When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot of other things.
Of Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Star Wars is the greatest science fiction series of all time. It works best, and is at its greatest, when it adheres to a certain set of core rules.
I’m not talking about the Jedi rules against falling in love here. It’s just an organizational mandate. I’m talking about basic laws that make the fictional Star Wars universe work.
That’s what separates a large, enduring fictional universe like Star Wars from a flash in the pan, burning bright and disappearing. These rules make Star Wars feel like Star Wars instead of some other fictitious science fiction universe. Star Trek, for example, has its own set of very different rules.
These are the rules of Star Wars.
Rule One: The space is small
The space is small. In some science fiction series there are great distances to cover and long periods of time to get around. In Star Wars, you can reach anywhere in the galaxy with a relatively short jump through hyperspace.
There are places with names that make them seem far away, like The Outer Rim, but even those places are easily accessible by anyone with a flying piece of junk and a semi-operable hyperdrive. It’s not bad to write. It’s part of the style and tone of the Star Wars universe, which is built around adventure and excitement, not exploration and introspection.
When you enter the Star Wars universe, you are on a fast-paced, exciting adventure. No, on a slow journey through infinity. That’s something Star Wars should never deviate from.
Rule Two: Better left unsaid
Star Wars works best when the people and places in it just exist. We always jump into an embodied universe where, much like in our daily lives, people don’t spend much time sitting around thinking about why or how their world works. Not only does it make this universe feel more real, but it also makes Star Wars more fun.
We are free to go on adventures Han Solo without worrying about the economics of smuggling. He probably knows everything about how it works to be able to do his job, but we don’t need that, and that’s good enough.
We really didn’t need to know how the Force works either, and trying to tell us took a lot of the fun out of it and held Star Wars back. Writers unable to think of better plots often resort to explaining rather than doing, and when it comes to Star Wars, that almost never works.
Star Wars is a world that is. The people who live there know how it works, and since we’re only looking in on them from the outside, we don’t. That’s good.
Rule Three: Technology and magic are the same thing
It may seem like Star Wars is about the collision between the invisible world of the Force and the technological world of the Empire, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both are just different forms of magic.
When you see a Jedi facing off against a stormtrooper with a blaster, it should and usually does feel like two wizards with different philosophies and abilities meeting in a magical showdown. The technology in Star Wars is even less well explained than The Force. We don’t know how any of them work, just that they do.
Ships appear to be cobbled together by random bits of sheet metal, wires and determined lust. The Force is something that works if you want it hard enough.
To get lost in the explanations of how these things work is a waste of time. All that matters is that they are visually and tonally consistent.
Powers should have a certain look and feel and a certain amount of things they can do. Blasting bolts must always have a similar appearance and way of working. Lightsaber skills should fit within a certain spectrum of reality. Spaceship should all have similar basic components such as a hyperdrive, a cockpit or bridge, and a sublight engine.
It’s important to be consistent with how your magic works. Investigating how it works is not, and should be avoided.
Rule Four: People are everywhere and from nowhere
In Star Wars, every species has a home planet. Wookiees come from Kashyyk. Gunguns live on Naboo. Mon Calamari comes from Mon Cal.
Every species has a home. All species except the most common.
People are everywhere and from nowhere. There is no human planet. There are people who live on planets, and in some cases they have even squatted on other species’ planets, as happened on Naboo.
The Mandalorians are from Mandalore… but not originally. It’s just another planet that people settled on and then started calling themselves something else.
Humans have no home planet, and their origins are never explored in Star Wars. It’s for the best. It’s not interesting, and the franchise doesn’t need that kind of detail. These approaches are best left to larger thinking sci-fi such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Rule Five: Species don’t matter
While most people living in the Star Wars universe tend to look human, it doesn’t really matter. No one in Star Wars seems to care if the creature facing them is a human or a thing with tentacles and giant crab claws. Nobody cares.
Species rarely come up, unless say there’s a situation where it might be beneficial to have giant crab claws. Then someone will probably say: Hello! Lucky us! You have giant crab claws that you can use!
Most people can’t understand a word Wookiees say, but aside from realizing they’re big and have a temper, they’re still treated pretty much like everyone else. If the Wookiees are punished, as they were by the Empire, it’s not because they’re Wookiees but because they ripped off a bunch of stormtroopers’ arms.
