If they're going to invoke the spirit of the Bantam era, they should go all in and include blob racing, Han's identical cousin, whuffa-wrangling, and especially Singing Threepio.
The timeline issues remind me of the Marvel movieverse: large chunks of screentime feel like they're either setting up for some other movie but doing nothing for the movie you're actually watching, or are just so fans can say, "Hey, I recognize that guy/planet/fuzzy dice!" In both cases, it feels like you can't properly appreciate the movie unless you've done your homework by watching about 20 other movies and probably also reading a bunch of stuff. I guess at least Bantam is a good reminder that Marvel didn't invent this problem?
It's especially annoying because one of the new new tie-in novels I bothered to read, Claudia Gray's Leia, Princess of Alderaan, handles references to other books and movies in the continuity so well. There are a bunch of them, and it adds depth if you know the references--but they also have a self-contained purpose within the book and I think they'd still be effective from a storytelling perspective even if you had only seen the fist six movies and nothing else. Like, it's the early days of the Rebellion coalescing as an organization, and there's a lot of vigorous debate over what methods are appropriate, so of course there needs to be someone the others think is hurting the cause by being too extreme and violent. Hearing a few arguments about him during strategy meetings and having him plan an attack which endangers Leia makes sense within the story. If you know the name Saw Guerrera, you can go, "Cool, this conflict is still a problem a couple of years later in Rogue One! This seems logical and it's fun to know how his story plays out!" But if you haven't seen Rogue One, he still has a reason to be there and makes sense. You don't feel like he's a teaser trailer plopped into the middle of the book. There's no "but the other shoe never dropped!" feeling. Ditto the planet Crait, awkward teenage Amilyn Holdo, etc. I wish more media-verses handled their cross-references so well.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2021-06-20 04:35 am (UTC)The timeline issues remind me of the Marvel movieverse: large chunks of screentime feel like they're either setting up for some other movie but doing nothing for the movie you're actually watching, or are just so fans can say, "Hey, I recognize that guy/planet/fuzzy dice!" In both cases, it feels like you can't properly appreciate the movie unless you've done your homework by watching about 20 other movies and probably also reading a bunch of stuff. I guess at least Bantam is a good reminder that Marvel didn't invent this problem?
It's especially annoying because one of the new new tie-in novels I bothered to read, Claudia Gray's Leia, Princess of Alderaan, handles references to other books and movies in the continuity so well. There are a bunch of them, and it adds depth if you know the references--but they also have a self-contained purpose within the book and I think they'd still be effective from a storytelling perspective even if you had only seen the fist six movies and nothing else. Like, it's the early days of the Rebellion coalescing as an organization, and there's a lot of vigorous debate over what methods are appropriate, so of course there needs to be someone the others think is hurting the cause by being too extreme and violent. Hearing a few arguments about him during strategy meetings and having him plan an attack which endangers Leia makes sense within the story. If you know the name Saw Guerrera, you can go, "Cool, this conflict is still a problem a couple of years later in Rogue One! This seems logical and it's fun to know how his story plays out!" But if you haven't seen Rogue One, he still has a reason to be there and makes sense. You don't feel like he's a teaser trailer plopped into the middle of the book. There's no "but the other shoe never dropped!" feeling. Ditto the planet Crait, awkward teenage Amilyn Holdo, etc. I wish more media-verses handled their cross-references so well.