Star Wars and Old Republic character notes

I made an off-hand reference in my previous post that I actually thought about a bit more since I made it. Looking at the original trilogy, Luke is the protagonist of the series overall, of course. Han is the deuteragonist. And Leia is the love interest, although there was a curious diversion where she became Han's love interest and Luke had to become a celibate monk or something. Which then later evolved into actually Leia was his sister all along. If you read The Secret History of Star Wars which examines older drafts of the scrips and the comments of the creators and actors, it becomes very obvious that those were later developments, though—the original plan for the script was much more straightforward. When Leia appeared to be the love interest in the original Star Wars, that's because she was. When Ben Kenobi told Luke that Darth Vader killed his father, that's because that was the original plan. Even in the early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back we see Luke's father make a brief appearance as a force ghost or voice or something. The change of Leia to Luke's sister wasn't done until the drafting stage of Return of the Jedi where Lucas felt that he had to tie up the loose end that he'd created perhaps foolishly by making an offhand reference to Luke not being the last hope so that there was more tension; the audience was meant to think that if Luke went to go fight Vader that he didn't necessarily have bulletproof plot armor. 

Of course, it had the additional benefit of giving another subconscious reason for why Leia was diverted in her role from Luke's love interest to being Han's love interest. In my opinion, nobody really needed this; I think subconsciously everyone got it anyway. Although Luke was the protagonist and Han the deuteragonist, everyone also understood implicitly that Han was an alpha and Luke was considerably less so. In spite of his non-protagonist role, Han was the one that men identified with or wanted to be because of his character (this was maybe less true for younger boys) as well as the member of the pair that women were more attracted to. And part of that had to do with how the script and later casting and acting played out in the first movie. I seriously doubt that it ever occurred to Lucas to make Leia shift her love interest focus from Luke to Han until after the first movie was finished, at which point it seemed maybe a bit more obvious. In fact, obviously it didn't; when Lucas had Alan Dean Foster write up a sequel for Star Wars, this shift hadn't happened. This is Splinter of the Mind's Eye which was also meant to be a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in the event that it didn't make enough money to merit a big budget sequel, which is the outcome that Lucas expected. And in that book, Leia is quite clearly still Luke's love interest; Han only gets a brief offhand mention, and Luke and Leia have all kinds of flirty moments with each other. Although Foster had a lot of leeway in terms of what kind of plot he developed, he did work closely with Lucas, and Lucas' only input to the plot outline was to remove a space dogfight which would have been effects heavy and therefore expensive to film. Other than that, Mind's Eye is the "truest" sequel to Star Wars in some ways; i.e., the sequel that held most closely to the spirit of the first movie, before Lucas got more ambitious and serious and "mythic" as the critics love to say in Empire.

In any case, I've now made sixteen characters for Old Republic, mostly so I can get the free Shae Vizsla companion for all of them. After creating the characters, I had to watch the opening cut-scene, close out the tutorials (why isn't the game smart enough to recognize that if this isn't my first character on the account, I obviously don't need the tutorials again!?) and go find the mailbox right outside of the opening cut scene location so I can open my mail, which is how ou unlock Vizsla. As well as the two pilot outfits, the old anniversary fireworks and a few other perks for new players and subscribers, etc. as it happens. And then after I did that, I logged out of that character, and decided that I'm going to be done with them until I open them back up.

I started off making eight characters. As I mentioned in my earlier post, which talked about my preferences for space opera protagonist, deuteragonist and love interest characteristics, all of these eight characters are human males. In fact, they all use the same body type and I think I even picked the same face style for all of them. This isn't meant to imply that I made the characters all look the same (although I did have at least a bit of that idea in mind) because they don't. I have different shades of skin tone from pretty darkly tanned with sunburned cheeks on my bounty hunter to pretty pale on my two Sith characters. The bounty hunter, which of course I inherited from my free to play days, has light blue eyes and my agent has green eyes; the others all have either the silver-chrome or the wolf-eyes gold colors, which I unlocked via cartel coins. And they have a variety of hair styles and colors from nearly jet black to silver-white, although some kind of brownish or blondish is the most common. My trooper even has gray hair, although in the lighting in which I picked it, I thought it looked more like a grizzly brown, so that was kind of an accident. But I think I'm going to keep it anyway. Makes the guy look older and more experienced (which is funny because in the cut scene, he's called "kid" by the other guy doing the talking; Gearbox or whatever his name was. This one was my trooper.)

But then I made eight additional characters, which I may or may not get around to playing through with. They are all women, so I can get the other dialogue actor's performance, and they are all non-humans so I can more broadly unlock the races if I ever come back. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but the last one had to be a cyborg because I was out of more alien choices to pick from. I didn't spend the cartel money to unlock the Kit Fisto race; nautolan, or whatever they're called, or the cathar or the togruta. Not only do I not want to spend real money on those options, but I don't really love any of them anyway. Again, I can't remember exactly how I did it, and I may not even ever play them anyway, but I think I have my two sith are the Darth Maul style zabrak and a trueblood, although I can't remember which is which, and my bounty hunter is chiss and my agent a rattatak. She almost looks like she could be Kaliyo's sister, which may influence how I play her, if I ever do. My two jedi are a Eeth Koth style zabrak and a miraluka although again, I can't remember for sure which is which, and my smuggler is a miralian and my trooper a cyborg.

Because each story class has two variants, which are "repeated" with cosmetic difference across factions, I was able to spread those out as well a bit. With my first pass, with one exception (the vanguard trooper variant) I avoided any of the class options that had healing options with my male characters, because that's a multiplayer option that I set my companion to do passively otherwise, while I focus on DPS-style, mostly. But with the second wave of girl alien characters, I finally went ahead and have the other variant on all of the ones I picked. If nothing else, the weapon choice will look different for them.