When Star Wars deviates from these basic core principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot of other things.
Written by Joshua Tyler | Published
Star Wars is the biggest science fiction series of all time. They work best and are at their greatest when they adhere to a certain set of ground rules.
I’m not talking about the Jedi rules against falling in love here. This is just a regulatory decree. I’m talking about the basic laws that make the fictional Star Wars universe work.
It’s what separates a big, enduring fantasy universe like Star Wars from a flash in the pan, which burns out and fades away. These rules make Star Wars feel like Star Wars instead of like any other sci-fi fantasy universe. For example, Star Trek has its own set of very different rules.
These are the rules of Star Wars.
First rule: Space is small
The space is small. In some science fiction films, there are huge distances to travel and long periods of time to travel. 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 remote, like The Outer Rim, but even those are easily accessible by anyone with a 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 contemplation.
When you enter the world of Star Wars, you are in for an exciting, fast-paced adventure. No, a slow journey through infinity. It’s something Star Wars should never stray from.
Second rule: It’s best left unsaid
Star Wars works best when the people and places in it are present. We are always jumping into a world we live in, as in our daily lives, where people don’t spend a lot of time sitting down thinking about why or how their world works. Not only does this make this universe feel more realistic, it also makes Star Wars more fun.
We are free to go on adventures with Han Solo without worrying about the economics of smuggling. Maybe he knows everything about how it works in order to do his job, but we don’t need to, and that’s good enough.
We didn’t really need to know how the Force worked either, and trying to tell us took a lot of the fun out of it and hindered the rise of Star Wars. Writers unable to think of better plots often resort to exposition rather than execution, and when it comes to Star Wars, that never works.
Star Wars is a world. The people who live there know how it’s done, and since we’re only looking at them from the outside, we don’t know. This is good.
Third rule: Technology and magic are the same thing
It may seem as if Star Wars is about the unseen world of power colliding with the technological world of the Empire, but nothing could be further from the truth. They’re both just different forms of magic.
When you see a Jedi confronting a Stormtrooper with a blaster, it should usually feel as if two wizards with different philosophies and abilities are having a magical encounter. Star Wars technology is less well explained than The Force. We don’t know how either works, just what it does.
The ships appear to be cobbled together from random pieces of sheet metal, wire, and specific desire. Power is something that works if you want it to, hard enough.
Getting lost in explanations of how these things work is a waste of time. The only thing that matters is that they are visually and tonally consistent.
Force powers must have a certain look and feel and a certain set of things they can do. Blasting nails should always have a similar appearance and method of operation. Lightsaber skills must fit within a certain scope of reality. All starships must have similar basic components such as a hyperdrive, a cockpit or bridge, and a light engine.
It’s important to be consistent about the way you work your magic. Examining how it works is not, and should be avoided.
Fourth rule: Humans are everywhere and nowhere
In Star Wars, each species has a home planet. Wookiees come from Kashyyyk. Gunguns live on Naboo. Mon Calamari comes from Mon Cal.
Every species has a home. All types except the most common.
Humans exist everywhere and nowhere. There is no human planet. There are humans living on planets, and in some cases, they have settled on planets of other species, as happened on Naboo.
Mandalorians are from Mandalore…but not originally. This is just another planet that humans settled on and then started calling themselves something else.
Humans do not have a home planet, and their origins are never explored in Star Wars. This is for the best. It’s not interesting, and the franchise doesn’t need that kind of detail. These methods are best left to bigger-minded sci-fi movies like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Rule five: Genres don’t matter
Although most people living in the Star Wars universe tend to be human-looking, that doesn’t matter much. No one in Star Wars seems to care if the creature standing in front of them is a human or something with giant lobster claws and claws. Nobody cares.
The species rarely appears, unless there is a situation where the presence of giant crab claws might be beneficial. And someone will probably say: Hey! Lucky us! You have giant crab claws that you can use!
Most people can’t understand a word the Wookiees are saying, but other than admitting that they are big and have a moody temper, they are still treated the same way as everyone else. If the Wookiees are punished, as they were by the Empire, it’s not because they’re Wookiees but because they tore off a bunch of Stormtroopers’ arms.
