Episode 49: Transcript
Our Opinions Are Correct
Episode: 49: What’s the matter with Star Wars
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and beyond. I'm Annalee Newitz. I am a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:15] She does. I can attest to this. It's like pretty much anytime you stop her on the street if you're like, what are you talking about? She's like well plate tectonics. Probably, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:23] Probably. Pretty much, yeah.
Annalee: [00:00:24] So this episode, we're going to be talking about Star Wars, so this is a huge topic and it covers everything from our feelings about the nonology, which has just come to a close, to thinking about the politics of the series, to thinking about whether we can still take hope from Star Wars fandom. And we are incredibly lucky to be joined in the studio and remotely by two amazing guests. Star Wars-ologists, in fact.
[00:00:53] Our guests are Anneliese Ophelian who is the creator of a new documentary series called Looking for Leia, which you can see on the Syfy Channel right now and also find it on YouTube. And she's also, in her copious spare time, a psychologist. And we are also joined by Elena Rose Vera who is a minister and community organizer and is also interviewed in Looking for Leia. And in her copious spare time, she is the Executive Director of the Trans Lifeline.
[00:01:19] So thanks for joining us, you guys. All right, let's start the show.
[00:01:21] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:50] So one of the things that's been really interesting over the past bajillion years as Star Wars has unfolded as a franchise is watching how, not just the movies have changed, but the whole position of those movies in our American culture that we live in because they really started out as just fun blockbusters, you know, summertime movies that were just like pew pew pew. And they've become part of this national conversation about who we are as a people and like what is justice and what is fascism. And I'm wondering what you guys think about how that happened. Like when did it happen? Like when did you realize that Star Wars wasn't just a fun thing anymore and why did it happen?
Elena Rose: [00:02:36] Well I think took a detour there actually along that line in a way that a lot of other stuff that we think of as geek culture did where you know, Star Wars and superheroes and pulp scifi, all of these started out as sort of popular fun things that a lot of people across a wide swath of populations were doing. And then they went through this period of being sort of stigmatized and subcultural and you were a nerd if you were into them and there was a sense of feeling like part of a persecuted group if you were an enthusiast for these things. And now they've had a resurgence of taking over pop culture again and going mainstream again.
[00:03:16] But so much of the way that we're dealing with them now is inflected by that period where they felt like a cultural underdog. And I think it's a really interesting thing to see something that is mass scale, popular entertainment, take this detour through subculture and all of the strangeness and queerness and rebelliousness of being subcultural and then re-emerge into the mainstream with the power of massive mega corporations behind it. And now being again part of this big national conversation. I think that's a really interesting part of this whole mess.
Annalise: [00:03:49] I think, too, about the way I think about it in terms of genre, right? Like I think about, I grew up with the original trilogy. I totally can appreciate in retrospect, the way that George Lucas intended those to be a sort of treatise on Nixon and Vietnam. Like I understand what was going on there, but for me also like as a Trek fan, Trek always was the place that I knew, I am being fed allegory now. I am being, this is exactly the point of his, I didn't look to Star Wars for my allegory. I looked to it for like, you know, space wizards and pew pew and I love those stories, right? And they were inspirational and adventurous. But because I had other scifi fandoms that did feel much more like, “We are instructive. We are painting an idealized world. We are making cultural commentary now.” Star Wars didn't feel like it was that for me as much growing up in particular.
[00:04:38] And I think the prequel films were the first films I ever experienced as being like instructive or like we're making a reflection and they were in so many ways directly reflecting the Bush era and you know, the sort of politics of that era.
[00:04:52] And so it's interesting with this sequel trilogy. I think for me the outstanding political thing that will remain for me in the sequel trilogy is the sort of statistic that came out around like 50% of the really particularly vitriolic trolling, not people not liking the film, but actual trolling around The Last Jedi were Russian bots. And that anytime a media franchise can be considered significant enough to unravel the fabric of culture, you're onto something.
[00:05:18] I mean even the fact that Russia decided like, okay, this is a weak place. If we can destabilize Star Wars fandom, we can destabilize the United States. That's the kind of political take-home for me of the sequel trilogy.
Annalee: [00:05:28] I just so happened to have been embroiled in a long discussion with the person who did the study on the Russian bots. And he was careful to point out to me that it wasn't 50% Russian bots. I just feel I need to correct the record. It was over 50% political operatives. It was sock puppets, it was people with fake accounts. And a lot of them, in fact, he thinks now having gone over the research again, that the majority were in the US and it was, people who were part of right- wing groups that had that same idea.
[00:05:59] Some of them were Russian bots, a small number, but it was basically the same crew that was meddling in the US election. So it's like a lot of homegrown trolls and then a few sprinkles from Russia helping it along.
Elena Rose: [00:06:13] Thank you for that, yes.
Annalee: [00:06:13] Um, yeah. And so I just, having been attacked on Twitter repeatedly for that. I just wanted to set the record straight, but I think the point is exactly the same. That it became so politicized that these people who normally would be screaming about abortion decided, oh, today, we're going to scream about Star Wars, which is such a weird transformation to me.
Elena Rose: [00:06:33] And it's interesting because these same political operatives were involved in the end of the scandal around the Ghostbusters and were involved in Comicsgate and Gamergate and all of these places. And it's clear that they have sort of decided as a strategy, right? These are widespread narrative power sources. These are places where people are involved in story and also invested in what those stories mean about the story of themselves and of the groups that they belong to and the people they identify with. And they clearly have figured out, right, we can make a fairly low energy intervention here. We can introduce some really poisonous discourse here and it will spread like wildfire and we will be able to sow the seeds of a lot of discontent and resentment and anger and we can use it to sort of farm for angry young men who will lash out. That they can sort of put this signal out and all of the people who stand up and say, yes, in the name of hating this movie or this character or this story choice, I will go out there and hurt people on the internet. That they go, this is a likely recruit for my white nationalist movement. This is a likely recruit for my queer-phobic movement. This is a likely recruit for all of these sort of forces of evil that we're seeing out there who are deliberately going into the world of video games or pop culture as recruitment tools.
