I don't often like to cross-post on more than one blog, but I'll do it this time, because this kind of straddles the topics of the legacy Dark Heritage blog (this one) and my more focused Dark Fantasy X blog. Anyhoo, on to the content. Arguably, it fits better here, but for various reasons which are probably apparent, I did it there and I think it needs to be there too:
This is going to be a little bit roundabout, but let me set some context for an idea I've had that would alter a major guiding principle of Space Opera X and change a lot about how I see the setting, and therefore how it gets presented. Before I get to the punchline, though, I'll need to spend some time winding the thing up. Also, here's a video of Tim Kask, the first employee of TSR back in the 70s, talking about life at TSR and in D&D in the first few years of its existence. Not only is this an interesting little video in its own right, but it'll become relevant down below. Watch it, and log away what Tim says.
It's no secret that George Lucas was a big fan of Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, and that in his earliest drafts, the Jedi order resembled the samurai of movies like Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Seven Samurai much more than they eventually later did. Although echoes of this samurai past still stick with them. Originally Jedi weren't superheroes at all, and there isn't much—if any—hint of mystical super powers that they had, at least in the earliest versions of the scripts. They were just honor-bound warrior clans or organizations, and the Jedi and Sith were rivals here. The original Sith warrior was actually not Darth Vader in these early drafts, but Valorum, a Sith Knight who is demoted for some failure and eventually joins the rebels. Valorum is later renamed Dodona, and Espaa Valorum is later the head of the Empire, or at least the Sith clan. In the Star Wars graphic novel by Dark Horse based on these early versions of the script, Valorum is certainly a villain, but he's a relatively honorable one, who's more interested in dueling honorably with Starkiller (the early version of Luke Skywalker) then he is on advancing what he sees as grasping and puerile goals of the Imperial bureaucracy.
It's also worth noting that there was a lot less difference between the Jedi, the Sith and everyone else. There's concept art by MacQuarrie showing stormtroopers with lightsabers (and shields!), as well as the original concept painting for Darth Vader which shows him sporting a blaster pistol on his leg; as much like a black hat gunfighter from a Western movie as like a samurai or mystic warrior.
By the time we get to the novelization and the movie as presented in theaters, both the Jedi and the Sith had undergone a major change. The lightsaber becomes their signature weapon, that nobody else uses. Belief in the Force is an "ancient religion" that most people are skeptical of, even when they know what Darth Vader can do, for instance. Obiwan becomes, by necessity of George Lucas' idea to modify his plot to conform to his interpretation of Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey*" plot arc, a wizardly mentor figure, so he has to have some magical powers. It's worth noting that in the first movie especially, but in the original trilogy overall, these magical powers are much more subtle and modest then they later end up being.
But this was a major change to the setting, to the nature of both the Jedi and the Sith, and to the idea that it faithfully represents the samurai ethos at all anymore. The Jedi and Sith as rival samurai clans idea never really recovers, they neither really resemble samurai all that much anymore. For that matter, the plot doesn't resemble the samurai movies much anymore either. When people tell you that Star Wars is basically a remake of The Hidden Fortress, that's now a reliable tell that they're midwits (at best) parroting something that they've heard in an attempt to sound smart and name-drop, but that they don't actually understand what they're claiming at all. Star Wars has very little resemblance to The Hidden Fortress; it's more like after a lengthy introduction, a remake of Where Eagles Dare spliced to a remake of 633 Squadron. But that's stretching it. It's not a remake of anything, just because it borrows some sequences and plot points.
While we're treated to an escalation of Force superpowers in the next two movies, that's in an attempt to raise the stakes. Darth Vader throwing things at Luke with the Force while swordfighting is supposed to be impressive because we didn't imagine that that could be done. Same with Yoda pulling up an X-wing out of the pond. Later, when the Emperor shows remarkable precognitive powers (although fallible ones, obviously) as well as shooting lightning out of his hands, that's supposed to shock us (no pun intended) because, again, we had no idea that something like that could be done. The Force superpowers remain relatively modest throughout the original trilogy, and those we see using the force in these remarkable ways are (other than Luke himself) presented as true prodigies of force power anyway; much greater than the run-of-the-mill Jedi or Sith would have been. Although that presentation is a bit implicit rather than explicit.
Unfortunately, then George Lucas made another major change to Jedi between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel trilogy, and turned them overtly into superheroes. It's not just the Force, but the lightsabers are escalated immediately. Right off the bat, we're told that lightsabers can now cut through thick blast doors. Funny; I don't remember Darth Vader thinking of doing that when Luke and Co. were escaping the Death Star and he was cut off from them by a blast door. Dooku throws around lightning like its throwing a football in the backyard, Yoda doesn't just strain, struggle and pull an X-wing out of the swamp, he rather casually catches a falling cavern ceiling and throws it aside to save Obiwan and Anakin's life. Even within the prequels we see this escalation; when Obiwan and Qui-Gonn are stopped by destroyer droids in the first sequence of Phantom Menace, we later see Jedi and even clone troopers treating destroyers as if—in the immortal words of Ryan George's Pitch Meetings—they're super easy; barely an inconvenience. If the prequels weren't bad enough—and they were—then other media from this same era is even worse. The Starkiller character from the Force Unleashed video games raises his hands, uses the force, and pulls a freakin' Star Destroyer out of space and crashes it to the surface of the planet he's on.
