You thought I’d forgotten about this, didn’t you?

It’s true that I bring you my monthly offering later than it usually falls in this cycle, though in my defence, having just taken a new job and then immediately catching Covid-19 (for a second time!) seems a pretty good excuse. There was, in fact, a point in time at which I did plan to post this on May 4th, though now one month and six thousand words later that seems a little trite.

Still, loyal readers of my beloved Arthur—my cinevangelicals, if you will—I feel I must solemnly apologize to you for a heinous indiscretion of mine. For the past going-on-three-months now, it would appear that I have—wholly inadvertently—re-written beat-for-beat the same film column not once, not twice, but thrice upon a time. While this may surprise those of you who correctly observed that I wrote three columns about three separate movies, it bears pointing out that structurally, these respective pieces might prove a tad… derivative. While “Eternal Sunshine of the [Frot]less Mind” is, in many ways, my magnum opus (and a damn funny title, at that) the genuine earnestness and testimony to which it commendably aspires is cribbed in the subsequent entries of my semi-eponymous column to much more cynical effect. I mean, I made you read a twenty-four-hundred-word screed about trains for Goddess’ sake, even I’m not sure how I retain fans after that one. 

I’ve been told that the first step is admitting you have a problem, so consider this a confession with a mind to make amends. However, don’t expect to see things change around here, as I certainly don’t plan on bettering myself any. My readers are masochists, after all, and who would I be to change on their account? Sure as heck not the whiny tranny you know and love, that’s for darn sure. So while we’re on the subject of things which never change which maybe ought to, let’s go ahead and pull out “Evangeline drops a whopper of a bad take” again. If you thought “Christmas movies are garbage,” was controversial territory, you’ve not seen the half of it yet. 

So, pull out your bingo cards theydies and gentlethem, cause this one’s going to be a doozy. This is my first Cinevangelism as Co-Editor of this rag, and for that reason alone I want to make it EXTRA special. I’ve built up a lot of goodwill over the past six months, so let me take the opportunity to squander it all in my first critical column to date. Unencumbered by print deadlines and word counts, I am able to attain a power level once thought impossible and finally do what every film critic dreams of doing—namely, shit on a universally-beloved staple of popular culture. While cowards and charlatans might reign in their instincts in this respect, I’m always one to embrace my delusions of grandeur. You heard it here first, I’m shooting for the big leagues, baby! I’ve made up my mind and taken square aim to talk smack against none other than Star Wars.

Episode I: I was a Tweenage Star Wars fan.

Whenever I make the three-hour trek to my natal city of Ottawa, ON, my younger brother tries to get me to watch Star Wars. By this I do not mean that he implores me to rewatch the 1977 film Star Wars, mind, rather, it’s usually one of the myriad sequelesque derivatives that particular cultural monolith has sired in the fourty-odd years since its release. The thing about these is that they’re not very good. Obi-Wan Kenobi was easily the worst piece of television I watched in 2022, and I say this having watched all of three episodes of the goddamn thing. Admittedly, the profundity of my lesbianism means that any year I rewatch one of Mike Flanagan’s gay little horror series, anything else will hit several rungs further down the ladder ranking my media consumption of that year, but trust me when I tell you this one was a stinker. 

Earlier that year, my brother had attempted to put me on to The Bad Batch. I was disappointed by it, though arguably not as disappointed as I was with Season 7 of the once-excellent, now thoroughly uninspired Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I doubt I could care less about the Star Wars franchise at this point in my still-short life if I actively tried. While I still seem to retain some semblance of understanding as to what is happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe I so professedly despise, I’ve honestly no idea what is happening with the Star Wars franchise of late, so unengaging is the drivel they serve, so underwhelming each announcement of another trilogy penned by such-and-such a bigshot director. Understand though, that it comes from a place of love when I say I hate the Star Wars franchise.