[00:08:00] And they look at something like Star Wars and they go, this is something everyone is going to be watching. This is something everyone's going to be talking about. And if we can inject ourselves into this conversation, we can essentially put out a signal across the world that will help us identify more people to bring into our movement by seeing who stands up and is ready to hurt people for this cause we've made up. We can say your childhood was destroyed by The Last Jedi and if you are with me, here are the people we need to harass and threaten today. And then you just scoop up all the people who say, “I'm in.” And all the people who aren't interested, you already know that they've self-selected out of your movement.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:40] Right?
Elena Rose: [00:08:41] I mean, it's fascinating as a phenomenon.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:43] It's a recruiting tool. And it's a really horrible, ugly, recruiting tool.
[00:08:48] I think it's interesting that, first of all, when Star Wars sort of came back from its decade of exile in 2015, we were already in the middle of this. There were so many other franchises and series and games and comics and stuff where we were having these political battles. And Star Wars kind of came into the middle of that and immediately became central to it. But I also think that Star Wars kind of shows how the politicization of mass culture has happened on multiple axes because you have the question of inclusion and like whether people like Kelly Marie Tran or John Boyega should be front and center in the Star Wars universe. Which had been an issue that had been raging for years before Star Wars came along. We already had had these debates around other things including Ghostbusters, which I forget when that movie came out, but it was around that same time.
[00:09:35] But then on the other hand, you have the politicization where basically people are seizing on these things to provide metaphors. And you see people, for example, on the left, kind of using all the iconography of the rebellion and like the kind of symbol of the resistance. And you actually see Princess Leia t-shirts where she's like resisting the current government.
[00:09:56] And when we did our episode a while ago about fandom, we talked to Naomi Novik who basically said that part of what fans do is they repurpose narratives and that that kind of fan organizing can turn into political organizing for good as well as for ill. And so you have like… Star Wars kind of shows us all the different ways in which people can take a narrative that, perhaps has its own meaning, but also is… Part of why Star Wars is so popular is that you can project your own meaning onto it and people seize on it and use it as a metaphor for their own things in multiple different ways.
Elena Rose: [00:10:28] There's a way to play that safe, right? There's a way to cheat at that thing and I think we saw that some around the film version of the Hunger Games, right? That here was a story about a brown woman of a lower class background joining together with many other people, particularly the Black district and rising up against their powerful masters. And it's this story of revolution. And they cast a white woman in the main role for the movies. And what resulted was a movie where both left-wing and right-wing people saw themselves as the rebels. They identified as the rebels in this movie.
[00:11:04] Left-wing people talked about, right? Like it's this class consciousness, people of color joining together, rising up in solidarity against the military industrial complex. And right wing people were like, look, it's all these scrappy rural folks joining together against the decadent liberal elite look we see in the Capitol. There's all these visibly queer people and people in bright colors and visibly Jewish and people of color. And so they saw themselves in the rebels rising up against us and we saw ourselves in the rebels rising up against them. And the movie marketed on that. It counted on that in some ways.
[00:11:42] And when you see something like Star Wars, that is again explicitly about rebellion and rebellion against fascism, who you put in the lead matters. Because if you put sort of a generic white guy in the lead, then people across a broad political spectrum will say, I identify with the underdog here who is fighting against the bad guy and they will project whoever the villain is in their political frame onto the emperor or whoever.
[00:12:07] And when you start including different faces on your heroes and different kinds of rebels, suddenly it becomes political. It feels political. People go, wait, this is a Black man rising up? This is an Asian woman rising up? This is… Then suddenly, it doesn't feel generic to a lot of people anymore. It may be feels like it's more on our side and then there's that backlash of trying to take that away.
Annalee: [00:12:29] It's so interesting because… I mean, I think you're absolutely right. And I'm wondering if we look at the Star Wars films, the nonology, do you guys think that the films themselves are trying to tell kind of a liberal story or do you think that they really are trying to play it safe and just basically be all things to all people?
[00:12:54] Because Annalise brought up that Lucas thought about the first-made trilogy as being about the Vietnam War and about Nixon was the bad guy, which makes it liberal. But do the films kind of continue to be liberal in that way or are they just kind of blank?
Annalise: [00:13:07] I think in as much as the, the treatise of all of the films is about rebellion against empire and arguably the prequel films are about the rise of empire. And actually my favorite stories are the Clone Wars, or the animated stories, which are really about like the rise of colonialism and the way the colonial dynamics work. Right? So, and think of how people think that they might be working for the thing that's good and actually end up working for the Empire. Right? All of that is, I think, really that's some of the most politically complex.
[00:13:35] But any story that's inherently around rebellion is leaning into that space. And I think Elena Rose's point is really well taken, which is that we're at a point where I do think that sort of extreme-right folks do regard themselves in their own perverse way as freedom fighters.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:53] Oh, yeah.
