Feature Creep and Star Wars: Force Whatnow?
When magic doesn’t have any limits, it gets boring, and fast.
FRIENDOS, I am so old I can remember a time when there were just three Star Wars movies and a scattering of other stuff, mostly mediocre novels and one legendary holiday special1. Living in this future where there’s a new Star Wars-related series, video game, film, or immersive virtual reality experience every other day feels like a prank to someone of my vintage. I spent a lot of time as a kid wishing for just this kind of reality—I remember once someone posted a fake script on the Internet2 that was supposedly George Lucas’s vision of the Fall of the Galactic Republic and how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader and I was riveted even though I knew it was fake. Just the idea that it might someday happen was exciting3.
And now I live that dream and it’s terrible4. Star Wars was always just a vehicle for licensing deals more than an actual story, but over the years some very talented people have taken the filthy lucre and in exchange made the franchise almost cromulent at times. But there have been a lot of freelancers working in this universe. A lot. And so the Star Wars universe has developed a near-fatal case of something that comes for all sprawling fictional universes: Feature creep. Specifically, The Force is so fucked up beyond all proportion as of this writing the only cure is to burn it all down and reboot the whole damn thing5.
Force Healing my Ass
Look, I’m aware that every day that goes by thrusts me deeper into elderly curmudgeon territory6, and that people are allowed to just like things. So stipulated. But The Problem with The Force is a fundamental one that has more or less ruined much of the Star Wars narrative in the modern era, so it’s worth discussing from a writing POV. In short, The Force has become too magical.
In the first trilogy of films, The Force was a purposefully vague spiritual power gained through meditation and devotion7. Some of the flashier stuff that could be done with it was kind of easy, but doing anything of real consequence required a lot of discipline and practice. And even then, it was presented as a subtle power, really. What was the biggest Force moment in the original films? Yoda slooooowwwwwllllly dragging the X-Wing out of the swamp8? Force lightning from our friend the Emperor? Sure, nice moments, but not exactly a wide-range superpower. The Force is presented as a small-scale power, really. Vader can choke you or grab your blasters from your hands with a gesture, but he’s not out there casting magic spells.
Over the course of time and corporate money, however, the Force has evolved into magic. What can’t the Force do9? It can now heal you, it can allow to move at super speeds, it can resurrect the dead, it can project a perfect simulacrum of you across vast distances, it can read your mind and it can grab hold of enormous spaceships and drag them back to the surface and destroy them. There’s simply no difference between the Force and simple, generic fantasy trope magic at this point. What was once a mysterious and interestingly limited facet of a distinct fictional universe is now basically just “I point at the things I wish to command10.”
Levitating Out of Plot Corners
The problem with the messy, sloppy Force of the modern era is that it’s essentially a blank check for plot problems. Written yourself into a plot corner? No worries, just invent a new Force power11 and watch the magic happen. Literally.
You can see evidence of the corrosive nature of unlimited magical powers in the last turd of a Star Wars movie, which didn’t even bother to explain how, exactly, a Sith Lord who had been dead since 1983 came back to life, offering the rather marvelous sentence “Somehow Palpatine returned” as the sole explanation for a literal resurrection12. The Force, finally, has become a shapeless magic that is used to explain away any convenient plot turn—if you need a character to survive a lethal injury, Force Heal them. If you need a character to suddenly be able to, I don’t know, fly? Turn invisible? Transform into The Incredible Hulk? Invent Force Whatever and make it so.
It’s lazy, and it renders your stories terrible because you’re no longer bound by rules and limitations. Contrary to the belief of bad writers everywhere, having zero limitations on your plot mechanics makes for some very bad stories, because there’s not much tension to be had when your character can just Force Whatever their way out of any jam13. This is especially notable when it comes to “twists,” that fun plotting element that idiots everywhere confuse with good writing, because Force Whatever means you can totally surprise your audience with plot twists that make absolutely no sense whatsoever, which certainly does make it easy to surprise us rubes14.
Of course, I didn’t invent a fictional universe that has generated kazillions of dollars for my corporate masters, so what do I know15? I do know that if midichlorians actually existed and allowed you to become a badass Jedi or Sith there would 100% be a robust black market dealing in injectable blood siphoned from Force-sensitive children that would give you a brief but potent Force sensibility any time you wanted. Got a big meeting at work? Spend a few bars on some Force Blood and use that Jedi Mind Trick to make the sale. I think I just wrote a better story than Rise of Skywalker.
Next week: Cliff Booth and good character work
Other things I remember: Having a phone card from the phone company I could use at pay phones to make calls without change, cassingles, my parents getting an enormous delivery from the local liquor store every week like we were extras on Mad Men, trash cans on the subway platforms in NYC, when MP3 players were as large as a brick and twice as heavy, and a glorious time when my house was not overrun by imperious cats.
It took four hours to download.
I recently experienced a faint echo of that excitement when they announced a Community movie. I’m sure my disappointment will be similarly epic.
Is I Lived that Dream and It Was Terrible the new title of my memoir? You betcha.
Step one: Make Force power linked to hairstyle. The crazier your Star Wars-ian hair style, the more powerful a Force Wizard you are.
I will enjoy having a cane to shake angrily at people.
Also helmets that made you effectively blind and droids designed to randomly shoot painful lasers at you, for some reason.
This is a civilization capable of building planet-sized laser guns that destroy other planets, but there’s no super duper anti-grav winch of some sort to pull a starship out of a swamp? Lame.
You know you’re dealing with bad science fiction when they start pairing a sci-fi word with a regular word to make new things. I can’t wait to see some Force Racing or Force Dancing.
If I was Force sensitive I would use it mainly to float beers to me from the kitchen to the living room, and to occasionally use a Mind Trick or two to get out of paying bar bills. Don’t look at me like that, I’m the guy who wrote We Are Not Good People, you can’t possibly be surprised.
Again, I want to see Force Dancing be a thing so badly I’m willing to pony up for a Kickstarter to make it happen.
I know this is explained in a tie-in novel somewhere, but tossing some pennies at a poor writer to fix up your shitty movie franchise is so depressingly common, especially since I’m not the writer getting those pennies.
If Force Hangover Cures existed, what would even be the point of cocktails any more?
To be fair, as I get even (improbably) older I am regularly surprised by a lot of things, my own continued existence being chief among them. My liver is the size of a planet.
My invented fictional universes have generated hundreds of dollars for my corporate masters, and don’t you forget it.
Thanks. I was hoping the holiday special was just one of my DTs.
#10) Homer had a similar idea when he linked a teleporter from the couch to the fridge.
Also, one afternoon, while in the library reading WANGP, I was approached by someone who had some serious comments to make about the title of the book. It's ok tho, we were both drinking at the time.
#13) Force Hangover Cure: Didn't Star Trek avoid the whole sloppy mess by serving "Synthahol" in Ten Forward?
Thanks once again for keeping the word "Cromulent" alive and well.
I shake my cane at all of you young whipper-snappers. I had my first date with my first wife at the premier of Star Wars. (Let’s see, how many wives ago was that?) I guess what I needed was Force Divorce, because Force Marriage worked way too well.