When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we’ve already got plenty of something else.
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Star Wars is the biggest science fiction franchise of all time. It works best, and it’s at its biggest when it sticks with a certain set of core rules.
I’m not talking about the Jedi rules against falling in love here. That’s just an organizational edict. I’m talking about fundamental laws that make the fictional Star Wars universe work.
It’s what separates a big, enduring fictional universe like Star Wars from a flash in the pan, which burns bright and fades away. These rules make Star Wars feel like Star Wars instead of like some other fictional science fiction universe. Star Trek, for instance, has its own set of very different rules.
These are the rules of Star Wars.
Rule One: Space Is Small
Space is small. In some science fiction franchises, there are vast distances to cover and long periods of time involved to get around. In Star Wars, everywhere in the galaxy can be reached with a relatively short hop 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 hunk of junk and a semi-operable hyperdrive. It’s not bad writing. It’s part of the style and tone of the Star Wars universe, which is built around adventure and excitement, not exploration and introspection.
When you enter the Star Wars universe, you are on a fast-paced, exciting adventure. Not, on a slow journey through the infinite. It’s something Star Wars should never stray away from.
Rule Two: Better Left Unsaid
Star Wars works best when the people and places in it just exist. We always jump into a lived-in universe where, much like in our daily lives, people don’t spend much time sitting around thinking about why or how their world works. Not only does that make this universe feel more real, but it also makes Star Wars more fun.
We’re free to go off on adventures with Han Solo without worrying about the economics of smuggling. He probably knows all about how it works in order to do his job, but we don’t need to, and that’s good enough.
We really didn’t need to know how the Force works either, and trying to tell us took a lot of the fun out of it and held Star Wars back. Writers incapable of thinking of 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’re only looking in on them from the outside, we don’t. That’s good.
Rule Three: Technology And Magic Are The Same
It might seem like Star Wars is about the collision of the unseen 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 down a stormtrooper with a blaster, it should and usually does feel as if two wizards of different philosophies and abilities are facing off in a magic showdown. The technology of Star Wars is even less well explained than The Force. We don’t know how either of them works, only that they do.
Ships seem to be cobbled together out of random pieces of sheet metal, wires, and determined desire. The Force is something that works if you want it to, hard enough.
Getting lost in the explanations of how these things work is a waste of time. The only thing that matters is that they’re visually and tonally consistent.
Force powers should have a certain look and feel and a certain range of things they can do. Blaster bolts should always have a similar appearance and way of operating. Lightsaber skills should fit within a certain range of reality. Starships should all have similar basic components like a hyperdrive, a cockpit or bridge, and a sublight engine.
Being consistent about the way your magic works is important. Examining how it works is not, and should be avoided.
Rule Four: Humans Are Everywhere And From Nowhere
In Star Wars, every species has a home planet. Wookies come from Kashyyk. Gunguns live on Naboo. Mon Calamari come from Mon Cal.
Every species has a home. Every species except the most common one.
Humans are everywhere and from nowhere. There is no human planet. There are humans living on planets, and in some cases, they’ve even squatted on the planets of other species, as happened on Naboo.
The Mandalorians are from Mandalore… but not originally. That’s just another planet humans settled on and then started calling themselves something else.
Humans don’t have a home planet, and their origins are never explored in Star Wars. That’s for the best. It’s not interesting, and the franchise doesn’t need those kinds of details. Those approaches are best left to bigger-thinking sci-fi like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Rule Five: Species Doesn’t Matter
While most of the people inhabiting the Star Wars universe tend to be human-looking, it doesn’t matter much. No one in Star Wars seems to care if the being standing opposite them is a human or a thing with tentacles and giant crab claws. No one cares.
Species rarely comes up, unless say, there’s a situation in which having giant crab claws might be beneficial. Then someone will probably say: Hey! Lucky us! You have giant crab claws you can use!
Most people can’t understand a word Wookies say, but other than to recognize they are big and have a temper, they’re still treated much the same as everyone else. If Wookies are punished, as they were by the Empire, it’s not because they are Wookies but because they ripped a bunch of stormtroopers’ arms off.