Annalise: [00:13:53] And so they'll read themselves into that as well. But I think that the intention is a very, you know, kind of like blanket, it's a little bit mono-myth-y around this sort of like, it's good versus evil. Which is really, again, different than the more purposefully politically allegorical stories. And I think we see the awkwardness around that. Right, I do think the sequel trilogy has a lot more people. I mean, they were a little on the nose with the New Order or the… new order, with the First Order. I'm totally just like on my little New Wave kick over there. They were a little on the nose with the First Order being like really fascist, right? Like they got a little too close to the Nazi paraphernalia and they painted themselves into a corner around that because unlike kind of amorphous bad guys that you can be like, yeah, I want to be a stormtrooper, pew pew, and other folks might be like, yeah, no, actually those are the bad guys. Don't identify with that. I do think the First Order leaned heavily into it, and—
Annalee: [00:14:46] So then it became kind of more liberal in that sense or more explicitly allegorical.
Annalise: [00:14:50] More explicitly allegorical in ways that, I see fandom having this conversation where it's really like, no, Kylo Ren is a fascist and we have to have [inaudible]. I'm like, yeah, that's… it's all actual, like everybody's subjective reading of these movies is actual and true to them and they're all valid points. But it's also interestingly concrete in this way that I don't recall those conversations happening around Darth Vader. He just got to look and sound cool.
[00:15:12] I think we do read more of the modern, real condition into these stories because it's also so forward in our minds. Maybe also because it's feeling especially big and overwhelming since, particularly the 2016 election, in a way that's like, I can't necessarily push the needle on fascism and my day to day life, but man, can I yell about this movie?
Annalee: [00:15:35] Yeah. And I do think that the prequel films brought in a pretty concrete, if fantastical idea of the political structure that kind of runs the world. I mean, we see the Senate, we see a long procedural scene in the Senate, many of them, actually. And we kind of learn about how people are elected or not elected. And so it does become more concrete in the way that you're describing.
Elena Rose: [00:16:00] The first, the original trilogy, with that sort of Vietnam allegory. They explicitly identify that outmatched guerillas as the good guys and invite us to identify with them partially by putting more stereotypically American faces on them and taking away a lot of the faces of the bad guys or making them all British.
Annalee: [00:16:20] Yes, they’re all British.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:20] It’s true, it’s all Peter Cushing.
Annalee: [00:16:21] Masked British people.
Annalise: [00:16:22] Shorthand for evil.
Elena Rose: [00:16:24] You know? So there’s that thing, and then there's sort of a nostalgia for the good times of the old Republic. And then the prequel era, which was, as Annalise was saying, really expanded on in the TV shows, really asks that question, however clumsily, of like, okay, we are a prosperous, powerful nation. Do we deserve to be? Do we deserve this power? Are we in some way fundamentally morally corrupting ourselves in this position? How do we, and how do we avoid becoming the Empire that we know happens and that we don't want to be? And then we get the sequel trilogy where we get neo-Nazis, essentially, we get guys who are nostalgic for the fascist regime that was defeated before.
Annalee: [00:17:04] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:04] Really true.
Annalee: [00:17:06] We see that a lot in The Mandalorian even more, like super explicitly, although that's set kind of in the past. But there's all these people who are still identifying with the Imperials. Even though the new Republic has come into power and like it reminds me of kind of a post-Civil War kind of scenario where there's people who are still like, yeah, I'm on the side of the South, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:25] For sure.
Elena Rose: [00:17:26] Or at least guys who fled to Space Argentina, you know?
Annalee: [00:17:29] Yes, totally.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:30] Space Argentina, right.
Annalee: [00:17:30] Yeah. Or they just have their weird little outpost up in the mountains somewhere.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:34] Yeah. I mean, I was just going to say quickly that I feel like part of what makes Star Wars so popular is that it really nails the American ethos and part of the American ethos is that we get to have it both ways, in the United States. We get to be the underdogs, always. America's always the underdog. We're always the scrappy come from behind hero. Like that's who we identify with in the United States. We get to basically be the world's leading superpower and have everybody give us their raw materials and give us their cheap labor and give us their—
Annalise: [00:18:02] “Give us.” I’m going to put that in air quotes.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:05] Okay. Yeah. We get to take from the rest of the world, basically. And we get to be a hegemony, we get to be really dominant. But at the same time we tell ourselves that we're the scrappy underdogs.
[00:18:15] And that's kind of Star Wars. Star Wars speaks to that and is like, well, you know, even though these people are actually really powerful and they've got all this stuff, they're still the scrappy underdog. And you know, that's who you always want to identify with. And I think that that's, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I think that that's part of why Star Wars is more popular than Star Trek, because Star Trek is about people who are on top.
Annalee: [00:18:37] Yeah. And it's also more complex. But you know, Elena Rose, I think you really nailed it when you were talking earlier about how the very structure of the Star Wars narrative is about, being really a popular story and then becoming this nerdy thing that was like the underdog that was, you know, something beloved of people who were social outcasts. And then it became on top again. But all of those people still think that they're the victims and the underdogs, even though they have all this power. And I really feel like that is the story of America. You know, even though we have all this power, we're still like, but no, we're the victims.
[00:19:10] And anytime someone wants to take power in the United States, anytime a group wants to, they often try to do it by claiming victimhood. And that's why we're getting all of these white men identifying with victim characters in, you know, say, Star Wars for example. And saying like, yeah, we're like the victims. Like where's all the white guy victims for us to identify with.
Elena Rose: [00:19:31] That narrative of victimhood is fundamental to fascist and generally reactionary ideologies that, they are both, you know, we have an enemy who is an other who is both worthless and weak and sniveling and disgusting and also a threat to us at all times.
Annalee: [00:19:48] And super-powered somehow.
Elena Rose: [00:19:50] Right? And so it's interesting to see that play out here. There is a shadowy, insidious enemy and they are both pathetic and terrifying all the time. And anytime the narratives that we sort of identify with start to steer in that direction, there's sort of that danger of going over the edge into it.