It has not always been the case that I felt such disdain for this ubiquitous franchise. For many years I’ve not been as big a Star Wars fan as I have of certain other nominally science-fiction programmes which will remain unnamed—for sake of your sanity and of my word count (whoops!)—but I always considered myself an enjoyer of the series. If anything, I grew up a downright obsessive Star Wars fan. Star Wars (that’s Episode IV: A New Hope to the heathens among us) is the first movie I can remember watching. The second, for the record, is Ice Age, and the third is Goldfinger. I think, all told, that’s a fairly comprehensive picture of my childhood, though I’ll spare elaboration on that statement for a later column. At my fourth birthday party I subjected my cohort of pre-kindergarten aged friends to watching Star Wars. I think my parents must have forgotten that a guy gets his arm chopped off in the first act of that movie, only minutes after we’re subjected to the image of burning corpses. Fun for the whole family! Whether or not that moment was forever responsible for my present obsession with the most debauched and macabre horror films I can find, I suppose we’ll never know, however, by that tender age I’d already watched Star Wars more times than I could count, and probably more times than my parents would care to remember. This time, however, was the first time I would remember. Henceforth Star Wars became inseparable from my childhood. I watched the original trilogy endlessly on the Special Edition DVD boxed set my father had bought on their release in 1997, the same year he moved to Canada. Long before I’d verbalize the opinion that “the Special Editions ruin those movies, man,” these (admittedly lesser) editions would suffice to entrance me enough to become enamoured with the craft of filmmaking—even George Lucas himself is incapable, it seems, of killing what is quintessentially a perfect film.

The obsession would reach its apex in the seventh and eighth grades, fueled by an extremely close friendship and nascent delusions of grandeur. I was, at the time, a six-foot-tall child who used far too much hair gel to tame his unruly, cowlicked hair, who wore converse high-tops, video game graphic tees, and whose favourite song was “Sex” by the 1975, which I thought made me cool. I played Settlers of Catan in the special education room with a group of friends at a games club after school. Out of a number of house rules for Star Wars: Battlefront, a penchant for obsessing over media, and a newly-professed desire to one day do writing professionally, I and the aforementioned friend (who was, at the time, more Star Wars obsessed than I, and probably remains so to this day) would construct elaborate hypothetical narratives which we would dream of turning into our own live-action Star Wars television series. At our collaborative height we had sketched plans for novels, for video games, for compounding vertically integrated tie-in narratives. We had a hundreds-slides long PowerPoint presentation tracking each episode which we intended to pen. I went so far as to draft a pitch to Lucasfilm.

In 2015 I was just as excited as anyone to see The Force Awakens, in a packed, rank-smelling theatre on Carling Avenue in Ottawa. I too was swept up in the potent cocktail of euphoric nostalgia upon seeing that stupid little title card flash across the screen. Yet in spite of my downright infectious anticipation going in, I left the theatre comparatively tempered in my enthusiasm. To this, I attribute two principal reasons. 

The first is that The Force Awakens does not satisfy me as a Star Wars fan. It is a shameless imitation of a much better film riddled with much uglier computer-generated imagery which fails to grasp the political and narrative preoccupations of its predecessor, nor to attain the same heights of inspired and innovative filmmaking and passion therein for the craft. The second is that, exactly in tandem with the characters’ arrival on Takodana, my brother threw up in my lap. 

On principle, I refused to leave the theatre—refused to miss a single second of the newest Star Wars sequel. In hindsight, this proved a poor choice, though considering I was fourteen at the time, I can’t entirely fault myself for this decision. I loved Star Wars enough to sit through nearly another hour-and-a-half in a room which smelled of puke—no mean feat should you know what kind of sensory issues I’m dealing with. Certainly today I’d not be likely to do the same for Star Wars Episode XII: Revengeance of the Midi-Chlorians when it comes out in 2027, though in 2015, my opinion of the franchise still bore sufficient goodwill. Mind, I also sat through two other films on the likewise occasion of my brother’s puking—Jason Bourne (2016) and a pre-release screening of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (also 2016)—neither of which even possess the competent mediocrity of The Force Awakens; they’re just bad. Maybe it says more about the state of the contemporary film industry that I’ve seen more bad movies in theatres than I have good ones (and bear in mind, I’ve seen a lot of movies). Astute readers will further note that all the aforementioned films are themselves either sequels or reboots belonging to popular franchises or Intellectual Properties—though I doubt that will become relevant later. 

