#sw sequels

[the-stubborn]

i love star wars and this fandom, dont get me wrong, but wtf is up with so many people whitewashing poe dameron in their fanart????

anytime i look at sequel fanart i go 'wait who tf is this guy with light brown hair ive never seen him bef- POE DAMERON????'

[an-old-lady]

Rey and BB8

[thetorturedlover]

Armitage Hux

[dead-cowboy]

May the 4th Be With You 2025

MayThe4thBeWithYou is a low-pressure Star Wars themed fanworks exchange, running from mid-February to May 4th! We're celebrating its tenth-year anniversary for this round 🎉

SCHEDULE

Feb 15 - Feb 28: Nominations - Currently Open! 🔗 Feb 22 - Mar 1: Sign ups Apr 20: Early default deadline Apr 27: Assignments due May 4 00:01 UTC: Works go live May 11 00:01 UTC: Creators revealed (all times are 23:59 UTC unless noted)

You can find the rules on the AO3 Collection, and all updates on the official comm on Dreamwidth. For any question, you can reply to posts on Dreamwidth or email the mods at maythe4thmod(@)gmail.com.

Please help spread the word: the more the merrier!

Tagging @swfandomevents, @thebigbangblogproject, @fanwork-exchange-promos, @faneventshub, and @eventfeed

[tomatette]

Bonus:

[gigi-drxws]

When my time comes around

Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth

No grave can hold my body down

I'll crawl home to her

•

I know this will flop bc i never do sw art and its not why yall probably here but i got comissoned todo this one and i love it sm myself that i just had to share it, i love them sm 🫶🏻

[shyranno]

Happy belated birthday, Kelly Marie Tran! I love you always

Piece done for @forcefatalezine <3

[clqoo]

i got bored

[short-wooloo]

RESTORE THE REPUBLIC!

I really dislike when people suggest that the Republic should not be restored post Rise of Skywalker

Because most of the explanations for what should be there in its place fall into:

"Just the Republic but the name is different"

"No central galactic government" which is just stupid (hello anarchy, wars, and general choas)

Or my "favorite" suggestion, "something more like the un"

Because yknow, the un is a fair, effective, and unbiased body when it comes to preventing war and atrocities or enforcing law

Just ask a Ukrainian!

And here's another thing

While I've personally disagreed with the sentiment, I do understand why people feel the sequels undermined the ot heroes accomplishments in destroying the empire and restoring the Republic

But personally I feel that "bad guys conspired to destroy the works (the new republic) of heroes (who would've thought the bad guys would do such a thing?) But a new generation of heroes mentored and guided by the old defeated the bad guys and restored what the heroes fought for" is still a worth while message

Especially when you compare it to "the bad guys destroyed the heroes work (the New Republic) and it stayed gone even after the bad guys were beaten"

The first can be frustrating, I will admit

But it's better than the second

Because the first still feels like the heroes won in the long run, there were stumbles and troubles along the way, but they won in the end

The second is just depressing, like the villains still got one last laugh despite losing

Fuckin Batman comics joker ass shit is what it is

Also now more than ever we need some goddamn hope, some belief that despite bad times happening and fascists taking power we will triumph in the end

[inquisitor-apologist]

Sorry for Finnpoe posting in 2025 but GOD they were so gay… disney I’ll never forgive you for this one

[artbyblastweave]

I think about Star Wars a lot more than I post about Star Wars, and I've had some free time recently to type up some thoughts on Episode 7 that've been swirling around in my head for a couple of years. There were a few ideas and plot beats, and moments of apparent self-examination in Episode 7 which I thought were fairly compelling, even though they ultimately paid no dividends:

First was Finn’s character concept. “Star Wars as experienced from the perspective of a Stormtrooper undergoing a crisis of faith” is a rich hook; humanizing and giving a face to what's basically the platonic implementation of the faceless mook. Unfortunately, the potency of the arc was undercut by the pre-existing textual ambiguity as to what stormtroopers actually are. Star Wars extended canon has settled on the idea that each trilogy features an entirely novel cohort of white-clad mooks, each with a fundamentally different underlying dynamic. The clones and the First-Order forces are different flavors of slave army; in contrast, the stormtroopers are more frequently portrayed in the expanded universe as military careerists, stormtrooper being a thing you work up to rather than a gig for a fresh conscript. A slave-soldier who defects is a very different character from a military careerist who defects, and they invite different analysis. There's a bait-and-switch going on here, in that Finn gestures in the direction of the familiar OT stormtroopers but can't comment on or examine them because he's actually part of a novel dynamic invented for the new movies. And there's one final nail in the coffin here, signaled by the number of times I've had to invoke the expanded universe so far. When Finn debuted, the racists were of course, legion, but I also ran into a number of people who were sincerely confused as to why they'd recast Temuera Morrison. Going off the seven films that existed at the time, it wasn't unreasonable to read the prequel trilogy as an origin story for where the OT stormtroopers came from. Going only off the nine films that exist now, it still isn't unreasonable! It's muddied from so many different directions by their failure to establish the ground rules in the mainline films before they tried to put on subversive airs about it. I am still irritated by this.

