so be it, jedi

so, fundamentally, the OT and the PT are two different kinds of story; the OT is a hero's journey, and the PT is a tragedy. this necessitates and allows for different elements of lucas' worldbuilding to be showcased in each. in the OT, the empire is allowed to be a very flat, cynical force for evil, because it's the force that luke has to valiantly slam his shoulder into, repeatedly, in order to complete his hero's journey, and it suited the anti-war film that lucas had set out to make before he started throwing literally every other genre into it. ANH came out in 1977, from the mind of someone who'd had their brain dunked into the protests against the vietnam war and then set to spin cycle. lucas has said as much; The Empire is a vague stand-in for every empire, borrows the styling of fascist regimes as a visual cue for the audience to go, "hm, evil," without ever having to depict actual fascism onscreen.

this was a smart choice, because fascism is an incredibly hard thing to define clearly, much less defining it clearly and also getting through all of the other worldbuilding star wars had to get through in order to be understandable to anyone. the famous opening crawl, actually, was a result of lucas struggling to both have a coherent film and slam a lot of worldbuilding into a film people otherwise weren't going to understand - lucas showed the cut of episode three to (iirc) spielberg, who essentially was like, what the fuck is happening? the crawl itself exists because the OT had to do a lot with very little time, and so, because the OT is your introduction to star wars, it is a simple hero's journey, with one notable twist. it doesn't try to be anything else and it doesn't need to be.

the PT is different. people at this point know the universe of star wars, and they know how these movies end. there's been other writers hacking away at the GFFA for years, and star wars has a dedicated fanbase of people who pick over the films like vultures - it's not some movie attempting to be a success, it is a smash fucking hit, a runaway train of success that has made lucas enough money that he can do whatever he wants even if everyone around him fucking hates it. (and everyone did. studio executives very hilariously told lucas that he was going to kill star wars with nine year old darth vader.) the PT has the time and the investment to be different, and to stretch further, than the OT ever did. and in his glee, i do think lucas bit off more than he could chew, because he introduced audiences to an enormous galaxy, a wildly complicated takeover scheme, the romance on which all the films depend on, and the moral decay of the one character all six films have in common, and jesus christ there was no way in fucking sam hell that he was going to deliver something satisfying on every front.

throughout the PT you can see the bones of points lucas was trying to make, and the skeleton is there, it's just also joined by nine other half-complete skeletons; each find is individually interesting but the payoff is either buried in scripts, deleted scenes, or was forced to be dropped, like jar jar. jar jar originally had a subplot in AOTC that touched on the ways he was forced to conform once arriving on coruscant, forgoing his racist and grating speech pattern from TPM for an upper-cut lightly posh way of speaking, that's common to all of the characters from coruscant and is reminiscent of the vaguely british accents of a lot of the characters that represent the empire. i'm not saying that subplot would have been executed well, and it's good for my sanity that it was cut, but i am saying that lucas had intended to weave in another thread about how the republic expects everyone to conform to a set normal long before the empire even comes to power, in another of lucas' many attempts to convey; the republic is becoming the empire without palpatine's input. palpatine seizes an opportunity; he doesn't create one.

this is undercut by how (extremely) convoluted the plot to create the clone wars becomes in AOTC, which is a film that tries its best to set up the political drama of the era but ultimately kind of fails. i mean, even among dedicated star wars fans, there's really really little discussion about the segment of the opening crawl that specifies that jedi are run ragged trying to mediate between planets and the republic before everything boils over to war, which, like, i'd consider that pretty necessary context for every choice made in AOTC, but it's largely ignored even by the vultures. so a lot of what AOTC tries to do in regards to developing the republic further as the failed state that it is - because TPM introduces us to a state that's in complete fucking failure - ends up being shunted off on ROTS, which is a movie that already had an enormous amount to do and little time to accomplish it, and this makes certain bits of ROTS fucking fascinating and there will never be any delivery on any of it because there's no more star wars. (there is no disney in ba sing se. there is no disney in ba sing se. there is n)

like, just to lead you through a Thought Diagram of how insane some of the underexplored elements of ROTS are:

palpatine has taken over the government before the movie fucking starts. you start this film without a hope of winning. lucas absolutely never wanted anyone to believe the republic was a force for good, because every film opens with it in an evolving state of failure - in TPM, it is powerless to stop a corporation from invading an entire planet and rounding up its population into labor camps to exploit their labor to collect a debt, which is before palpatine does anything more than fuck around as one senator among thousands. palpatine isn't shown to manipulate The Entire Republic. the system itself is already broken, and he does nothing that isn't perfectly legal within the system. in AOTC, the film begins with the galaxy - once again - on the precipice of a civil war, and the ending battle of AOTC on geonosis is actually really chilling, because what starts as an arena duel melts seamlessly into full scale war without anyone stopping it. and in fact, by the end of the film, everyone involved continues to escalate. when ROTS opens, you open with the republic's leader captured and chained - the republic has nearly essentially lost. lucas tied the brokenness of the republic, and its complete failure to be successful at anything, to the plot as integral to its ability to move forward in the way that it does - you are never supposed to want to fight for the republic. that's fucking fascinating.