The Force Awakens it seems, is and was merely an omen portending a far more cataclysmic death of a franchise. The Star Wars sequel trilogy bounces from trough to trough, with each movie possessing fewer and fewer redeeming qualities than its predecessor. Look, I like Solo well enough when I’m not squinting through the bafflingly dark colour grade, and I might be the single biggest The Last Jedi defender in the world, if not at least in Southern Ontario—if nothing else, Rian Johnson knows how to make a semi-coherent and undeniably gorgeous film—shame it was sandwiched between two servings of gibberish. Still, I’ll readily admit that  almost every piece of Star Wars media released from 2015 to our present day leaves somewhat (or in most cases, much) to be desired. The books are boring, the TV series are boring, or ugly, or poorly written, the films are all of the above. Somewhere in the last decade Star Wars went off the rails. 

Then again, maybe it was never on said rails to begin with. 

Episode II: Star Warts and All

The general consensus among Star Wars fans today is that the franchise is comprised of three discrete types of film: “The Good Ones” (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens and Return of the Jedi), “The Bad Ones” (The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker), and “The Fun Bad Ones” (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith). You can further separate and/or rank the quality of these films by grouping them together in their respective trilogies—the Original trilogy is unimpeachably good, the prequels are bad, if enjoyable for being camp (at least in philistines’ estimation of it), and the sequels are “just,” bad, if with the exception of whichever film (usually Rogue One or The Force Awakens) your present partner of conversation professes to like “in spite of its flaws.” 

To borrow a turn of phrase from a certain writer who I reference all too often, the sequels are not so much bad as much as they are “pretty good,” for movies made entirely out of problems. The sequels are the symptoms of the Star Wars disease, a canary in the proverbial outer-space spice mines. The sequel trilogy most effectively illustrates an underpinning reality which haunts the franchise as a whole—that these movies in no way function as three respective trilogies. For the sequels this goes without saying (Poe and Rey, two members of the ostensible “main trio,” do not share a scene together until the third and final movie), and such great lengths of time and narrative significance separate the prequel trilogy films so as to make them altogether alien from one another. The original trilogy—“the good ones,” if you will—are not, however, exempt from this fact. While Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are each themselves incredible feats of practical and narrative filmmaking—perfect movies each in their own right—everything goes to shit in the last one. Return of the Jedi is saddled with a sloppy narrative, baffling character development, and the initial symptoms of the Star Wars franchise’ worst favourite habit: retreading past locations for their recognizability. By going back to Tatooine we, the audience, were indefinitely condemned to desert planet after desert in every piece of Star Wars media until the twin suns burn out and every starship turns to rust.

Jedi is the textbook example of the ethos The Force Awakens would emulate decades later (suck the original for all it’s worth while paying no respect to the thematic or narrative consistency such a practice demands). I’m more than inclined to agree with Harrisson Ford’s initial desire for Han Solo to be killed off in the film, rather than survive as both George Lucas and (presumably) the audience so desperately wanted—the smuggler, who previously served as a morally-grey foil to the cast of righteous-if-boring heroes is retconned in this film into an uncomplicated do-gooder, bordering on bleeding-heart revolutionary. This is a film which equally gives us a return to Tatooine, the haphazard reappearance of characters who serve no purpose in the story (though I do feel bad saying that about Alec Guiness), the tempering of existing characters’ narrative arcs for the sake of audience wish fulfilment, and, most glaringly, another Death Star.

“Another Death Star,” might as well be the name of the franchise at this point, so prominently does that singular item of iconography figure in it. Hell, you’ve got a Death Star in Episode IV, you’ve got a Death Star in Episode VI, you’ve got “definitely not another” Death Star in Episode VII, a Death Star teaser in Episode I, a Death Star teaser in Episode III, a Death Star teaser in The Clone Wars, a Death Star teaser in Rebels, a Death Star prequel in Rogue One, a bunch of Star Destroyers fitted with Death Star canons in Episode IX, and more references to the blasted thing in the Extended Universe than even my notorious pedantry could hope to contend with.

