oh. hay.

[bornstrong]

Hi, everyone! It's Louisa here (for Iphigenia and a few others~), and I am trying very hard to get back into RP. Boo, work.

So! I have a kind of getting-to-know-you game we can play. Maybe it will be...fun? Hopefully? /cringes at self

I'm curious about everyone's pups' and their respective canons, and I'm hoping others are as well! So, in this post, feel free to link to video clips/blogs/general flailing about the worlds from which your characters come from. Go wild! Wax poetic! Just be excited about media!

Also, if anyone wants to use this post as a sort of ~enabling~ thing, go right ahead. We probably all need more characters to play, right?

Comments

[ixis]

How much does the EU version and the movie version of him deviate? Is it big dramatic stuff that doesn't happen in the movies at all or just different timelines or?

Don't worry, I'm not grilling you to CANON-CHECK you, I don't know shit about Star Wars. Sometimes willfully so.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

It’s never a problem for me to talk Star Wars’ lemmie tell you and I love when people take interest.

So, there are three novels and three novella’s that compose the backstory for Han, written by two authors. I’ll give the highlights, but I’m still in the process of re-reading them all again. (Some of this shit I haven’t read since ’99 or so.)

The Paradise Snare takes place when Han is 19. He was adopted by a man who collects orphans and exploits them in various ways. They all live on this ship called the Trader’s Luck. He spends all his formative years learning how to lie and steal from people and Han escapes at the beginning of the book.

Majority of this story is about Han’s first contractual job as a pilot. He has this idea that this job is going to be simple transports of cargo to and from this planet, but he kind of realizes over time that they have him running drugs.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with this girl from his home world who is among the people his ‘bosses’ are using to harvest these drugs from a dangerous mine inside the planet. They escape.

Han is really happy with this girl. He’s got it in his mind that he’s going to legitimize himself by joining the imperial navy. The end of the novel is him getting into the military academy, but the girl leaves him to work on some of her own personal issues.

(This was my favorite Star Wars book as a kid, so I remember it the best. It’s also the biggest influence on how I play Han.)

The Hutt Gambit tells how why Han’s career as Tie fighter pilot doesn’t last, how he meets Chewie, why the Hutt’s don’t like him in A New Hope, how he becomes infamous among other smugglers and how he wins the Millennium Falcon from Lando in a card game.

Rebel Dawn I hardly remember at all. I think I only read it once back when it first came out. The big take away from this novel has to do with why Han is both sympathetic and not sympathetic to the Rebel Alliance by the time he meets the Skywalkers.

Much of it has to do with that girl from the first novel showing back up and making him feel all the feels. She’s now part of the Alliance and she kind of manipulates Han into pulling a job with her, only to have her turn around and steal all the money to put towards fighting the empire. She tries to get Han to join up, but he’s just pissed at her, and she ends up dying at the end of the book.

The novellas are like Saturday Morning cartoons of Han Solo’s life. They’re fun to read, but they don’t really expand on his character much.

Now keep in mind, all this is bound to get blown up by Disney when they make the Young Han Solo movie.

Reading all these books doesn’t make anything about the trilogy different, but it adds a lot of subtext for the smuggler. We start to understand why he’s so obsessed about getting paid and trying to bail in A New Hope, why he’s so damn persnickety towards Leia’s idealism in the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, why he’s doesn’t like the force, why it’s hard for him to say ‘I love you’ and how he acquired the skills that make him a worthy General by Return of the Jedi.

What gets confusing between Han’s backstory and the trilogy is the spirt of the character and I’ll be honest, it’s something I always struggle with.

When you watch the original trilogy with no knowledge of the books, Han kind of seems lucky and like something of a madcap planner. The guy who comes up with the scheme that’s ‘just crazy enough to work’ with charisma for days and days and days.

The books implicate that he’s really smart, skilled as well as flawed and insecure.

The two tones are kind of in competition with each other and I think at a certain point, you just have to play him one way or the other. Even though he’s the same guy doing the same things in the three movies.

