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 many other things.
from Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Star Wars is the biggest science fiction franchise of all time. It works best and is greatest when it adheres to a certain set of ground rules.
I’m not talking about the Jedi rules against falling in love here. It’s just an organizational decree. I’m talking about fundamental laws that make the fictional Star Wars universe work.
It’s what separates a big, sustainable fictional universe like Star Wars from a flash in the pan that burns bright and fades. These rules make Star Wars feel like Star Wars instead of some other fictional sci-fi 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 place is small. In some sci-fi franchises, there are huge distances to cover and long periods of time to travel. In Star Wars, anywhere in the galaxy can be reached 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 reached by anyone with a flying piece of junk and a half-working hyperdrive. Not bad writing. It’s part of the style and tone of the Star Wars universe, which is built around adventure and excitement rather than exploration and introspection.
When you enter the Star Wars universe, you find yourself in a fast-paced, exciting adventure. No, on a slow journey through infinity. This is something Star Wars should never stray from.
Rule Two: Better left unsaid
Star Wars works best when the people and places in it just exist. We’re always jumping into an inhabited universe where, like our everyday lives, people don’t spend much time sitting around and pondering why or how their world works. Not only does it make this universe more real, it makes Star Wars more fun.
We are free to go on adventures with Han Solo without worrying about the economics of smuggling. He probably knows all about how he works to do his job, but we don’t have to, and that’s enough.
We really weren’t supposed to know how the Force worked either, and trying to tell us took away a lot of the fun and held Star Wars back. Writers unable to come up with 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 are only looking at them from the outside, we don’t know. That’s good
Third rule: Technology and magic are one and the same
It may seem that Star Wars is about the collision of the invisible world of the Force with 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 going head to head in a magical battle. Star Wars technology is even worse explained than the Force. We don’t know how any of them work, only that they do.
The ships look cobbled together from random pieces of sheet metal, wires and determination. Power is something that works if you want it hard enough.
Receiving lost in explaining 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 set of things they can do. Blaster bolts should always have a similar look and feel. Lightsaber skills must fit within a certain range of reality. starships all should have similar basic components such as a hyperdrive, a cockpit or bridge, and a sublight engine.
It’s important to be consistent about how your magic works. Researching how it works is not and should be avoided.
Fourth rule: People are everywhere and from nowhere
In Star Wars, every species has a home planet. The Wukis come from Kashyyyk. The Gunguns live on Naboo. Mon Calamari comes from Mon Cal.
Every species has a home. Every type except the most common.
People are everywhere and out of nowhere. There is no human planet. There are people living on planets, and in some cases they have even squatted on the planets of other species, as happened on Naboo.
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. That’s the best. It’s not interesting and the franchise doesn’t need such details. These approaches are best left to broader thinking science fiction such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Rule Five: Species don’t matter
While most of the people inhabiting the Star Wars universe tend to look human, it doesn’t really matter. No one in Star Wars seems to care if the creature standing against them is a human or something with tentacles and giant crab claws. Nobody cares.
Rarely do species appear unless there is a situation where having giant crab claws can be beneficial. Then surely someone will say: Hey! Lucky us! You have giant crab claws to use!
Most people can’t understand a word of the Wookiee, but aside from admitting that they are big and have a temper, they are still treated the same as everyone else. If the Wookiees are punished as they were by the Empire, it’s not because they’re Wookiees, it’s because they ripped off the arms of a bunch of stormtroopers.
Even the Empire, which seems to be a mostly human organization, doesn’t adhere so strictly to this as a rule. Their troops are happy to follow them around Grand Admiral Thrawn and he is blue. The Empire is fine with any being willing to work for the Empire. The Rebels are willing to recruit anyone who hates the Imperials.
What color is your skin or, oh, isn’t your neck weirdly long, it doesn’t stick out much. When it does appear, it’s usually an admission of fact rather than some xenophobic bias.
Rule Six: Droids are pets
In the Star Wars universe, species don’t matter, but biological or doesn’t. All the lack of bias and discrimination applied to creatures based on their appearance closes and piles on the droids, who, although they seem intelligent, are rarely treated better than a used toaster.
Honestly, most droids don’t seem to mind this, and maybe that fact alone is enough to justify their attitude. That’s what Star Wars droids were made for. They like who they are and are therefore happy to be treated as equipment. It’s full value.
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, such as R2 units, equaling that of biological intelligence, and others varying shades below that.
Are protocol droids sentient? The answer is that it depends.
Droids are often sentient and still treated as slaves and always should be. The Star Wars universe only works while the droids are its second-class inhabitants, and the whole thing falls apart the moment they’re not.
The franchise dabbles here and there with the concept of droid rights, but it shouldn’t. The last thing we need is to re-ramp Princess Leia as a slave owner.
If the droids were somehow released, 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 presented as loyal pets and there should be no further exploration of this.
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 was never about that.
From the beginning, Star Wars has been about the moral conflict inside 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 turned for the worse and started killing little children. Han Solo was a rogue, a scoundrel, a criminal, and also a hell of a good guy once you got to know him.
Most of the bad guys in the franchise also have the capacity for good, and most of their good guys have the same capacity for evil. This duality makes them interesting.
Rule Eight: A true villain
The true villain of Star Wars, the only constant face of evil in the entire franchise, was not and should never be Palpatine or the Dark Side of the Force. The real villain of Star Wars is the government bureaucracy.
The Death Star in the first film was the best representative of this. The final form of what happens when vast numbers of bureaucrats take the wealth of those under their control and use it to construct massive, impractical, completely flawed weapons of war. When it didn’t work, the same inflexible, massively incompetent bureaucracy run by Imperial DMV employees who only cared about keeping their jobs so they couldn’t admit they were wrong, turned around and did the same thing all over again.
This is what makes Luke Skywalker’s journey so exciting. He was not fighting an individual, he was fighting an oppressive system of corrupt bureaucratic oppression. The same one we’re all plagued by when we have to go down and get new license plates for our truck. The same one we agonize over when filling out IRS forms.
Luke fought a legion of lazy public school teachers and rule-breaking inspectors on behalf of all normal people who want to be left alone.
The best of the last Star Wars series is Andorand Andor, is the best recent Star Wars series, especially because it makes this bloated bureaucracy the only villain of the series. Andor is about guys in cubicles and meetings plotting the destruction of innocents. They do it not because they are evil, but because it is what they are paid to do.
Star Wars should only have one villain. Not Palpatine and never was. The real villain of Star Wars is the massive bureaucracy that Palpatine represents.
Using the 8 rules of Star Wars
These are the 8 most important, foundational rules of 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 many other things.
Future Star Wars writers take note and start creating with these 8 rules as a compass pointing the way to greater creativity in a galaxy far, far away, not an obstacle to it.