For a franchise nominally about wars in the stars, the focus of most of these films seems extremely muted in their relative scope. The problem with narrative storytelling is that you’re eventually going to have to pare your story down to the human level, and by consequence you often lose track of the “bigger” picture. While both Star Wars and Empire excel at illustrating the dynamic and growth between their central cast, this comes at the expense of the Empire and Rebellion each being afforded little in the way of development and the broad strokes of the galactic conflict being overlooked in favour of developing romance between a scoundrel and a sovereign. While the Empire requires little more than the visual shorthand of that first short of a Star Destroyer overhead, both factions suffer from a lack of specific aims and defining politics. While the prequels try to remedy this to mixed effect, the sequels instead go the route of pomp and spectacle, leading to the First Order being a faction incomprehensible in their goals and relying largely on the aesthetic invocation of a preceding entity from which to sap some modicum of identity and relevance—kind of like Star Wars. 

Star Wars is not, and has never been the story of a specific war. It is not even a parable, as its title would imply, for “Wars” in general. It is the story of the personal development of a number of archetypal characters—a farm boy who becomes a fighter pilot, a scoundrel who becomes sympathetic, and a princess who becomes a political figurehead. The end of the original film presents the point of divergence for the rest of the franchise—the opportunity to expand the scope and magnitude of the story at hand, or to home in on the characters specifically. The Empire Strikes Back picks the latter, and is all the better for it, but in doing so cedes any sort of claim to being a story about war. 

That’s not to say the constraints of the Western narrative tradition prevent you from ever writing about war, but it does require some forethought to be properly executed. Say, if you wanted to reboot a once-beloved science-fiction franchise and predicate it upon the central conceit of their having been a cataclysmically devastating war between two massively powerful opposing factions, you might want to illustrate the personal effects on your protagonist. You could, for instance, make your eponymous hero the sole survivor of said conflict, and over the course of the developing narrative arc examine the emotional and psychological effects on them personally through the framing of the material impacts on other species, worlds, or narrative devices. It’s not as if I’m referring to a specific science-fiction franchise which employs the aforementioned narrative techniques to better comment on a war which happens almost entirely off-screen, I’m just spitballing here!

All this speaks to a problem that riddles science-fiction in general, and Star Wars more specifically. Despite being set in a galaxy whose size boggles the scope of human understanding, Star Wars characters bump into each other with more frequency than I do ex-girlfriends in the city of Peterborough.

While in these occurrences are telegraphed in the original trilogy—Luke mentions his childhood friend having joined the Rebel Alliance, and Han seeks out Lando Calrissian in Empire, having met him in a previous, off-screen encounter—in subsequent Star Wars media they adopt the appearance of coincidence and fortuity. A character from a one-off arc in The Clone Wars? Bring him back for Rogue One! Make sure to have a cameo from one of the cantina aliens in your television series, or else reintroduce a tertiary character from an out-of-print extended universe novel from 1989. It’s no longer enough even for certain events to merely be discussed in contemporary Star Wars. While Han’s anecdotes about the Kessel Run, or winning the Falcon in a game of Sabaac add character to the original trilogy, they require little in the way of expansion beyond that. They’re set dressing—the narrative equivalent of garlic powder or MSG—a little touch which brings out the flavour of the dish. Solo: A Star Wars Story, however, sees fit to show all of that which was originally left to the audience’s imagination, in what is (to me, at least) a far less impressive realization of a throw-away smuggler’s boast. 

Many of the best episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars are wholly unrelated to the overarching and developing arc of the Star Wars franchise. While the series does contain elements from the so-called “Skywalker Saga,” many episodes instead focus on otherwise unseen characters or battles, playing to the series’ strengths as an anthology. The Rishi Moon arc, “Lair of Grievous,” the Umbara arc and others still eschew the hyperconnectivity of contemporary Star Wars. For this reason alone, they prove refreshing in their execution. That they are, on top of that, extremely well-written (especially for a children’s television series) and cements their quality among what I view to be a slew of low-effort and cynical entries in what was previously a long-beloved franchise.