Even the Empire, which seems to be a mostly human-based organization, doesn’t adhere all that strictly to this as a rule. Their troops are happy to follow around Grand Admiral Thrawn and he’s blue. The Empire is fine with any being who’s willing to work for the Empire. The Rebels are ready to recruit anyone who hates the Imperials.
What color your skin is or, oh my isn’t your neck weirdly long, doesn’t come up much. When it does come up, it’s usually more of a recognition of fact rather than some sort of xenophobic bias.
Rule Six: Droids Are Pets
In the Star Wars universe, species doesn’t matter, but biological or not does. All the lack of bias and discrimination applied to beings based on their species is bottled up and heaped on droids, who, while seemingly intelligent, are rarely treated better than a used toaster.
To be fair, most droids don’t seem to mind this, and perhaps that fact alone is enough to justify their treatment. It’s what Star Wars droids were made for. They like what they are, and so they are happy to be treated like equipment. It’s fulfilling.
It’s also worth noting that not all droids are sentient. The little rolling box sweeping the floors on a Star Destroyer probably isn’t much smarter than a Roomba. Droid intelligence exists on a spectrum, with some, like R2 units, being equal to that of a biological sentient and others being varying shades below that.
Are protocol droids sentient? The answer is it depends.
Droids are often sentient and are still treated as slaves and always must be. The Star Wars universe only works as long as droids are second-class residents of it, and the whole thing falls apart the minute they aren’t.
The franchise has dabbled here and there with the concept of droid rights, but it shouldn’t. The last thing we need is to reframe Princess Leia as a slave owner.
If droids were somehow freed, the entire Galaxy would probably starve without droids to do the bulk of the labor. No one wants a TV show about the Great Star Wars Droid Famine. Droids should always be portrayed as loyal pets, and there should be no deeper exploration of that.
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’s never been about that.
From the beginning, Star Wars has been about the moral conflict inside us all. Vader did horrible things, but in the end, he was redeemed because he was never entirely evil; there was always good in him somewhere.
Anakin did some good things, but later in life, he took a turn for the worse and started murdering toddlers. Han Solo was a rogue, a scoundrel, a criminal, and also a hell-of-a nice guy once you get to know him.
Most of the franchise’s bad guys also have the capacity for good, and most of their good guys have the same capacity for evil. It’s that duality that makes them interesting.
Rule Eight: One True Villain
The true villain of Star Wars, the one consistent face of evil across the entire franchise, has not been, and should never be, Palpatine or the Dark Side of the Force. The true villain of Star Wars is government bureaucracy.
The Death Star, in the first movie, was the ultimate representative of that. The final form of what happens when vast numbers of bureaucrats strip the wealth of those under their control and use it to construct massive, impractical, totally flawed weapons of war. When it didn’t work, the same inflexible, massively incompetent bureaucratic structure, run by Imperial DMV workers who only care about keeping their jobs so they can’t admit they were wrong, turned around and made the same thing all over again.
That’s what made Luke Skywalker’s journey so thrilling. He wasn’t fighting a person, he was fighting an oppressive system of corrupt bureaucratic oppression. The same one we’re all tortured by when we have to go down and get new license plates for our truck. The same one we’re tormented by when filling out forms for the IRS.
Luke was fighting a legion of lazy public school teachers and code violation inspectors on behalf of all the normal people who want to be left the hell alone.
The best of the recent Star Wars series is Andor, and Andor, is the best recent Star Wars series specifically because it makes that bloated bureaucracy the show’s sole villain. Andor is about guys in cubicles and meetings planning the destruction of innocents. They do it not because they’re evil but because that’s how they get paid.
Star Wars should only ever have one villain. It’s not Palpatine and never was. The true villain of Star Wars is the massive bureaucracy Palpatine represents.
Using The 8 Rules Of Star Wars
Those are the 8 most important, foundational rules of the Star Wars franchise. They aren’t always followed perfectly, but Star Wars does make an effort to stick with them when its working.
When Star Wars deviates from these basic, fundamental principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we’ve already got plenty of something else.
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 impediment to it.
