Chat corner: Free Friday

[annathecrow]

Welcome to Free Friday, your weekly free-for-all chat post. Anything SW-related is fair game.

Have fun!

 

Comments

Parallel stories!

[sathari]

Anybody want to talk about stories they see as having parallels to some aspect of SW? Common themes/"if you like this in SW, you might also like..." kind of things, or similar? I'll put one of mine in as a comment to this thread.

Re: Parallel stories!

[sathari]

I've been thinking about the parallels and compare/contrasts I see between Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga and the ST, and specifically Ben|Kylo's family. My tl;dr and somewhat snarky version is that the main family in that series is what happens if Han and Leia get together when they're older, wiser, have already had at least one serious failed attempted-co-parenting relationship under their belt (and both of them actively wanted to be parents as a goal before they even got together), and thus do a better job of dealing with their kid's special needs... and he still ends up with a massive family-legacy-related chip on his shoulder and an alternate identity (and also a relic of his grandfather's that he carries around in his early twenties as a kind of security blanket, no, really, I didn't make that up), but at least he's relentlessly loyal to his family. Also an hilariously but also dreadfully screwed up initial relationship proposal to the woman of his dreams that he does end up working out in the end. (Also that Kylo Ren is basically "If Aral and Cordelia had reacted to Miles' health needs by packing him off to Cordelia's brother on her homeworld and the corollaries to that mean that when Ser Galen wanted to set up a Byzantine situation where he gets Aral's kid to kill him, he doesn't need a clone because Miles is bitter and alienated from his parents enough that he's happy to oblige," and, yes, this is also some of what I see in the ST.)

...and I started to go into more detail here, and then wasn't sure how much I'd need to synopsize the Vorkosiverse, so I figure I'll see if anyone's interested first?

Re: Parallel stories!

[havendale]

This is a fun question! I’m going to be very cliché and talk about Star Trek.

I don’t think Star Trek generally has much in common with Star Wars apart from being set in space, but it does strike me that if you like the Clone Wars era, you could do worse than Deep Space Nine, which mostly ditches exploration-related storylines in favour of politics and war drama. Both DS9 and the PT/TCW, IMO, are less interested in the military aspects of war than in what war does to democratic values and institutions: the PT is very preoccupied with how a would-be dictator can use the rhetoric of national security to seize power, and while the President of the Federation is not (as far as we know) secretly engineering the Dominion War in DS9, it does create some interesting tension between the Federation’s ostensible idealism and the increasingly nasty things our heroes end up doing. You’ve also got Gul Dukat’s rise to power on Cardassia, which is a bit Palpatine-esque insofar as it involves a militaristic strongman crushing a struggling democracy and the public cheering him on.

I suspect you could draw some parallels as well between the Force and the Bajoran religion (DS9 is much more on the science fantasy side of things than, say, TOS or TNG), but I think I’d need to rewatch the Bajor-related episodes before delving into that.