Not even The Clone Wars remained so good forever, though. The release of Season 7 brough along with it a new handful of tie-in properties, more connections to the universe at large, and yet another fully-fledged spin-off series in the form of thoroughly mediocre The Bad Batch. The consequence of these and all aforementioned decisions thus becomes to shrink the universe in which the franchise takes place, turning it from a canvas in which individuals live out their lives to a web of interconnected events over which the Skywalker clan presides omnipotent in their importance. Ironically, the more Star Wars expands, the smaller its universe gets, and the proliferation of series like Kenobi, Andor, and The Book of Boba Fett merely serve to showcase this misguided assumption that everything must be connected. 

The Mandalorian arrived in 2018 like a flicker of hope struck to light the bitter cigarette of cynicism on which I’d been sucking for years at that point. Its release succeeded The Last Jedi—my third favourite Star Wars film, after the original and Empire—by a year. Both of these offered the false promise of stories about people who weren’t important, about a heroine who was nobody special except who she made herself, and a wanderer who was a hero by circumstance. Then, in truly Star Wars fashion, Lucasfilm released Mando Season 2, and The Rise of Skywalker, and took a massive putrid shit upon them, asphyxiating their respective narrative identities in a mountain of tie-in plot threads and cameos which would only serve to undermine the intrinsic merit to be found in them to begin with.

Star Wars Episode IX culminates in the downright-insulting revelation that our heroine of two films is not in fact, a self-made hero of circumstance, but rather the progeny of one Chancellor/Emperor Sheev “The Senate” Palpatine. Beside the obvious question of who is boning a man who looks like a nutsack, this twist defangs any tension in Rey’s previously established moral conflict. That, it turns out, does not stem from self-determination, but is rather a product of heredity. She is not rewriting her own fate, as it were, rather, providence was already predestined for her.

Remember when Star Wars began, remember how it was a series about a number of reluctant and unconventional heroes working together against all odds to take on a much-greater foe? Fuck you if you liked that, because the modern Star Wars family tree is more messy than Fire Emblem Awakening’s (and that's a game where you can marry your best friend's time-travelling future kids!). The killing joke, as it were, is that this franchise which has descended into mediocrity and cliché has done so entirely by its own hand. It was never written in the Force for it to pan out this way, which is a funny way of putting it given the self-evidence of there having been no consistent writing plan within the structure of its own sequel trilogy. 

Star Wars is an existential failure—a disappointment by no metrics but its own. The franchise is, in my mind, the worst thing a modern media property can be, a betrayal of itself. Say what you want about the new Matrix or goddamn Bill and Ted 3, but I’d argue either of those is at least more faithful to their own self-delcared ethos than Star Wars is to its. More than anything, caring about Star Wars in this day and age feels like a waste of time. My mind is better served remembering the base stat totals of all 900+ Pokémon, or else spending literally 100 hours perfecting my waveshine in Super Smash Bros. Melee than it is remembering what happens in Revenge of the Sith. At this point, who even gives a shit?

Section III: Like Poetry, it Rhymes

One of the defining characteristics of contemporaneity, in my mind, is cynicism. In the latent postmodern period everything is referential—a copy of a copy of a reboot of a sequel of a remake—an endless chain of signification whose point of origin has long since been lost in the noise of memetic reproduction. Per consequence, there’s little sincere about the content of contemporary blockbusters. When nothing is original, always pointing at a much more fondly remembered property, it’s hard to feel that even “new” entries in a franchise are anything other than shallow derivatives. The motivations driving this practice are equally cynical. The Star Wars sequel trilogy, its myriad tie-in properties, spin-off movies, video games, and every television series greenlit by Lucasfilm since its acquisition by the Walt Disney corporation are testimony to the continuous pursuit of profit. The quality of the series doesn’t matter when each new release rakes in more money than God. Star Wars has never been “high-art,” but it has also never, before 2015, been so thoroughly disenchanted with its own existence. 

While the prequel trilogy are fundamentally disillusioned with the American political project they allegorize, they still express the genuine concerns of an invested filmmaker and auteur—they are not themselves (for better and for Jar Jar Binks) cynically constructed or cynically motivated movies. Every part of the sequel trilogy, by contrast, reeks of cynicism and apathy. I’m not the first to kick the dead horse of calling The Force Awakens a rip off of Star Wars, but kick it I shall nonetheless. Both theatrical spin-offs—Rogue One and Solo—serve as contextual prequels to questions no one needed resolved. Star Wars still functions on its own merits without needing to know how exactly the Death Star plans were acquired, by which means precisely Han came into possession of the Millenium Falcon, or even how he met Chewbacca. All these serve for is as nodes upon which to affix the money-printing devices which are each successive Star Wars film. It doesn’t matter how small or inconsequential, if Disney+’s Cassian TV series has proved anything, it’s that every disposable character or reference proves an opportunity to further expand the franchise, which means more merchandise, and more money.

