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

[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.