Star Wars needs new characters, not endlessly recycled ones

Star Wars continues to produce new, profitable merchandise and material. But, strangely enough, the franchise seems to still be in trouble. Disney has been repeatedly able to accomodate its customers over the past five decades.Plans announcedForThe latest moviesIf so,They were unceremoniously cancelledOr just keep themStill, silently backburnered. Disney Plus’ recent Star Wars TV shows keepNew directions promiseFor the franchiseReverseAndMixing messages. Star Wars fans are still passionate about the series.Video games,Novels,ComicsPlease see the following:Animations, but the fandom is splintered, and there’s no clear vision or coherent narrative direction to the franchise as a whole. Everyone seems to desire something new from Star Wars.

So Polygon is gathering some thoughts about the franchise’s future under the loose banner of What We Want From Star Wars. These opinion essays lay out what we love about the Star Wars universe, and where we hope it’ll go in the future… or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

It’s become a cliché at this point to note how much time the Star Wars franchise has spent repeating itself — or, to put it more bluntly, hiding behind the past. The original Star Wars trilogy has such a stranglehold over Star Wars’ collective imagination that it’s been incredibly hard for the franchise to move past it. Since 1983’s Return of the Jedi — Also, it means for nearly 40 years now —Star Wars has spent the majority of its material on the past rather than looking to the future. It fills in the gaps between the original story and the present. Even stories from the past can be moved forward The Return of the Jedi’s ending have often either obsessively imitated the original Star Wars run, or narratively looped back to it, prioritizing old, familiar characters over new ones.

Star Wars’ new characters, however, are the true lifeblood of its series. Lucasfilm’s fixation on prequels like Rogue One Solo: A Star Wars StoryYou can also call it on Building entire series around Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett has proven to be frustrating. Given the scope of the Star Wars setting, it’s clear it could continue endlessly mining the past, resurrecting old characters even after the original actors die or retire. Characters can be reused endlessly through animation and special effects. But it’s long past time for the series to commit to and focus on its newer characters, and take up all the opportunities that approach would offer.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney Plus

After 2019’s Skywalkers are on the RiseStar Wars fans shouldn’t give up hope that the story will be meaningfully moved forward. There will be a sequel trilogy. Rise of the Skywalker wrapped up makes a production out of passing the torch from the original trilogy’s Luke, Leia, and Han to the new generation’s Rey, Finn, and Poe. But “moving the story forward” in this case mostly meant moving it backward, with a depressingly familiar new version of the Empire to fight, a lightly reskinned new version of Luke Skywalker to fight it, and the same old Emperor resurrected to serve as the villain behind it all.

It’s been clear that the Lucasfilm brain trust has struggled to find a new kind of blockbuster-sized, epic adventure story in the space after the Empire’s defeat in The Return of the Jedi. That seems surprising — one of the absolute best things about Star Wars has always been the incredible breadth and depth of its setting, and it seems like there would be a billion big life-or-death dramas going on in every corner of that galaxy, ones that have nothing to do with the Empire or the Sith. But even if Lucasfilm isn’t sure how to tell new stories in the future of the franchise, it’s had plenty of success at bringing in new characters to at least give Star Wars stories a different form and face.

And over and over, when the series pulls away from trying to make new Darth Vaders and new Luke Skywalkers, it’s created whole new waves of fan enthusiasm. Recent example: Mandalorian’s Din Djarin and Grogu. That dynamic duo clearly owe some of their creative DNA to Boba Fett and Yoda, but they have little in common with them, and don’t primarily read as attempts to capitalize on the old characters’ popularity. Din Djarin’s struggle to live up to a code he considers noble and right, even though most of his own people find it bafflingly backward, feels unique among Star Wars screen stories. And Grogu’s endearing alienness and opacity is something the franchise has been lacking for a long time, in its endless run of inhuman creatures that mostly just read exactly like familiar types.

Both of these characters are intriguing because they’re so unusual in the Star Wars setting. They both offer the sense that there’s still a lot left to discover about them, even apart from the question of where their story will take them next. And they’ve both prompted a lot of the widespread cultural engagement that any franchise is looking for. (“Baby Yoda” was an outright phenomenon.)

Lucasfilm Ltd. Photo

It’s the same for many of the fan-favorite characters from the series. Clone WarsMost notably, series Ahsoka Tano and Asajj Ventress — characters designed from the ground up to have their own unique, engaging motives and histories. There’s a clear nostalgic value to characters like Rey, Kylo Ren, and Poe Dameron, who are intended as narrative stand-ins for original-trilogy characters more than they’re intended to drive new stories. Ahsoka and many other favorite animated characters from Star Wars have made it possible to tell more stories, as well as the different points of views they offer.

Arguably, the characters who have most excited and inspired the fandom over the past decades have been the ones that most break from the original trilogy’s familiar story pattern. Grand Admiral Thrawn, first introduced in Timothy Zahn’s 1991 novel Heir to EmpireStar Wars fan were drawn to his distinctiveness as an animated character and made him jump to video games and comics. (He might be coming. MandalorianSoon, too. You can now see new droid characters Rogue One’s snarky reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk), Mandalorian’s assassin-turned-nanny IG-11 (Taika Waititi), and Solo: A Star Wars Story’s toweringly angry droid freedom fighter L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) all earned followings for the way they not only brought humor to their stories, but expanded Star Wars’ understanding of what droids could want and do.

Even cute and underused R2-D2 skinner BB-8 gained a loyal following through the entire sequel trilogy. Despite the fact that BB-8 was loved by many and they wanted to purchase toy versions of him, he lacked the ability to speak or tell a story. Still, while he never got the space to be his own character, the way fans latched onto him highlights the fact that while so many people may enjoy seeing their own nostalgia reflected back at them in Star Wars, they’re also hungry for novelty, for anything they haven’t already seen a hundred times before in the movies and shows.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney Plus

But for a character to really break out as more than just a novelty in Star Wars — or in any long-running franchise, for that matter — someone has to devote the time to telling their story and representing their point of view. Someone has to care about seeing them as story-drivers and story-generators, rather than just casually used and casually discarded accessories to still more stories about the original trilogy’s characters.

That shouldn’t be as much of a barrier as it is. The payoffs seem obvious: more fan engagement and interest, a story universe that can feel like it’s moving forward even if it’s focusing on the past, and stories where the fans don’t already know the ending before the first episode of a show ever airs. Disney may be practical and want to make Star Wars films more accessible. Star Wars fans may love the franchise’s past enough to get excited whenever it brings an old favorite to the fore. But they also love having fresh new things to geek about, whether that’s a Thrawn movie, a big reveal about Baby Yoda’s past, or a whole new character who lets them love Star Wars in a way they never expected before.

Previously:

Star Wars has been better without any new films.
Star Wars needs more alien heroes
Star Wars please, do not forget Tattooine