their writers with learning lore, yet we still have to learn lore to see how this bit of that old thing sort of fits into these new things. The puzzle piece that fit perfectly in the old puzzle never fits in the new one, and you have to bang it in to get it to sloppily fit.

I end up hating the new thing.

And by extension, I end up hating the old thing. And by that logic, I hate every other old thing since I know the writers will steal everything not tied down in the Legends storylines to sloppily insert in their stories, when it is as simple as coming up with something entirely new and never having these problems in the first place.

These writers never had the skill to write Star Wars.

They are so insecure that they have to steal things from their betters.

It comes off like "we can never think of a great mob boss." Hence, they just keep re-using Al Capone everywhere, even in modern movies, and I sit here thinking, "Can't you writers come up with something halfway original, rather than recycling every bit of nostalgia from the things we loved?" Make a new Thrawn! Make someone cool and unique that we can latch onto! Do something new and different.

And liking the old lore feels like watching a Walmart get looted during a riot.

Well, there goes that thing we loved out the door. Pretty soon, you get numb to the vandalism and rampant scavenging of lore, and you block it all out - the old and the new.

It is a chronic problem. These corporations want younger voices to appeal to a younger audience. Yet, the education system has failed so hard that the classics of literature (which Star Wars borrows from heavily) are not even taught anymore. They have no clue why one thing is in a book, how it relates to a classic myth or legend, and they will go off on some social media thing they saw (the colored smoke clouds from festivals are cool), and think that visual element has a deeper meaning than something with parallels in classical literature.

They are trying to maintain a car but do not understand how a car works.

So I say, "It all ended with the EU." This is the OSR of Star Wars. That strange future-shock story, 130 years after with Cade Skywalker, is the last known good part of the original Star Wars. To be fair to the current creators, I will always give them a chance, but there is a part of me that compartmentalizes the older stories and keeps them just like we keep the rules and lore of the OSR.

I used to hate the Yuuzhan-Vong. I felt the EU went off the rails at that point. Now, I miss them.

My stories will always be set somewhere in the original EU, and I will never pull in a modern-timeline story into my playtime. They need to fix the mess they have there currently, but my imagination and stories come first. It does feel like giving up on modern Star Wars, and it makes me sad. For a few years, I drifted away from the idea entirely and let it die.

Star Wars was dead to me.

It hurt, since this blog started with coverage of the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, and these are the ones my brother and I loved. We played these together on his stroke recovery. I remember those days at the end of the EU, the promise of new movies led by Disney, and looking forward to them.

When they de-canonized Legends, I had a bad feeling about this.

But Star Wars was still cool; the memories were good; I remember all the fun we had with the West End Games d6 System version of the game; and, finally, being able to play in that universe. The Star Wars universe still felt like a living, breathing, interesting place.

Last weekend, the hour-by-hour disaster watch on YouTube with the new Mandalorian movie made me face the music. Could I finally let it die? The movie sounded like something I had no interest in, but the coverage was so universally negative, and likely deservedly so, that I had to stop watching.

So, having left Star Wars for dead years ago, the noise around the movie brought it up again in my mind. Was it really dead to me?

And I recently went back to BX as my fantasy game of choice, since D&D 5E became too much for me to support, the books too modern and anachronistic, and the original gameplay of BX felt far superior to 5E's "superhero story adventures." I could split the new D&D stuff from the old. We have enough distance here that BX feels like an entirely different game than D&D 5E.

The new stuff has nothing to do with the old.

A line can be drawn in my mind, and I can play whatever I want with BX, even classic settings such as the Forgotten Realms, and not have any of the new lore take away from the old.

If that line of thinking worked for BX and D&D, why couldn't it work for Star Wars?

What resources do we have to make it happen?

Well, we still have a game supported by reprints of classic books from Edge Studio, and the earlier game from Fantasy Flight still works great and has data for most of the Legends lore. We can support this game, show them some love, and hope the license stays with them so they can keep supporting the system.

Which is why I say the new movies and shows always have a chance. I make that promise to the current owners: Please don't pull the license for this game, and I will keep an open mind. We need to keep the classic lore a vibrant, interesting, and ever-growing space, even if it is just the role-playing game. If the license ever gets pulled, I will likely play Star Wars with a BX rule set, such as Stars Without Number. For now, we have this great game, and it is supported and in print.

If they want to make new books for this system with the new stuff, I will buy those.

This is what I support.

With a game decided upon, now the question becomes, can I compartmentalize the classic lore and just play in that universe? If I can do that in the OSR and have things feel entirely different, then I can do that for Star Wars. Other people feel the same way, and we are getting a group of people who are tuning out to the newer movies and shows, and tuning into the Legends-era movies and books.

And people are starting to feel like "lost fans" out here, and giving up hope. I was for a while, but I had to re-learn what it meant to be a fan, sort of like my progression with BX and fantasy gaming, by learning that the older games were just better built, not so influenced by MMOs and mobile games, and not designed for live service models. If I don't want any of that, I will need to go back and find something I liked.

I am a fan of these discreet things.

I am not so confused and lost anymore.

I know what I like, and I feel good about narrowing it down.

I am open to new experiences, but I have a higher bar for those. I just can't be beholden to the past; I need to look for the best in anything new we get. But I want the current game to remain in print and supported; I do not want a 5E version of Star Wars to come out, I need to spend more money, and the narrative dice system I love goes away.

What we have is perfect, supported, classic, full of EU lore, and a wonderful, thematic experience.

Stick with this, and I will always give new stuff a chance.

But I can compartmentalize the "world of the games" and enjoy myself again. I can pick a starting point, like at the beginning of a specific novel series, tell myself "the future is not written in stone," and begin a new game with a fresh outlook. When I first pick up the dice, that's when the lore diverges from what could come, and the universe is mine now.

That I can be a fan of.

And I can start the long road back.