Annalee: [00:20:10] Before we take a break, I just wanted to ask you guys whether you think that the Star Wars films and TV shows kind of buy into a cyclical idea of history because we never see things getting steadily better. It's always like, the good guys won, the good guys lost, the good guys won, the good guys lost. Are we ever going to get like to this ultimate moment of like everybody is having star peace instead of Star Wars?
Elena Rose: [00:20:33] I just want to say like for that, one of the things I really loved about the Snoke character is that he doesn't matter. Like he is a cipher because there will always be a Snoke. There will always be an Emperor. There will always be a cruel old man with power who wants to use it to hurt other people and amass more power. Over and over and over again, that guy will happen and you can sort of isolate him and keep him away from sharp things, or you can give them access to angry, broken, young men who are looking for someone to tell them who they are.
[00:21:05] And once you get that combination of like angry, broken, young people who want to know who to blame for their pain and that cruel, powerful, old man, that's when you get the explosions. And just the idea of maybe we do get to peace, but maybe part of how we get to peace is recognizing that that guy is always going to happen and the particulars of him aren't so much important as making sure that we keep him away from power whenever he shows up.
Annalee: [00:21:32] Yeah. Or maybe give him therapy, I don't know. Like, some—
Elena Rose: [00:21:35] Right. Right, like, you know, we take them away from power and then we insist on a world that says to all those broken, angry, young people who a guy like that takes advantage of, here is something better to do with your heart. Like here is something better to do with your hands. Here's something better to be.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:51] For sure.
Elena Rose: [00:21:51] It will be cyclical until we find some way to fix that. And I don't think the answer is, you know, redeeming someone who has killed billions of people or whatever, necessarily. But it is a matter of maybe preventing it from happening in the first place. And I love that we got a deeply un macho hero in Luke Skywalker and I think it's really telling that a lot of people wanted him to be more macho. They wanted him to be more pew pew. Yeah, I dunno. I think, I think the cycle, it's a cyclical story. Partially because it's a story about the ways we fail to break the cycle.
Annalise: [00:22:23] I think it's a cyclical story also because it is a myth, right? So Star Wars is not a forward-thinking allegory about our intended or dream world. It is a backward-looking. It happens a long time ago. Right? We are in the past reenacting mythic stories. And one of the things I actually enjoy about some of the current storytelling is that they become self-aware of that mythic nature, that we suddenly get the myths and fairytales from within the sequel trilogy is highly aware of the mythology of its own characters. Right? “Luke Skywalker, I thought he was a myth.”
[00:22:58] And so I do think that the stories are not inherently about resolution. I think they're inherently about the conflict and about the journey in that conflict. And you know, a lot has been said about the sort of Campbellian roots of all of that storytelling. And I don't actually.
[00:23:12] I think it's an awkward fit in a lot of ways, I think it's an afterthought, which is great. And they do line up and that's the nature of them. And so when we try to start reading more of the, what's my roadmap from Star Wars into it, we get into the… I think the trouble that we find because the stories weren't set up like that. They were set up to give us that more mythic, less instructive, more simplistic. This is a series of well assembled scrims upon which you can project yourself and play the role that serves you and that gives you a thing out of it. And that's some of our oldest and most successful stories, do that.
[00:23:45] And that’s, I think, part of the longevity of Star Wars as well, and we're at 42, 43 years now. And so that's where I start, I think you started seeing the like, Oh wait. And it's also where things like The Mandalorian or Rogue One, which are these interstitial stories become really interesting because we don't need the story to wrap up. We know the story continues on, but we get to dive into those particular moments of textured conflict and character development and relational development. That's the kind of interesting stories to me.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:12] I'm going to actually disagree slightly and say that I think you know, up until Episode Nine I would've said maybe it's cyclical and there's just going to be another bad and another bad and another bad. But the fact that Episode Nine ,minor spoiler brings back Emperor Palpatine and makes him kind of the big bad of all nine films does kind of suggest that the series is trying to tell us that if you can just get rid of that one guy like that one once that one guy is gone… like Palpatine was behind Snoke, he was behind everybody. Once he's gone, maybe things will be fine? Maybe. Maybe we'll just be great.
Annalee: [00:24:46] Maybe so. All right. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back we're going to talk about Star Wars fandom and also we have a conversation we need to have about The Darksaber.
[00:24:56] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:25:10] So Annalise you have just released this amazing documentary series Looking for Leia. And it's about fandom around Star Wars. It's not really about the content of the films, it's about how people have engaged with them. So can you start by just telling us a little bit about why has Star Wars been such a great place, specifically for female fans, people who identify with Leia. They don't have to be female fans, but people who are really strongly feeling Leia as their character.
Annalise: [00:25:39] Yeah. Well I mean when, thank you for the kind words. I think I'll start by saying I think Leia’s our jumping off point. And I think for a lot of women she was an entry point. There is a permission to be able to engage with the stories because for certain women there was some mirroring in that character. When I talked with the women that I've talked to over the course of like two years filming, I was really delighted to hear how many points of entry folks had.
[00:26:04] And I think that that's the case in all genre fandom, right, is that we're not necessarily brought in only by the character that might look like us or share our experience, we’re brought in by the story. But there's certainly a kind of degree of permission. And when people would talk about their childhood experiences of like playing Star Wars in the neighborhood, often having, you know, you need a character who looks like you to be able to say, hey, do I get to be that character when we're all playing?
[00:26:26] Again, that's an entry point that's also really specific to white women. That's really specific to like certain groups of folks. But I think that going back to my earlier point about Star Wars being a selection of really beautifully organized scrims, there's a lot of spaces to read yourself into a story like Star Wars. And that in a lot of ways the films are thinly drawn, right? The plot of the films are thinly drawn and they create all of this room for additional imagination and for fan works.