Even the Empire, which seems to be a mostly human-based organization, doesn’t adhere to all that strictly as a rule. Their forces are happy to follow around Grand Admiral Thrawn who is blue. The Empire is fine with any being willing to work for the Empire. The Rebels are willing to recruit anyone who hates the Imperials.
What color is your skin, or oh my gosh, your neck isn’t weirdly long, it doesn’t show much. When it comes down to it, it’s usually more an acknowledgment of the truth than some kind of bias against foreigners.
Sixth rule: Robots are pets
In the Star Wars universe, gender doesn’t matter, what matters is whether it’s biological or not. All the lack of prejudice and discrimination applied to beings based on their sex is bottled up and heaped onto robots, who, though seemingly intelligent, are rarely treated better than a used toaster.
To be fair, most robots don’t seem to care about this, and that fact alone is probably enough to justify their treatment. This is what Star Wars robots are made for. They like what they are, so they are happy to treat them like equipment. It’s fulfillment.
It is also worth noting that not all robots are sentient. The little rolling box that sweeps the floors in Star Destroyer probably isn’t any smarter than a Roomba. Robot intelligence exists on a broad spectrum, with some, such as R2 units, being equal to biosensory and others varying degrees below that.
Are protocol robots conscious? The answer is it depends.
Robots are often sentient and are still treated as slaves and always should be. The Star Wars universe only works as long as droids are second-class inhabitants of it, and the whole thing falls apart the moment they’re not.
The series has dabbled here and there with the concept of robot rights, but it shouldn’t. The last thing we need is to recast Princess Leia as a slave owner.
If the robots were somehow freed, the entire galaxy would likely starve without the robots doing the bulk of the work. Nobody wants a TV show about the Great Star Wars Droid Famine. Robots should always be portrayed as loyal pets, and there should be no deeper exploration of that.
Seventh rule: Everyone can change
People often talk about Star Wars in terms of light and dark, as if it’s a series about pure good guys fighting pure evil. But it was never about that.
From the beginning, Star Wars has been about the moral struggle within all of us. Vader did terrible things, but in the end he was redeemed because he was never completely 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 killing young children. Han Solo was a rogue, a scoundrel, a criminal and also a nice guy once you got to know him.
Most of the villains in the series also have the ability to do good, and most of the good guys have the same ability to do evil. It’s that duality that makes it interesting.
Rule eight: One real villain
The true villain of Star Wars, the one consistent face of evil across the entire franchise, was not, and never should have been, Palpatine or the Dark Side of the Force. The real villain in Star Wars is government bureaucracy.
The Death Star, in the first film, was the ultimate representative of this. The ultimate form of what happens when large numbers of bureaucrats strip the wealth of those under their control and use it to build massive, unwieldy and completely flawed weapons of war. When it didn’t work, the same inflexible and highly incompetent bureaucratic structure, run by Imperial DMV workers who only cared about keeping their jobs so they couldn’t admit they were wrong, turned around and did the same thing again.
This is what made Luke Skywalker’s journey so exciting. He was not fighting a person, but an oppressive system of corrupt bureaucratic oppression. The same thing we all agonize over when we have to go down and get new license plates for our truck. The same thing we agonize over when filling out IRS forms.
Luke was fighting a horde of lazy public school teachers and code violation inspectors on behalf of all the ordinary people who wanted to be left alone in hell.
The best of the latest Star Wars series is AndorAnd Andor, is the best modern Star Wars series precisely because it makes that bloated bureaucracy the show’s only villain. Andor is about men in cubicles and meetings plotting to destroy innocent people. They do this not because they are evil but because this is how they get paid.
Star Wars should only have one villain. He is not Palpatine and never was. The real villain in Star Wars is the massive bureaucracy represented by Palpatine.
Using the eight rules of Star Wars
These are the 8 most important rules of thumb for the Star Wars franchise. It’s not always followed perfectly, but Star Wars makes an effort to stick to it as it works.
When Star Wars deviates from these basic core principles, it stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like something else. And we already have a lot of other things.
Future Star Wars writers took notice and began getting creative, using these eight rules as a compass that pointed the way to, rather than an obstacle to, greater creativity in a galaxy far, far away.