It's worth emphasizing for exactly how much contemporary merchandizing and consumer culture Star Wars is responsible for. George Lucas famously retained the rights to licence the merchandise for his films, meaning that he made most of his money not from ticket sales, but from action figures, tie-in novels, and other such licenced memorabilia. Flash-forward sixty years and we find ourselves in a culture permeated by the proliferation of these commodities, plastic lightsabers and Funko Pops and LEGO sets which serve no actual purpose save to preserve the flow of capital into Lucasfilm’s coffers. And, after years of resting on its laurels, the franchise saw fit to merchandize the last thing it could: itself. So, while I’m out here swinging for the fences, let me take a stab at one hell of a Mark Fisher-esque bombshell:

The archenemy of Star Wars is capitalism. 

Star Wars is a snake eating its own entrails—perhaps the greatest ever success story of merchandising becomes the most spectacular cinematic disappointment of the twenty-first century, a veritable victim of its own excesses. The Star Wars of today is brought to you by a board room—a corpse puppeteered through the motions of life in an effort to squeeze every cent out of audiences hopped up on genuine and founded nostalgia for films of legitimate quality. That which revolutionized cinema as a popular medium might well herald its death knell, or at least the tortured scream it emits as it is brutally bludgeoned in the hopes of effacing from it the last drops of capital. Star Wars is as good a franchise as any for late capitalism—worthless, cynical, and altogether vacuous in its existence.

And there it is. Are you happy? That is, for all intents and purposes, a mathematically perfect Cinevangelism. I’ve hit every beat, fulfilled every quota of delusional and self-aggrandizing claims. Yet here, at the end of it, it still feels hollow, doesn’t it? 

I don’t wish to leave it here, because in spite of it all, I don’t like being a cynic. Does it not say in my biography that I am “passionate…about solutions-based journalism?” So, if you’ll let me, I’ll finish this. Writing this monstrously long column has finally, at long last, taught me something about creative work which I wish I had learned years ago. Permit me another 1200 words and we’ll finish this, together [Editor's Note: The remainder of this column is most certainly longer than 1200 words].

Episode IV: A New Hope. Wait, Hang on just a fucking minu—

Unlike most fans of Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs for you acronym lovers), my first exposure to the genre was not the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons (be it 5E or any other edition), nor its long-time rival Pathfinder. Instead, the first sourcebook I ever lay my hands upon was that of Edge of the Empire.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire was a TTRPG produced by Fantasy Flight Games between 2012–2020. I’ve read that sourcebook cover-to-cover five times since acquiring it in 2015, and riffled through it more times than bears mentioning here. Together with its sister publications Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny, Edge forms one-third of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game suite, a system designed to simulate spectacular science-fiction adventures taking place in the Star Wars universe. In 2020, publisher Fantasy Flight decommissioned the system, and quietly it was moved to Edge Studio, another subsidiary of FFG’s parent company Asmodee. Edge and its siblings still exist, suspended in purgatorial half-life through their new proprietor, though to myself and other avid players of the SWRPG this is not necessarily Edge as we remember it in its heyday.

Back in the heights of said heyday, a friend and I would corral others our age into playing Edge at our weekly, after-school board games club, trading off GM responsibilities week-to-week. The characters I made for those early campaigns are probably indicative of the direction in which my life would proceed thereon—my very first being a Clawdite smuggler who captained a ship called the Mourning Star. My self-evident penchant for melodrama and poesis aside, it bears noting that Clawdites are a species capable of shapeshifting. Though being of textually ambiguous gender and sex, my character presented herself as female a majority of the time. Even in the valences of fictionalized roleplay we find my earliest proclivities for a kind of figurative cross-dressing, borne of and enabled by the comfortable escapism of the Star Wars universe.