[00:26:56] Which is really I think at its core a lot of what Looking for Leia is about are the ways that our engagement as fans constitutes a kind of alchemy, a way in which we're taking a source material and it's then interacting through a kind of magical process and being transformed into something that is an entirely new material. And so that often when people are talking about their fandom, they're talking about a thing that's incredibly specific and unique to them and invokes that kind of magic of like, I took the story and that it interacted with me and then this is what my fandom looks like.
[00:27:29] It’s why we get really passionate about fandom as well, I think. Because there are areas where we might be very similar. There are areas where we are radically different and where we're radically different can often make us feel like, oh, you're disagreeing with like a thing that's fundamentally a love of mine or my identity or, I really love that character. You really hate that character. That that can become really tense.
[00:27:48] But the series is really about the ways in which sites of love show up and the things that people do with them. And yeah, it was really special getting to see all of that and to see all the places where Leia was clearly the sort of flag bearer for it. And all the places where it was like, you know, Kit Fisto or someone entirely different.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:06] Kit Fisto!
Annalee: [00:28:06] Yeah, I was like, I was all about R2-D2. That was like my, my main source of identification when I first watched Star Wars.
Annalise: [00:28:12] What was it about R2-D2 for you?
Annalee: [00:28:13] I mean, R2-D2 is the best, obviously. Biggest hero. I don't think R2-D2 maybe has a gender, but it's, you know, obviously, the best looking of all the characters and knows how to hack and Charlie's giving me the eyebrow raise, I mean, and then later Han Solo. For sure.
Annalise: [00:28:32] R2-D2 also holds the collective history of the full nonology, right. Like, is the only droid that doesn't have its mind wiped and gets to maintain the actual full knowledge of everything. He’s the omniscient narrator.
Annalee: [00:28:42] Yeah, R2-D2 has like a great language. Boop, boop, boop-boop, beep-boop, boop-boop. [Imitating R2-D2 beep-boops]. You know, that sounds great.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:46] Yeah, that's pretty much how we talk to each other when we’re at home.
Annalee: [00:28:47] That’s how, yeah, but like I said, I was like, I think I went from like R2-D2 to Han Solo and then, but I, I mean of course I love Leia. Everybody loves Leia, so.
[00:28:55] What do you think is the difference between being a fan of Star Wars versus just kind of going to see the movies and talking about the plot or whatever? Like Annalise, you already said it has to do with kind of getting your identity kind of entangled with it. But is there a difference between a fan and someone who's just sort of, you know, engaging in commentary about the film?
Annalise: [00:29:13] I think a fandom as a site of self-identification. So I think that we get into trouble if we try to actually like quantify what fandom is because it shows up in so many different ways. And so I think that there are people who maybe it would self-identify as more casual fans. But one of the points that we tried to make actually in the episode, “More Than the Basement” is this idea that the metric of fandom is something that's historically used a bit to gatekeep, particularly women in fandom and this notion of like, well are you a real fan? What does that, how does your fandom show up? Which has historically also been rooted in very like acquisitional forms of fandom. Have you acquired the requisite trivial knowledge? Have you acquired the requisite vintage figures? And that it doesn't give as much space to fandoms that might be more generative in nature.
[00:30:01] That might be more single point. Like I've just seen the original trilogy, I haven't seen anything other than those movies. And that's my fandom versus I've read every single Expanded Universe novel and that's my fandom or the video games or the role-playing games. Charlie Jane actually says in our first episode, the sort of, you know, unpacking of all the different forms of media that have happened. And it's one of the reasons why we used Star Wars as our singular site of fandom. I think the things that are coming up in Looking for Leia could be said about a lot of different kinds of fandom, but nothing has the longevity or the breadth that this particular franchise has. So it makes it a really interesting sandbox to sort of explore.
[00:30:37] One of the things that came up a lot was this sort of self-questioning of fandom. Like, oh I'd love to participate in that. I don't know if I'm enough of a fan to do this. And of course, you know there's no such thing as enough of a fan. Fandom is—Cecil Castellucci at a point in her interview with us had talked about fandom being about passion and engagement. And that those are the things that are requisite. And then at that point if you feel like a fan and that's what you want to call yourself, you are.
[00:31:00] I think when we start having those externally imposed notions of fandom is where we get into gatekeeping problems and…
Charlie Jane: [00:31:06] Fuck gatekeeping.
Annalise: [00:31:08] Yeah. Right.
Elena Rose: [00:31:08] So it's really funny cause I remember us having this conversation, you know, when you asked if I wanted to be in the Looking for Leia documentary. I was like, I dunno if I'm enough of a fan. And like we talked about it some as I recall because I definitely had thought of myself as a fairly casual fan in a lot of ways. And then it was honestly being… sort of thinking about being part of this documentary that made me sit down and go, no, this is actually something that I've been engaging with a lot and that I have opinions about and feelings about it and I care about. And I remember sort of an astonishing amount about it that I didn't remember memorizing. And oh, I guess I really am. You know, I've met people who introduced themselves and their first question is like, what's your favorite fandom? What fandoms are you in? And I'm like, I don't know if I'm in any fandoms. I don't know. Did I sign up for a thing, I didn’t… I don’t have a—
Annalee: [00:31:59] You didn’t get your brand?
Elena Rose: [00:32:00] Right. I don't know if I'm part of the right message boards. Do we even do message boards anymore? You know, like, what do the youth do? Right. But through sort of the question of whether or not I had things that I cared about saying about Star Wars, I realized I was a fan. And now I get to be part of this thing that I'm really proud to be part of. I got to watch it and it was such an achievement. It’s such a beautiful thing you made.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:28] The web series, yeah, it’s amazing.