Next up is how Han Solo was written. I actually liked the tack they took with him quite a bit. Because initially, right, his role in the movie is just to be Han Solo. He's back, and he hasn't changed! He's still kicking ass and taking names, he's still the lovable scoundrel you knew and loved from your childhood- and the principle cast members react to his presence with the same reverence the film's trying to invoke in the audience, they've grown up hearing the same stories about him. Except that episode 7, at least, is also very aware of the fact that if Han Solo is still recognizably the same guy thirty years on, it indicates that things have gone totally off the rails for him. We find out that the lovable rogue routine is the result of him backsliding, his happy ending blown up by massive personal tragedy rooted in communicative failures and (implicitly) his parental shortcomings. It feels deliberately in conversation with the nostalgic impulse driving the entire film- here's your childhood hero back just as you remember, here's what that stagnation costs. And it also feels like it's in conversation with what was a fairly common strain of Han Solo Take- the idea that Ep. 6 cuts off at a very convenient point, and that Han and Leia's fly-by-night wartime relationship wouldn't survive the rigors of domesticity. Obviously, that's not the only direction you can take with the character; the old EU basically threaded the needle of keeping Han recognizable without rolling back his character development gains. But it felt like they were actually committing to a direction, a direction that was aware of the space, and not a reflexively deferential and flattering one, which at the time I appreciated! The problem, of course, is that for it to really land, you need to have a really, really strong idea of what actually went down-of what Han's specific shortcomings and failures were. And given the game of ping-pong they proceeded to play with Kylo Ren's characterization, this turned out to be. Less than doable.

Kylo Ren is the third thing about Episode 7 that I liked. His character concept is basically an extended admission by the filmmakers that there's no way to top Vader as an antagonist. Instead, they lean into the opposite direction- they make him underwhelming on purpose. Someone who's chasing Vader's legacy in the same way any post-OT Star Wars villain is going to, pursuing Vader's aesthetic and the associated power without really understanding or undergoing the convoluted web of suffering and dysfunction that produced Vader. It's framed as a genuine twist that there's nothing particularly wrong with his face under that helmet. Whatever it takes to be Vader, he doesn't have it, and he knows that he doesn't have it, and the pursuit of it drives him to greater and greater acts of cartoonish villainy. The failure to one-up Vader is offloaded to the character instead of the writers, and it was genuinely interesting to watch. For one movie. The problem, of course, is that if the entire character archetype is "Vader, but less compelling," you can't try to give the bastard Vader's exact character arc. You can't retroactively bolt on a Vader-tier tragic backstory when you spent a whole movie signaling that whatever happened to him wasn't as compelling as what happened to Vader. You can't milk his angst for two more movies when it's the kind of angst on display in "Rocking the Suburbs" by Ben Folds!

There's a level on which I feel like Moff Gideon was a semi-successful implementation of Vader-Wannabe concept; he's the same kind of middling operator courting the Vader Aesthetic for clout, but he's doing it in the context of the imperial warlord era, where there's a lot of practical power available to anyone who can paint themselves to the Imperial Remnants as a plausible successor to Vader. Hand in Hand with this obvious politicking, Gideon is loathsome, which relieves the writers of the burden of having to plausibly redeem the guy; he's doing exactly what he needs to do and there'll never be a mandate to expand him beyond what his characterization can support. Unfortunately, the calculated and cynical nature of how he's emulating Vader precludes the immaturity and hero-worship elements on display with Kylo, which is unfortunate; the sincerity on display in Kylo's pursuit of authenticity is an important part of why he worked, to the extent that he worked at all, and it'd be worth unpacking in a better trilogy. As he stands Kylo is a clever idea, and that's all he is- he lacks the scaffolding to go from merely clever to actively good.

[thund3randrain]

5 years still not over them

[thetorturedlover]

Poe Dameron

[angelicamoco]

from Legacy of Vader issue 3

[itzshrike]

Star Wars needs a ‘what-if’ series like marvel did. Or they need to like do the original endings they had for the shows and movies before they switched it. I just need an alternative reality where everything’s okay and nothing hurts.