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]

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.