Annalee: [00:32:29] Yeah.
Annalise: [00:32:29] Thank you.
Annalee: [00:32:29] So, Elena Rose, you are a minister. So you know something about spirituality. And I have a question that's a little bit weird, but I'm wondering, do you think that when we're talking about fandom around Star Wars… Which, of course, Star Wars has its own form of religion and mysticism, is there a way that that can kind of shade over into a form of spirituality? That fandom engagement, that passion, finding meaning for your identity, finding a meaningful community in fandom? Is that similar to religion and spirituality or is it really a mistake to kind of say that there's an overlap there?
Elena Rose: [00:33:09] I think part of what makes that question complicated is that you're never going to get a consensus on what counts as religion. The idea of drawing a circle around like a piece of culture and calling that piece of culture religion and other things not religion doesn't really work. And that you're not really going to get a consensus on a definition of how fandom operates.
[00:33:27] If you think about groups of people coming together and having conversations about what matters and what means what, you what ideas are applicable in their own lives and what stories inspire them or upset them or teach them things. Where you get people getting together regularly and working together on things, that's a lot of how our religious community operates, right?
[00:33:55] Religion is a thing we do together, spirituality as a thing you can do by yourself. But fundamentally, it's about taking ideas and stories and symbols that are shared and trying to figure out how they apply to meaning in the world as you experience it and how they might guide what kind of person you are.
[00:34:16] And there are plenty of people who engage very deeply with these stories in community and they talk about them and they talk about the different kinds of heroes and the different kinds of virtues and the different kinds of terrible mistakes that are presented in these stories. And who they identify with, and what they learned from it. Like that’s… And then there's the whole, like, I think most religions, there are all the arguments over which texts are canonical.
Annalee: [00:34:41] Yes.
Elena Rose: [00:34:41] The whole notion of fan canon comes from discussions about canon in religion, right? That's where we get that word.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:49] Right.
Annalee: [00:34:49] Yeah.
Elena Rose: [00:34:49] It’s what is part of the canon of scripture. This movie counts and this one doesn't. I choose to go by this book and not by this one. These statements disagree over what happened, and I choose this one over this one. These are the same arguments that we have over religious texts.
Annalee: [00:35:08] Yeah.
Elena Rose: [00:35:08] Which ones count, which ones matter. There are the people who are really into this set that you're into, but they have this other set that they like that you don't think should count. And then you get splinter groups who are like, I'm really into the expanded universe of the Bible. Um. And other people who are like, I'm sorry, the authorities declared that that's just legends now.
Annalee: [00:35:30] Yeah, bring back the Apocrypha, damnit.
Elena Rose: [00:35:35] And I love an Apocrypha—
Annalee: [00:35:37] Yeah, me too.
Elena Rose: [00:35:37] As much as anyone.
Annalee: [00:35:39] Yeah, the best part.
Elena Rose: [00:35:39] Right. So it's really interesting to see people engage… And honestly, I think that part of the reason people engage in fandom and the way they do is because religion doesn't occupy the same kind of space in public life as it used to. Especially with sort of the advent of a more globalized way of interacting culturally without being as bound to local community. There's not the same need or habit of people to show up to the same center of local community every week. And there are more options for where to show up and some of the same impulses that you get out of showing up to a congregation of some kind a couple times a week and talking with people about meaning, making, and stories, and sharing, and music, and movements, and aesthetics together and building these memories together. You can go do that in a lot of ways elsewhere and people are just sort of engaging with what works for them.
[00:36:35] And because of sort of the way that our lives under capitalism and our working lives have sort of crushed our ability to freely gather as local communities in a lot of ways. There are so few spaces now that are intergenerational that don't cost you anything to be in, that are a place that you can just show up. There are fewer and fewer of those spaces now.
[00:36:58] And so religion being one of the things that provides those has less influence. Whereas people are now going to virtual amorphous online spaces or convention spaces for some of those same senses of community and mass experience. You know that you go to the movies or you go to a convention and you can be in a big crowd of people who are having the same feeling at the same time. And it used to be, you could only get that at public theater. You could get that at a symphony or you could get that in a religious service of some kind or in a mass spiritual practice. And so some of those same ritual impulses, we have, to feel things together, we're engaging with through fandom instead. And I don't know that that's a good or bad thing. I think it is interesting.
Annalee: [00:37:41] So I wanted to ask everybody before we get to our final most important question, which is going to be about the text. Do you guys feel like the Star Wars stories are a source of hope for people?
Annalise: [00:37:51] I mean, in my experience having just gotten to like listen to lots and lots of people talk about Star Wars. That was a hugely consistent theme and it was really lovely to hear the folks talking about hope but then also like that kind of trifecta of hope where it intersects with joy, where it intersects with connection. And so that was the place where people were drawn to these stories, that there was an overarching message of hope that they felt they got from the stories. That there was a deep and profound sense of joy that they got. I think particularly about the droid-building episode and this sort of like deep sense of, we have the word squee to describe it now, right? But like the kind of squee. The sense of like I saw this thing roll across the screen and I said, I love that. I have to know more about that. I want to build one of those. That sort of thing.
[00:38:38] And then the connection, the sense of like, I love this thing and I want to talk about it and share it with someone else. Tracy Deonn talks about when she goes to convention, she's blown away by the amount of jewelry that fan girls make for each other. And I do think there's something unique to a lot of geek franchises around that, but that, Star Wars certainly leaned into this theme of hope as a central treatise early and has held onto it. And I do think it's one of the sort of universalizing aspects of that story that draws folks to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:07] Yeah, I mean I think actually the thing about droid building kind of makes me think of what I consider the central kind of theme of Star Wars, which is cuteness. Star Wars has a lot of things going on. There's a lot of like pew pew pew and good versus evil and stuff. But really it's about cuteness. Like a Star Wars movie or TV show that didn't have cute critters or cute droids wouldn't really be Star Wars. And I feel like a lot of the hope in Star Wars does come from the idea that no matter where you go, no matter how scary and difficult things get, there will always be cute critters.