so all of the characters are trapped in the eternal bell jar of being motivated to protect a fundamentally broken system. not only are their motivations futile to us, who know how this story ends, their motivations are futile within the GFFA itself, because the republic isn't salvageable. it is never successful at being a state. it is never successful at being government. ROTS becomes the film where everyone looks around and finally sees the bell jar, and panics; the frog has finally, finally, finally noticed that the water is boiling. almost all of the characters are then tasked with reacting to the reality of the bell jar; padme, seeing the republic is broken, wants to tape over the cracks with the loyalist committee. the jedi council actively discusses a military coup. anakin, perhaps the guy with the shittiest response ever to realizing the water is boiling, decides this is the same water he's been in all his life so it can't be wrong, and not only does he love the bell jar he is trapped in, he'll slaughter any perceived threats to it.

you can see evidence of the above scattered everywhere through the film. padme pensively asking anakin if the republic has become the very thing they were fighting against, anakin's horror at her disloyalty; the council, as mentioned, discussing taking over the fucking senate, which is an insane thing no one ever talks about; palpatine's classic I AM THE SENATE (note: he was, in fact, the senate); and the famous, "this is how liberty dies." everyone fucking applauded, because most people lie dead center between padme and anakin - they like the bell jar because it feels safe, even though they probably wouldn't slaughter small children to protect it.

you are never, ever supposed to believe the republic is a Good Institution that's Worth Saving, because it is never shown as anything other than a failure. the one character, the singular character in all of the PT who has seen the bell jar from the start, is palpatine, who is the guy who uses it to climb to the very top of centralized power in the GFFA.

i struggle to get into most depictions because a lot of them depict a leia that relies on the weaknesses of her character, rather than the strengths; carrie fisher had a really damning criticism of how lucas wrote leia, where she says that, you know, leia's written to be the ultimate female badass, who is worthy and strong specifically because she takes no shit, but any deeper meaning is far from present. by the time of ROTJ, when she's going to presented as han's final love interest, leia has to be sufficiently separated from her stereotypically masculine traits - her clothes come off to remind you that she has sex appeal, her hair comes down to symbolize that she's unwinding and becoming more feminine and thusly less of the abrasive, bull-headed leia from the first two films.

there are a myriad of ways that people deal with the inherent misogyny of leia's writing, but the most popular one is to double down on that take-no-shit leia, who mouths off through ANH and ESB, as if the gestalt of her personality has to be this abrasiveness. and, like, i appreciate that, and being generally kind of an asshole is absolutely a cornerstone of leia's personality in the films; her first words to the guy here to rescue her are, "lmao, fucking manlet," and she tells tarkin he smells like ass and she calls han some variation of stupid about forty times a minute, and then calls chewbacca a "walking carpet." granted, leia's in pretty extreme circumstances - captured, tortured, and then subjected to the loss of alderaan all at once - but ESB kind of shows you that the more leia cares about someone or something, the more generally unbearable her personality becomes, the one exception being luke. it's really significant that the will-they-won't-they dynamic she has with han is all about leia caving and admitting that she has feelings for han - partially this is inherent misogyny, but as it is the text, i go for the interpretation that leia's abrasiveness and raging bitchmode attitudes are all about protecting her vulnerabilities, and that emotional intimacy intimidates her.

there are exceptions to this rule, naturally, and those exceptions prove that leia is way more compassionate than people really give her credit for. the way she cares for luke in ANH despite having lost not only her whole family but her whole planet is nothing short of awe-inspiring, that maybe she's just had the absolute worst handful of days in her life but her first instinct is to pick up someone else's pieces is nothing less than one of the most tender acts of kindness in the entire saga. the way she's gentle with luke after he loses a hand to vader in ESB, the way she holds him and wraps a blanket around him and resolves to get them the hell out of there, the way she says, "someone who loves you," to han in ROTJ, even the way she's really quite kind and playful with the ewoks in ROTJ, all of that speaks of someone who isn't an inch less compassionate than luke is, the saga just happens to not be about her going before the emperor.

the idea that leia's personality is solely cold as ice just isn't borne out by the way she acts in the films; she's not inherently angry, she's masking. her anger isn't a lack of compassion, but an overabundance of it that she seeks to hide. and a lot of the theories about how she might relate to vader as her biological father tend to rely more on the idea that leia's in some form inherently vengeful, when it's never indicated in the OT that she has any kind of vengeful tendencies; she has just tendencies. she strangles jabba with her own chains and it's the ultimate comeuppance for the crimes against sentient lives jabba has wrought. when she snipes at vader in ANH, all she says is the absolute, unbroken truth - that more people are going to turn to the rebellion the harder the empire tries to keep them in line.

!!!!!

This is great and 100% accurate. It was incredibly satisfying to see a take on Leia that doesn't reduce her down to one dimension of her personality that is pretty clearly about staving off vulnerability (and not something she always does, as seen in nearly all her interactions with Luke), and that doesn't mischaracterize her ideological commitment to justice and revolution as Dark Side-y vindictiveness.

It’s understandable that this would be a horrifying possibility to Luke. He probably loves Leia more than anyone else in the galaxy (Anakin’s “especially for … sister” suggests it) and he has the dreadful example of Anakin himself to illustrate how the Dark Side affects people.

At the same time, the idea that Anakin would be able to turn Leia to the Dark Side is IMO kind of ludicrous. I mean, as if she’d listen to anything he has to say! And I doubt he could even manipulate her all that effectively. When you think about it, this is actually a pretty toothless threat. But Luke is so sensitive to it that he loses his mind and flies into a violent rage, hovering right on the edge of fully turning to the Dark Side himself as he rushes at Anakin.

A gift for my dear friend, Sophie 💛