In that long-off moment of my youth I guess it seemed easier to adopt the embodied veneer of a space pirate being shot at on the daily than it was to just… transition, and live my life as I wanted to—to play at being a girl rather than perform as one (much love Judith Butler). That, to me, was a greater science fantasy than a little ‘ol Star War [sic]. 

My recreational and admittedly obsessive pastime of meticulously orchestrating Edge campaigns was a decided expression of my desire to write for Star Wars. It was a process of taking this fictional world beloved to me and putting my stamp on it, to prove to myself and to my party members that I could tell a story worth telling which lived up to the quality of what I viewed to be one of the most impactful pieces of media I’d ever consumed.

Between the brainstorming of mine and my friend’s prospective collaborative television series, writing scripts which will never be produced, running Edge of the Empire campaigns, making fanart and fancfiction, and reading every expanded universe novel I could get my hands on, I devoted a cumulative amount of time to the Star Wars franchise which is probably best measured in weeks, if not whole months, or my life.

I first read Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire, the first in his beloved “Thrawn Trilogy” when I was thirteen. That novel is at least partially responsible for reigniting my love of Star Wars, then dormant, over the next several years. I thought, because I loved the Thrawn trilogy so much, because I sought out Zahn’s successive novels and other novels—Christie Golden’s Dark Disciple, her subsequent novel Inferno Squad, Stack Pole’s X-Wing: Rogue Squadron series, Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy and Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars and Bloodlines—that I wanted to write for Star Wars.

I put that on a pedestal for years.

 In 2016 I started the draft of a manuscript about a class of starfighter pilots at a naval spaceflight academy, quite obviously inspired by Lost Stars. As I have a habit of doing, I chipped away at the document for a couple years, never making much progress beyond my conception of the point-of-view character—a working-class Zeltron who proved herself in basic training, out of her depth among the nepo babies of dedicated space admirals. As I grew ambivalent towards the Star Wars franchise, it collected digital dust in the recesses of my hard drive, until something happened in January of 2023. 

I’d been writing this column for a month, only having produced two installments thus far. Part of my initial conception of it was a podcast—something to populate the then-barren Arthur RSS feed. Over the winter break between semesters, I recorded a podcast with a friend of mine from high school, herself back from school in the United Kingdom for a tragically fleeting break. Half on a whim and out of a professed desire to see her, I organized a rendezvous to record what would become the podcast pilot of Cinevangelism. 

It was about Top Gun. 

In preparation, I watched Top Gun: Maverick with my family. Despite my cynicism, I enjoyed the film quite a bit, though moreover something about it’s downright pornographic salivating over jet fighters and flight school scratched a long-surpressed itch in the back of my hand. That night, I booted up Microsoft Word and typed nearly 10 000 words on my portable Filco Majestouch Minila R wireless keyboard, not going to bed till past 2AM, exhausted, and with my hands throbbing from a carpal tunnel flareup. 

I completely reworked the concept for my original novel.

I retitled it—Screaming Stardust—and set about making it my own. First and foremost, I extricated it wholesale from the Star Wars universe. If I were going to write this, I decided, it would be on my own terms. From there, I made it darker, more violent and more bitter, put way more gratuitous sex in it; made it what I realize now was more honest. The desire to write a Star Wars novel had obfuscated my desire to write a novel at all.

In hindsight, the same applied to my erstwhile Edge campaigns. Any of those could be transposed into any universe without need of the specificity of them being “Star Wars-y”. In all the clamour to try and tell someone else’s story I’d forgotten to even want to tell mine. 

That’s the thing about franchises—they get into your head, tell you “you could write your own version of me your way some day.” What no one outright tells you is that you don’t have to wait, or ask permission to do that. I certainly did neither in my barely-teenaged years in conceiving a complete Star Wars continuity wholly divorced from that which Lucasfilm/Disney would pump out over the next decade. At the time though, I still sought the legitimacy of that media property—the stamp of Lucasfilm approval—hence the aspirationally written project proposals and naïve daydreams of board meetings with Kathleen Kennedy.