Annalee: [00:39:38] There will be porgs.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:38] There will be porgs, there'll be baby Yodas, there'll be the cute little lampshade droid in the new movie.
Annalee: [00:39:46] Oooh.
Elena Rose: [00:39:46] D-O, we love him. “No, thank you.”
Charlie Jane: [00:39:47] D-O. Yeah. And you know, cuteness will follow you everywhere. And I feel like that's kind of the promise of Star Wars in a sense.
Elena Rose: [00:39:56] I think the thing that I find most hopeful in Star Wars is that for me, Star Wars is about failure. The good guys make mistakes and they lose and they're up against impossible odds. And sometimes those impossible odds are impossible. And then they keep going and they get back up and they lose their Republic and make a rebellion and they get a new Republic and they lose that and they make a resistance. That over and over, they screw up and they lose. And there's something more to be after that.
[00:40:28] Part of why these movies and these TV shows and everything resonate for me is I come from rebels. My grandparents and great grandparents were in the resistance in the Philippines, in World War II. They were insurgents against an occupying empire. In that occupation, all of these different factions came together to fight off the oppressor. And then after the Empire was gone, they fought each other, it all fell apart. And then they were occupied by the US again. My grandparents belonged to a faction that didn't win that in-fighting and became refugees and then joined the other half of my family who were refugees from the other side of the world.
[00:41:09] And there was something else for them to be, and there was more life to live. To see reflected in a story, the hopelessness of rebellion and the choosing to hope anyway, and the choosing to fight against impossible odds and to be more and live more even when it all collapses around you because what you're doing matters. That resonates for me. We’re seeing right where all… we're all watching The Mandalorian right now, which has been explicit that it takes place in the aftermath of a failed rebellion. That there was an uprising that we were cheering for that failed and they were all exterminated just about. And we get more stories about the people who survived. That matters to me in fiction as it matters to me in life. We all fail. We all face things that are impossible. We need more stories that tell us who to be next.
Annalee: [00:41:59] I mean that for me is, is definitely where the hope comes from in the stories. I feel like there's a scene in The Last Jedi where we see these slave kids who are on, I think Canto Bight, they’re swabbing the deck basically. And we realize that they, some of them have force powers and that they've gotten some inspiration from legends that they've heard about great Jedi. And to me that was the scene of hope. And it's exactly what you're saying about these are people who've been crushed. These are people who are slaves and yet they keep going and they keep fighting and maybe fighting is just surviving another day and patting a friend on the head or whatever, but they're going to keep going.
[00:42:42] Okay. Final question you guys. We've had our deep conversation but now what we've got is The Mandalorian and the cuteness of baby Yoda and I just learned that there's a Darksaber that Annelise and—
Charlie Jane: [00:42:58] Spoilers!
Annalee: [00:42:59] And spoiler, spoiler. Annelise and Elena Rose have some thoughts about the Darksaber. I thought it was a vibro sword. So what the hell is the Darksaber?
Annalise: [00:43:08] One of the things I love about the, I mean I love so many things about The Mandalorian, but The Mandalorian is not the first Star Wars TV show.
Annalee: [00:43:15] Of course.
Annalise: [00:43:15] We have this amazing legacy of animation with Star Wars and that starts with The Clone Wars, which is where we first get introduced to the Darksaber and that the actual story of Mandalore as really beautifully kind of laid out. And involves Obi-Wan and his spectacular love interests, Duchess Satine and Darth Maul who comes back after being cut in half in Phantom Menace with cybernetic spider legs but is then made whole by space witches. I mean like truly.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:46] Like you do.
Annalise: [00:43:46] Yeah, as one does.
Annalee: [00:43:47] I mean, yeah.
Elena Rose: [00:43:47] Whomst among us?
Annalise: [00:43:49] All the stories that I love the most in a lot of ways come from The Clone Wars and they're deep fantasy. Right. I also feel like Star Wars’s fantasy roots—
Annalee: [00:43:58] For sure.
Annalise: [00:43:58] Really show up in those, right. Especially with the space witches, which all of the Dathomir stuff is… that’s my jam.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:04] The Night Sisters.
Elena Rose: [00:44:06] Legit.
Annalise: [00:44:06] The Night Sisters are my jam.
Elena Rose: [00:44:08]
Annalise: [00:44:10] Right? Legit. And you know women wrote that, BT dubs. Folks who are loving The Mandalorian I think, are being encouraged to take a deep dive into the Clone Wars and also into Rebels, which is where the Darksaber, we get the Darksaber in Sabine Wren's whole backstory and I know Elena Rose you had wanted also to like chime in on this, I'm going to not like take up all of the airtime. But to talk about the other amazing Mandalorian characters throughout animation who have also wielded these kind of historic artifacts of power and what it means for this particular character to have it, opens up so many questions for me.
Annalee: [00:44:43] Okay. What does it mean?
Elena Rose: [00:44:45] Okay, so the Darksaber is the saber of the first Mandalorian Jedi who basically looked at lightsabers and was like, yeah, but can I have something that's more metal.
Annalee: [00:44:57] That is so Mandalorian, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:59] Nice.
Elena Rose: [00:44:59] Right, he was like, you want to take my armor off and also maybe could we have something a little more hardcore?