So that’s how he’s both different and the same by way of the EU/Legends canon at the point where he meets the Skywalkers. I’mma go back to sleep now and maybe I’ll do another epic ramble about how he’s different between Force Awakens and the books tomorrow. That’s a lot less subtle.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

So I haven’t read every Star Wars book there is to read, there’s just so friggan many of them and some of the stories depending on what they’re about and who the prominent characters are, some of them are more interesting to me than others. Which, by the way, was the coolest thing about the old EU. There was a character for everybody to latch on to in there somewhere and all different kinds of stories that appealed to different things that people liked about Star Wars.

So this is going to be my (very) rough meta analysis of Han age 30 to 70 in the books versus the movies.

Following RotJ, Han is trying to come to terms with being a general in the The New Republic (that’s what the Rebels evolve into after defeating the Emperor) when he still sees himself as a smuggler at heart. Also, he’s dealing with his insecurities and his feels for Leia.

There’s a really good book (The Courtship of Princess Leia) that takes place during this phase of his life that deals with a prince from a really powerful system proposing marriage to Leia. The guy is very good looking, well to do and could help the Republic a lot with the wealth of his kingdom. So in this story Han really has to prove to himself and his princess why Han Solo is the right man for her.

Also, hilariously in that same book, 3P0 reveals that Han is descended from a line that can trace its roots back to Corellian royalty, when they still had it. Which turns out to be kind of true and kind of not true.

Han and Leia get married. They have three children. A set of twins (are we seeing a theme), Jacen and Jaina, and another son, Anakin, a few years later.

By now, Han is commanding part of the fleet in the army of The New Republic. High ranking. The New Republic is basically always either embroiled in a war of people trying to step in to the power vacuum created in Palpatine’s absence or helping Luke fight off an insidious dark side threat.

He spends a lot of time as a side character in many of the books from this point forward. Many of his scenes involve high military strategy, being part of some sort of daring ship to ship space battle or (sadly less often) being a father to his kids.

Ultimately, Chewie dies during one of these endless conflicts. The situation was that Han was at the Falcon’s ramp, reaching for his brother/partner/bff while his youngest son was flying the ship and Anakin steers the ship away from the planet tha's about to explode before Han can grab him. In his rage and his sorrow at losing Chewbacca, he blames his son for leaving him behind. He spends the next couple years of his life as an alcoholic who can’t really be of much help to anybody and regrettably detached from his family.

This has a profound impact on Anakin Solo going forward who never wants to see anyone get left behind on a mission again. It ends up costing the young Jedi his life, right around the time that Han is starting to get his life back on track.

A few years later, the Solo-Skywalker clan realizes that Han’s remaining son has fallen to the dark side. (As well as fathered a child) It ends up being that his twin sister is the one to kill him, which earns her the title of Sword of the Jedi.

After that Han ends up in a state of semi-retirement and spends a lot of time with his grandchild, though the occasional adventure pulls him back into the fight once in a while.

Conversely, and we only know so much about the Force Awakens Solo family, Han is a lot more … on the periphery of things, it seems.

Han and Leia still get married. They have a son they name after Ben Kenobi. It seems like the movie tries to implicate that Han and Leia aren’t very involved in the care of their son and at some point, he gets shipped off to Uncle Luke for Jedi training.

Ben falls to the dark side, for reasons we don’t yet know (though there’s a book coming out in May that I hope will elaborate on some of this) and his fall rocks the family very hard. Leia copes by throwing herself into being a General. Luke goes soul searching. Han goes back to being a smuggler, but he seems like kind of a shell of himself (till he runs into Rey and Finn).

The novelization of the book seems to suggest that when Han steps onto the platform with Kylo Ren, he kind of knows what’s coming, but it’s his promise to Leia that inspires him to try to bring Ben back to the light. It also suggests, that when the young sith strikes down his father he’s expecting to grow stronger in the force, but instead he’s weakened …

So, when you strip everything down, you have a Han that’s fighting running into battle after Jedi’s he can’t hope to keep pace with (but damn it if he wont try), versus a Han that is licking his wounds and trying to recapture his former glory. I can’t help but prefer the EU Han, even though both versions of the character have moments of great heroism.