Even the Empire, which seems to be a mostly human-based organization, doesn’t stick to this as strictly as a rule. Their troops are happy to come along Grand Admiral Thrawn and he is blue. The Empire thrives on all beings willing to work for the Empire. The Rebels are ready to recruit anyone who hates the Imperials.
What skin color you have or, oh my, isn’t your neck weirdly long, doesn’t come up much. When it does come up, it’s usually more of an acknowledgment of fact rather than any kind of xenophobic bias.
Rule Six: Droids are pets
In the Star Wars universe, species don’t matter, but biological or not. Any lack of bias and discrimination applied to creatures based on their species is bottled up and heaped on droids, who, while seemingly intelligent, are rarely treated better than a used toaster.
To be fair, most droids don’t seem to mind this, and perhaps that fact alone is enough to justify their treatment. That’s what Star Wars droids were made for. They like what they are, and so they are happy to be treated as equipment. It is satisfactory.
It’s also worth noting that not all droids are sentient. The little rolling box that sweeps the floors of a Star Destroyer probably isn’t much smarter than a Roomba. Droid intelligence exists on a spectrum, with some, like R2 units, equaling a biological sentient and others varying shades below that.
Are protocol droids sentient? The answer is that it depends.
Droids are often sentient and are still treated as slaves and must always be. The Star Wars universe only works as long as droids are second-class inhabitants of it, and it all falls apart as soon as they aren’t.
The franchise has dabbled here and there with the concept of droid rights, but it shouldn’t. The last thing we need is to rephrase Princess Leia as a slave owner.
If droids were somehow freed, the entire galaxy would probably starve without droids to do most of the work. No one wants a TV show about the great Star Wars droid famine. Droids should always be portrayed as loyal pets, and there should be no deeper exploration of that.
Rule Seven: Everyone can change
People often talk about Star Wars in terms of light and dark, as if it’s a franchise about pure good guys fighting pure evil. But it’s never been about that.
From the beginning, Star Wars has been about the moral conflict within all of us. Vader did terrible things, but in the end he was redeemed because he was never completely evil; there was always good in him somewhere.
Anakin did some good things, but later in life he took a turn for the worse and started murdering toddlers. Han Solo was a villain, a villain, a criminal and also a damn nice guy once you got to know him.
Most of the franchise’s bad guys also have the ability for good, and most of their good guys have the same ability for evil. It is that duality that makes them interesting.
Rule Eight: A true villain
The true villain of Star Wars, the only consistent face of evil across the franchise, has not been, and should never be, Palpatine or The Dark Side of the Force. The real villain in Star Wars is government bureaucracy.
The Death Star, in the first film, was the ultimate representative of that. The final form of what happens when a large number of bureaucrats take the wealth from those under their control and use it to construct massive, impractical, totally flawed weapons of war. When that didn’t work, the same inflexible, massively incompetent bureaucratic structure, run by Imperial DMV workers who only care about keeping their jobs so they can’t admit they were wrong, turned around and did the same thing again.
That’s what made Luke Skywalker’s journey so exciting. He was not fighting a person, he was fighting an oppressive system of corrupt bureaucratic oppression. The same that we are all tortured by when we have to go down and get new license plates for our truck. The same that we are plagued with when filling out forms for the IRS.
Luke fought a legion of lazy public school teachers and inspectors for violation of rules on behalf of all normal people who want to be left the hell alone.
The best of the latest The Star Wars series is Andorand Andor, is the best new Star Wars franchise, especially because it makes the bloated bureaucracy the show’s sole villain. Andor is about guys in booths and meetings planning to destroy innocents. They don’t do it because they’re evil but because that’s how they get paid.
Star Wars should only have one villain. It is not Palpatine and never has been. The true villain in Star Wars is the massive bureaucracy that Palpatine represents.
Using the 8 rules of Star Wars
Those are the eight most important ground rules for the Star Wars franchise. They aren’t always followed perfectly, but Star Wars makes an effort to stick to them when it works.
When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot of other things.
Future Star Wars writers take note and begin creating with these 8 rules as a compass that points the way to greater creativity in a galaxy far, far away, not an obstacle to it.
