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.
it was about just some guy. you start in a bar fight having been set up. you're unprepared for most things thrown at you, sure, you've got combat experience from being a mercenary and street smarts, but just like the present, even an honest criminal leads a tense life. especially the honest criminals.
and then he learns his dad was a Jedi and gets his light saber. the game becomes much easier for the player, and much more fraught for the character. he doesn't feel Jedi, he has no training, and his litmus for moral good/bad is "honest criminal" to "war criminal" not "good" and "bad".
he learns the Valley of the Jedi, a badly named place of great power, exists and people are hunting it, from a recording he decodes with his dad's droid, after people ransacked the place. he also learns that he's perhaps the only person outside those involved to know there's a conspiracy to bring back the Empire, the Imperial Remnant (it was ahead of it's time).
then he gives up his force powers, after killing the sith trying to use the Valley to produce super soldiers, sparing the last one. and having seen what they made him do, he gives up the lightsaber, gives up (i think?) his force powers to the valley, and in JK2, goes to do anti-fascist OSINT, spying, and tactical strikes to slow the remnant threat. fame isn't for him, and there's work to be done. He just wants to be some guy, doing the good work and keeping his head down otherwise. no Grand Game for him.
he has to get his force powers back once it's clear the remnant are hunting Jedi, but he doesn't want to, he's forced to. no one believes the full picture but him and his pilot. and even if they did, there's no time. it's the sort of thing where one single jedi willing to actually use a gun sometimes is better than 60 warships.
so you're taking on the preposterous, showy nazi super weapon with nothing but the weapons they drop, your FUCKING LASER SWORD, and your Force Powers of amazing luck, speed, and precognition (quick save and quick load). again, when he gets the chance, he stops being a jedi as much as he can. there was a need, he used a tool. job done, time to clock out. being a hero when it's unnecessary exists only for power and fame, and both lead to the dark.
Somewhere inbetween, he meets Luke and eventually trains under him, but luke isn't the star. he's just some tired headmaster who's seen war, and is teaching teachings he understands to be too rigid even for him, but too important not to teach. because if they weren't too rigid for him, he would have gone further towards what amount toatrocities of convenience instead of doing the hard diplomacy or other work required to find another way out.
but Kyle Katarn? Kyle "Jedi Knight Dark Forces II I delivered the deathstar plans not that other guy" Katarn? he's just some guy who keeps having old debts come due. Saved the universe twice. Fames only there for people who do things others saw, not what they prevented. And anyway, there's work to be done. People forgot about him so much that when they made Rogue One they forgot he delivered the plans to the death star. But it's for the best, big damn heros either die or they stop doing the work.
which is part of why the republic fell in the prequels, which came out after. not that the game is canon or anything, I just think it was the zeitgeist. rigid adherence to doctrine when it's clearly unrealistic, in the star wars (expanded) universe, leads to people causing exactly what they wanted to protect from.
but the heros who didn't want to be heros and didn't embrace it, just did it anyway, tend to be the only ones who don't get corrupted, metaphorically or literally. even of the Jedi, those of them who don't constantly make things worse tend to be the ones most living in the middle. living with people, not living for the people. the prequels are at least half about what happens if you shelter kids from the harsh truths of the things they're a part of and benefit from, while telling them they're Important simply for having been born with something.
It flips the trope on its head, even of the reluctant heros. The westerns that were prolific even when Star Wars (A New Hope) was released had reluctant heros who just wanted to hang up their hat, but the story framed that as a noble thing. In star wars, you're just back to scraping a life together while the people who did none of it go on the speaking circuit making six figures. And that's just seen as the way of things. the frame of narration rarely portrays it as ANYTHING, it just is what it is. it's the detective movie but you've been tracking down and defusing nuclear bombs instead. lying low afterwards just hits different, and the universe, the narrative lens, KNOWS THAT, and half of every book or side story is about showing just how much living in the gray areas society needs to function, is the hardest choice in the world because picking either light or dark is easy -- you're picking status quo, just with different ways of saying the same thing, because rigid arbitrary morality without context is how we got into this mess in the first place.
*ashes e-cigarette into Qi charger-puck* Never really understood why being a Jedi automatically got you aristocratic status on Coruscant, never really thought about it much. But that's pretty fucked up right?
anyway the point I was originally trying to make is that pretty much all star wars after people missed the point of the prequels, but also most media, just stopped doing that. time stopped after the 90s
