i feel like i posted this before but i'm gonna post it again if so because i'm thinking about it again
a thing about star wars to me is that when i was growing up, i saw the trilogy perhaps twice, too young to really comprehend much of it other than "damn that was cool." my parents did not buy videotapes, ever, so if they didn't rent something, I didn't get to see it, and they didn't often choose to see a star war again, so it wasn't until I gave all the movies a watch through in like 2013 that i really processed them.
what they did buy was books however, so what i did have, whenever i wanted, were several of the expanded universe novels (mostly timothy zahn, thank christ; fuck stackpole.)
i read all of them several times, once when I was too young to really understand them, again when i was a bit older, and then again in my mid 20s. i enjoyed the hell out of them every time, despite having only the beginning book from one series, and the middle books from a couple others (until the third time, when I bought the complete series'.)
the end result of this is that, to me, star wars is slow, quiet, contemplative. oh sure, occasionally bad things happen, but- adventure? nah. that's in the past. all that stuff happened before the characters' stories begin. they're mostly just flying around in ships for days at a time thinking wistfully about their families and the years-later knock-on effects of the empire collapsing, the difficulty of replacing it with a functioning government, of avoiding the problems that caused the war to begin with, and the personal effects of being thrust into heroics and then yanked out just as suddenly when the need no longer existed.
luke, han, and to an extend lando wander around the galaxy being recognized as something between heroes, nobility, and cops. chewie has to go deal with old family problems. leia is mostly nailed down at home dealing with running the government. it's tedious shit; i loved it even at age 12 and i wish there was more. i don't want to go into why everything they've done after jedi isn't star wars to me, but even the post-ep1 books really lost the energy that the old ones had, and I cannot imagine anything they've published since 2015 does any better.
there are a number of really interesting scenes in those books, but the one that stuck in my craw the most was:
luke is off on his own, away from his old friends, pursuing leads to investigate some business having to do with the force, I don't remember what. he still has his X-wing - the new republic gifted it to him, the least they could do in return for his service. but as he's leaving a planet, he has to remind himself to keep his speed below however many thousands of kph, because of port authority restrictions.
during ww2, some warplanes had a feature called War Emergency Power, by which they could massively boost their engine output, sometimes by 100%, at the cost of massive mechanical strain. it might blow up your engine, but it was war, you did what you had to - you broke the tiewire and yanked the lever when it was time to get the fuck out, now, consequences be damned.
even when that wasn't engaged, warplane engines probably ate fuel at an unholy rate and went much, much faster than anything civilians had, because they were taking off and landing at purpose-built, cost-no-object airstrips with extremely tight airspace discipline. they could get away with absurd velocities, and they needed to, because every time they took off they had somewhere to be right away.
for the last few years before the book begins, luke was a military officer. this didn't really occur to me when watching the movies; he's just doing things, you don't really think of it within the context of a disciplinary hierarchy. but per the books i think he holds a rank of captain or general or something. i always find this sort of narrative decision fascinating, because a field commission of that magnitude (direct from civilian to one of the highest ranks) means you now have an "officer" who hasn't had a lick of training. is this precedented in reality?
anyway, he's a decorated military commander who just spent years pushing the throttle all the way forward, because why not? he wasn't doing it for fun. but now he isn't the highest authority anymore - he has to answer to someone else. that's what i loved about those books, in a nutshell: they're about after.
all the events of the movies take place during a continuous rolling emergency, and from a legal perspective, the protagonists are at first an army fighting a conventional war, then they're embroiled in the ambiguous legality of a civil war, then they're either terrorists or revolutionaries depending on who's asking, and then they're the legitimate government's military - at what point would they have needed to care about planetary speed limits? you're going to get blasted out of the sky before you get a ticket, and at any given moment, there's somewhere you direly need to be, as quickly as possible, so - punch it!
the whole film narrative takes place during a period of exception, where normal rules and laws don't apply, either because the characters are not part of "polite society," or because they're authorized to use force by that society. then, the war ends.
things stop being black and white, the protagonists no longer have a clear and obvious enemy, who everyone they meet is either in league with (so, fuck their rules) or in opposition to (so, they'll suspend the rules in support of the rebellion.) they aren't on the run from every accepted authority, so they actually have to worry about coming back to a port that knows who they are and keeps records and can make their life really tough if they don't pay their fines. the goalposts have all moved.
luke, han and lando were all moral nothingmasters before they joined the navy, and that's when they stopped living day by day - an emergency stirred them to great change, essentially rebooting their personalities. for all intents and purposes, that war is all they've ever known. now they have to settle "back" into peacetime, a life they've never really had.
han, the career criminal who's now a family man married directly to The Government; luke trying to find a place for himself in a galaxy that, before the war, consisted of a single farmhouse and a shopping mall; lando trying to actually be a legitimate businessman. They Have Problems
there's a lot of ground to cover, and while I might be remembering more of the books being about this stuff as opposed to Swashbuckling High Concept Adventure than they actually were, I could absolutely have devoured a couple dozen more boring-ass, tedious and morose treatises on the privations of existence in Star after the War.