Somewhere around here, it occurred to me that Star Wars had become an overtly superhero story, even though people like Dave Filoni and others in featurettes and interviews explicitly denied it. The Jedi and the Sith were like the X-men or the Avengers; completely disconnected from normal people altogether. They also developed a bit of the Superman problem, i.e., the only kinds of stories you can tell about Superman are ones where his dedication to his ideals are tested, because those ideals conflict with him using his deus ex machina powers to easily and handily solve literally every problem that ever comes his way. Watching some of the episodes of The Clone Wars which was the follow-up media to the prequel movies themselves, it occurred to me that most of them were really boring, because the Jedi never even struggled to overcome all of the challenges thrown at them. There were no real stakes anymore; they were just going through the motions of making action sequences. Using your lightsaber to fight off enemies is supposed to be cool, but they had all of the excitement of the Jedi using a lightbroom to clean up their rooms.
When I created my own Star Wars Revisited stuff for homebrew RPG use, which later lost the Star Wars IP connotation specifically and became Ad Astra and then Space Opera X, my analogs to the Jedi and Sith were always supposed to be more like the original trilogy version, and I actually made that explicitly clearly stated. The rest of the characters were equally competent swashbuckling heroes; if the Jedi had modest magical powers, the others were still Batman and Captain America or whatever and could stand toe to toe with them even without magical powers. I wanted to seriously de-escalate the power creep of the Jedi. Which wasn't really so much of a creep as it was an abrupt shift during the prequel era.
But now comes the time to think about what Tim Kask said about Gary Gygax and what he thought. Remember that from the little video up above? Star Wars as a high concept world-buildling episode could be seen as a three-legged stool. One leg was space opera, one leg was superhero stories, and the other leg was high fantasy. The setting superficially resembled space opera and takes place in space, but once you get rid of the superficial trappings, it's a combination of Old West American frontier and Medievalism, the plots are very high fantasy, and the characters have superpowers like the Justice League or the Avengers. Well, maybe Justice League is a bit much, but like the X-men at least.
But what if Space Opera X were more like a three-legged stool of space opera, the Old West, and sword & sorcery of the kind that Gary Gygax claimed he was modeling D&D on? Specifically the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber kind, who are the two most iconic authors in the genre? And like with Gary Gygax, who failed to really understand why anyone would want to play a wizard or an elf when you could play a more down-to-earth heroic figure, what if the Jedi and Sith were treated much more like the sorcerers of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber than like actual protagonists? In Howard, they're almost always villainous. Leiber has friendlier sorcerers; the Gray Mouser actually apprentices under one briefly and has a few modest magical tricks up his sleeve from time to time, and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes tend to be sponsors and patrons of the two main characters. Although they're weird. They're inhuman, and bizarre, and inscrutable. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never really trust them, because they can never understand them.
I don't know that that changes the way the game would work, at all. In fact, I don't see any reason why it should. But it is a major change to the worldbuilding side, if my Knights and Warlocks are much more rare, and much more inscrutable, and are usually played more like plot devices than like characters. Heck, there may well be something about them that specifically makes them go insane over time, or at least become trans-human creeps. While Star Wars has gradually become the story of Jedi and Sith, with everyone else kind of falling into the background (even The Mandalorian and its sad Boba Fett spin-off are not immune from this, although they should be from a structural standpoint. I think the writers just can't help making it all about the Jedi and Sith) Space Opera X, on the other hand, would specifically be about swashbuckling "normal" people, with the magic-users being relegated to more of a plot-devicey role most of the time.
* I'm not really very impressed with Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" and I see the name-dropping of it as a red flag that I'm dealing with a midwit who greatly overestimates his own intelligence. The plot arc and the archetypal characters are not actually nearly as ubiquitous as its adherents claim, and they often struggle to name anything other than Star Wars itself that really fits it very well. They're certainly common, but that's a far cry from universal, and they often appear without the rest of the "Hero's Journey" package, which defeats the purpose of the the model. I also think that the plot outline of "The Hero's Journey" is so reduced to banality that it says very little to point out obvious similarities that it posits. Mostly, Joseph Campbell is a tool for the self-important to flatter themselves that they are intelligent and academic without them actually having to be intelligent or academic, or even to know very much about what they're talking about. If you want to work in this same space but actually read someone who's said something more interesting, then check out the work of Georges Dumezil. It's still a just-so story, but it's fundamentally a much more serious and interesting just-so story than the one Campbell has pushed on us.
It's also interesting that those very interested in showing how academic they are by referring to Campbell and the monomyth are completely unaware that the monomyth is very much out of favor and has been for decades in the field of academic comparative mythology.
2006 Northrup, Leslie: Mainstream scholarship of comparative mythology since Campbell has moved away from "highly general and universal" categories in general.
1998 Constantino: "It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor." [ed. Pun intended, I presume.]
1999 Ellwood, Robert: "A tendency to think in generic terms of people, races... is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking."
1990 Crespi: "... unsatisfying from a social science perspective. Campbell's analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the very meanings supposed to be embedded in the 'hero.'"
1984 Dundes, Alan: "Like most universalists, he is content to merely assert universality rather than bother to document it. […] If Campbell's generalizations about myth are not substantiated, why should students consider his work?"
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