Star Wars: The High Republic

So… this has dropped!

The High Republic is the Next Big Thing for Star Wars, now that the Skywalker Saga is over. To some extent, this was what a lot of people had been expecting. I mean, the favourite fan theory was for Knights of the Old Republic, which is of course thousands of years prior to the Battle of Yavin. We’ve got a lot of really great storytelling in that period from the old canon, of course culminating in the wonderful Tales of the Jedi, which you can read about in my old blog here.

The High Republic is set, I believe, 200 years prior to the events of the prequels. So we’re not quite talking the ancient history of TotJ or KotOR but, I would expect, something much more akin to the Jedi storylines of the prequels themselves. We’re promised Jedi who are like Knights of the Round Table, which I’m hoping means will bring some really noble and actually good Jedi. There’s a lot to be said on this subject, for sure, but I feel like the prequels were a bit flat on the Jedi as a whole, and it fell to the comics and novels that came out alongside the films to fill in the blanks. We need Jedi who embody what it means to be a part of the Order, not those who stand out from it like Qui-Gon or Mace, you know?

My first thought, upon seeing the trailer there, was that this could be Disney attempting to almost re-write the prequels, taking the stuff that people liked – such as seeing Jedi en masse – and putting them into a new era to sort of capitalize on that. We couldn’t have a lot of Jedi in the movies that Disney has put out so far and, so I’ve heard, this series is limited to books of various descriptions. So, no movies yet, but what’s to say this isn’t setting us up for something further back in the past? Testing the waters with seeing whether people still respond to the Jedi capers, before we then head back into the past with a movie series set properly in the KotOR era?

Interesting.

Having a core cast of characters that will grow, and that will straddle comics, novels and the like, is really interesting – I hope it won’t end up being the sort of melange that we had in Rebels, for example. Hopefully it will be good, and we’ll get a nice look at the wider universe as well – we’ve had the usual mix of scum and villainy promised, of course, so I’m excited to see what that will bring us.

In fact, now that I think of it, I wonder whether we’ll see breakout characters like Cad Bane coming out.

So, that’s Project Luminous, then!

I’ve been a bit down on the new Star Wars lately, it seems, but I’m taking a bit of a stand on this one, and I’m going to choose to be hopeful. It’s a pretty unexplored era so far as looking back to the Legends stuff, so there’s less of a risk for me comparing it to what we’ve lost.

Let’s hope it delivers!