Annalee: [00:45:05] Something that’s black.
Elena Rose: [00:45:05] Right? Can it look like a piece of night cut out of the world? Just, the light thing is just not really cutting it for me as a theme. And then there's a whole dramatic thing of who has ahold of it and you know there's like fighting over it and it's locked in an archive and then it's stolen and then it becomes this sort of symbol of Mandalorian power and sovereignty. And various movements are trying to take control of it to show that they deserve on some deep sort of warrior spiritual level to rule that world and its culture.
[00:45:36] And then in Rebels we see it fall into the hands of this character Sabine, who is in a lot of ways, I think the first, I think the first Asian leading lady in Star Wars. Rose Tico is the first live action one and Sabine steps in in animation. Both of those, I think, meant a lot to me as an Asian American fan. But Sabine is a Mandalorian in exile who is untraditional and is an artist and can't go home because of the things she did that she won't talk about. And then this thing falls into her hands and it's the catalyst in her big story—I'm just full of spoilers here—for essentially finally going back home and confronting her family and her clan and her mistakes and her culture.
Annalise: [00:46:17] And she's royal born. She's royalty but also this like kind of spectacular artist. There's also something, because the fall of Mandalore is also a colonial excursion on the part of the Empire and I think we're about to get that in the next season and it was certainly heavily referred to in this season. We're getting a new season of The Clone Wars, which I don't know if I should be up on this, if that is actually, if we're getting like a siege of Mandalore continuation.
Elena Rose: [00:46:40] That's what we're getting. That’s where we’re heading.
Annalise: [00:46:40] That’s what we’re getting, right? That's what… I know that's the rumor and I'm never sure if that's what it actually is or not. But it means that at some point between Rebels, which wraps up before the events of A New Hope and The Mandalorian, which pick up after the events of Return of the Jedi. When, in the aftermath of the Empire sacking Mandalore, an Imperial leader got his hands on this like Mandalorian relic of leadership and that it's in his possession makes him extra the big battle. So just Giancarlo Esposito.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:15] Oh, yeah.
Annalise: [00:47:15] I could not love that actor more and they withheld him until like the very end and then we're just, I'm just like yes. Anything you have to say. You are my favorite baddie.
Annalee: [00:47:22] He is definitely one of the main things that's amazing about that series. But also as you were saying, the fact that the Mandalorian, I feel like, really centers questions around post-colonial life in the Star Wars universe and what does it mean to have been horribly colonized and not just colonized but it's kind of environmental racism on like a planetary scale. Because their planet has been trashed, their minds have been destroyed, and we get the sense that their planet is just kind of in ruins as a result. And so it is really interesting to see this whole backstory now being part of like what's important to understanding the universe. Because we, for the nonology, all we need to know are like aristocratic people's lineages and it's like I don't give a fuck about that. I want to know about the people who were colonized and what happened to them.
Elena Rose: [00:48:10] Right. And like the last we saw of Mandalore, right? They’re under occupation, a bunch of their people are in collusion with the Empire and then a bunch of them have decided to rise up and it's this triumphant moment. They have a new leader. They're going to do it. They're rising up to save the day, and that's where we leave the narrative. And then what this tells us is it went badly for them. Like, it went really, really badly for all of these people that we got meet. And theoretically probably every one of those names characters had to get dead for that Relic to end up in the hands of that conqueror. And it tells us that this isn't going to be just the story of this one guy in The Mandalorian. It's going to be about identity and peoplehood and the fact that everyone we meet who is still from that culture is this weird fanatical zealot offshoot that won’t even take off their hats anymore.
Which wasn't the thing before? How do they expect to make new Mandalorians? We don't know.
Annalee: [00:49:06] We're gonna find out. I mean there's gotta be hinges on those suits. I don't know.
Elena Rose: [00:49:10] I gotta, you know, I'm worried about them and but—
Annalise: [00:49:12] They’re hats, not a chastity belt.
Annalee: [00:49:15] They’re face chastity.
Elena Rose: [00:49:16] It takes us back to that story of usness. It makes it not just an individual story. It suggests it's a story about a we and those are the stories I always care about.
Annalee: [00:49:26] All right. On that note we're going to wrap up. I'm glad that we got to find—I got to finally find out about the Darksaber because that's pretty exciting.
[00:49:33] So Annelise and Elena Rose, where can we find more information about you on the internets?
Annalise: [00:49:38] You can find more information about Looking for Leia on LookingforLeia.com, at @LookingforLeia on the tweets and you can watch us on Syfy VOD, on Syfy Wire through their YouTube, the NBC One app, all of the places, right now. So check it out.
Elena Rose: [00:49:55] I'm a grim and elusive figure on the internet much like the silent barn owl in the night. But I am on Twitter as @burnlittlelight and you can find more about my other work, which is less Star Wars-y during the day at translifeline.org.
Annalee: [00:50:13] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:13] Yay. Thank you so much.
Annalee: [00:50:16] Yeah, thanks for being here.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:15] You guys are the best, you’re the best.
Annalise: [00:50:17] Thank you both, so much.
Elena Rose: [00:50:18] Seriously, it’s great to be here.
Annalee: [00:50:21] All right, well thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you would like to support us, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect any little bit helps. If you can give us some Beskar, we'd love it. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us on, I dunno, Facebook and places like that. But, you can also subscribe to our podcast wherever fine podcasts are shot into the universe. If you review us on Apple podcasts, we'd really appreciate it. It helps people find us.
[00:50:51] And thank you so much to our producer, Veronica Simonetti here at Women's Audio Mission, where we're recording and where she is making us sound professional as opposed to dorky. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.
[00:51:07] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:51:08] Bye!
[00:51:08] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.