The reality is that this headspace is antithetical to creative thinking. There are certainly franchises for which I would more than anything love to pen an entry, but I refuse, at twenty-one years of age, to let that be an obstacle for me in the interim. I can’t wait for permission to tell a story from somebody else. That in itself is counterintuitive as a creative practice, but it’s what a thoroughly commodity-wrought culture demands of us. Don’t get me wrong, I realize exactly how lucky I am to work for a masthead which permits me to write very nearly anything I want, though fundamentally I’m just skeptical of a world in which we aspire towards selling out, because that’s what this feels like to me. Everything nowadays needs to be a reference to a spin-off of a sequel of a remake of a thing. You’ve never made it until you’re writing in the big leagues.

Fuck that. 

Consistently, across the history of cinema, we find filmmakers who deigned to create whatever the hell they pleased, stealing wholesale from whatever their heart so desired in the process. You want to know the most famous example of that? A little movie called Star Wars. Budding film director George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordon feature film, but the Hollywood studios wouldn’t let him. Instead, he wrote his own treatment of a Flash Gordon movie, and turned it into his own thing, which would become arguably the most successful motion picture ever made. I doubt many of my readers have seen 1980’s Flash Gordon, a bad movie with a strange Timothy Dalton performance, one iconic Brian Blessed line, and a fucking banger of a Queen sountrack. I would be genuinely surprised if any of the few that have had not also seen Star Wars. 

So, here’s what I have to say: 

Give up on Star Wars. 

Let that franchise rot in its own cesspool. Write that script you’ve always dreamed of writing, that novel you always intended to finish, to anything creative for the sake of having done it at all. That’s all it takes at the end of the day. We have, each and every one of us, the potential to write the next thing bigger and better than Star Wars—the obsession with writing literally the next Star Wars is merely a distraction to that fact.

It’s terrible, soul-wrenching advice, but I stand by it. Franchises obviously have their places, but at this point in my life I find far more merit in, for instance, an anonymous graduate student writing a 250k word Finnpoe rewrite of the sequel trilogy than I do in a boardroom asking themselves what would happen if they asked Robert Eggers to direct Star Wars Episode X. If anything, fanfiction is a legitimately beautiful and deeply cathartic practice that fulfills this very desire to create something belonging to a property you adore, the difference being that in fanfiction there exists the potential for it to take on a life of its own.

At the risk of stealing a factoid from a mutual deeply important to me, did you know that Naomi Novik, bestselling author and co-founder of Archive of Our Own dot org, wrote her critically and commercially beloved Temeraire series because of her inspiration from the Patrick O’Brian series upon which the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is based? That’s right, His Majesty’s Dragon is essentially just Alternate Universe: Dragons Aubrey—Maturin fanfiction. Ain’t that just beautiful?

It might be more surprising to note that a little series, credited with codifying contemporary high fantasy as a literary genre, called The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien precisely because he was so enchanted with the Welsh folktales collated in The Mabinogion. Same bestie, same! Ol’ J.R. even went so far as to write his own congruent tome in The Silmarillion, whose name and structure he chose expressly to evoke that of the Mabinogi. 

It really does not matter if what you do is original, or noteworthy, or even good. Do it for yourself. I don’t care if I ever publish that stupid novel, but I feel damn good having started it. When every Star Wars entry is the worst one to date, dare to do something different, because writing something which is good on its own merits is always going to be better than making something which is fated to mediocrity by default. Hell, I'd be lying if I didn't say I mostly write this very column for myself and merely the joy of doing so. Besides a few friends drunkenly waxing their stated adoration of this project, I've no reason to believe anyone reads the damn thing—it's not as if I'm checking the analytics!

Making something new always invites the possibility of failure, though it equally invites engagement from an audience in a wholly novel and authentic way. Who knows, maybe the protagonist of that grimdark space fantasy epic you’re working on will one day be millions of autistic women’s babygirl and sweep Tumblr polls with adroitness of which Sans Undertale could only dream. 

That’s about all I can impart to you at the moment. Still, it’s got my creative juices flowing. So don’t just sit there, you don’t need an idiot like me giving you advice about what to do with your life. Do whatever you feel like, but for Goddess’ sake do it on your own terms. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a novel to finish.

And with that, dear reader:

“Bingo.”