Fiction Friction: You Are The Last Jedi (Except For All The Others)
- cepmurphywrites
- 7h
- 12 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
In this article, I will examine a phenomenon of writing in which stated absolutes become an unintended restriction on future storytelling. In many ways, this is a counterpart to an earlier article I wrote entitled “The Romulan Straitjacket” which focused on a similar facet but with a sense of time rather than space. In that article, I looked at how Star Trek has a habit of saying that this is explicitly the first contact with an alien race (even if it’s not necessary for the story) or for saying that a particular alien race has been out of contact for – invariably – ‘100 years’. This was usually fine at the time, but unintentionally limited future storytelling, because it means a prequel set before that first contact, or during that hundred years, can never feature the alien race in question. That is, unless you are willing to bend over backwards with explanations to the point of doing mental Karma Sutra gymnastics in order that you can still use the iconic Gorn before their explicit first appearance in “Arena”, as the Strange New Worlds series seems keen to.
Star Trek could also be an example of the problem I’ll be discussing today, albeit not the strongest example. Star Trek is usually written to imply there are endless wonders in the galaxy just out of reach (indeed, with an improbable number of planets and alien races who only appear once and then are never mentioned again!) so the problem of absolutes rarely comes up. One element where it does is how later works choose to present the original series (TOS) with Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise. Early episodes of The Next Generation (TNG) seem to be keen to imply Kirk, his ship and crew were just one of many who had adventures and people in the ‘present day’ would not immediately think of them. (This may be due to Gene Roddenberry’s quixotic desire to distance TNG from its predecessor). However, after Roddenberry’s death this later shifted to them being presented as being as famous and iconic in-universe as they are in real life pop culture. For example, in Voyager (VGR) Kirk is said to hold the record for the most first contacts until Janeway’s ship was lost in the Delta Quadrant amid unfamiliar aliens, thus implying that the number of new planets and races encountered in TOS was not normal. Of course, the problem with this is that no later Star Trek series is ever going to feature humdrum routine by contrast because that wouldn’t make good television – even a series like Lower Decks (LD) where the whole point is comedy with a B-list crew far from the front lines.
But as I said, Star Trek is not the best example of the problem of absolutes. Its traditional rival Star Wars, as the title of this article implies, is a much more obvious choice. In the original film trilogy, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi explicitly tell Luke Skywalker he is the last of the Jedi. As an aside, there is also a confusing (but famous) retcon in which in The Empire Strikes Back (ESB) Yoda tells Obi-Wan that Luke is not their last hope, “there is another”. In the follow-up Return of the Jedi (ROTJ) Luke is told this is his sister, figures out immediately that this is Leia, and somehow doesn’t have a Túrin Turambar breakdown from the fact that they snogged in the previous film. This is a retcon (albeit not one that explicitly contradicts anything on screen) because Lucas had originally intended for this to be a sequel hook for something else but then decided to close it off. Except it doesn’t make any sense, because the context in which Yoda says there is another hope in ESB is that Luke is about to defy his and Obi-Wan’s warnings and go off to Cloud City to rescue Han, Chewie...and Leia! So if Luke obeyed their warnings, their ‘other hope’ would be in the hands of the Empire anyway!
The irony today, of course, is that there are plenty of other options that Obi-Wan and Yoda could have been talking about if Lucas had let the original line stand, and not explicitly state that Luke is the last Jedi in the follow-up film. This was a problem long before the Disney takeover of Star Wars, much as fans like to blame that for everything, though it has probably got worse since. The problem is that the revival of Star Wars as a brand, after a period of deep uncool-ness in the mid-1980s, was heavily tied to the success of West End Games’ Star Wars tabletop role-playing game. And when people play an RPG based on an iconic film trilogy, they generally want to play characters that loosely resemble those films’ protagonists. Hence the terrifying number of Han Solo knockoffs that continue to litter the galaxy to this day (of which Dash Rendar is perhaps the most well-known) all with a not-quite-Chewbacca alien sidekick. But more problematically, lots of people also want to play as Jedi. And there aren’t meant to be any Jedi left. But nonetheless...
I first encountered this problem when I read stories from the Star Wars Adventure Journal in the collections Tales from the Empire and Tales from the New Republic. There were at least two stories in those collections which featured characters who were either secret Jedi in hiding or, in one case, just a full-blown Jedi Knight who shows up seemingly at random. At the time I assumed the latter case was set in the future after Luke had got his Jedi Academy going and started turning out new Jedi Knights, but now I’m not so sure. One rule which a lot of writers seemed to obey was not having surviving good-guy, light-side Jedi, but you could have as many dark-side Jedi or Jedi-adjacent people (this was before the term Sith was routinely used in its modern sense) as you wanted. Thus rather stacking the odds again Luke and co.! This idea, which manifested with the Inquisitors among others, has stuck around in the new Disney continuity.
Anyway, it got worse and worse over time. In the first revival Star Wars novels which trailblazed the others, Timothy Zahn’s iconic Thrawn Trilogy at the start of the 1990s, Zahn referenced the ‘last of the Jedi’ line, but poignantly has Obi-Wan (in his chronological last appearance) say that Luke is not the last of the old Jedi but the first of the new. Of course, this great line gets completely contradicted as time goes on. Even within the Thrawn Trilogy, Zahn mucked about with cloned Jedi and featured the (iconic) character of Mara Jade, a former servant of the Emperor who was a strong Force-sensitive who could use a lightsaber, though technically not a Jedi. The Dark Empire comics, which quite amazingly fall into tons of the same mistakes as the Disney sequels so the latter could avoid them and chose not to, also feature some surviving Jedi. Luke sets up his Jedi Academy in the trilogy of that title which helps provide a pipeline for new Jedi, but we still get stuff like Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi, with a pre-Purge Jedi surviving as a spirit in the computer system of a ship, and going back in time we have The Courtship of Princess Leia with its Dathomiri Force-witches (I would never have expected this of all things to be brought into the Disney continuity!) and so on, and so on.
Much of this was swept away by the Disney takeover (not always for ill) but that promptly added its own Jedi survivors, some of whom had already been added in the ambiguous changeover period in which much of the Clone Wars series was produced. Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice Ahsoka Tano appeared in that cartoon and survived, but apparently that’s OK as she wasn’t a practising Jedi anymore; once he had fallen and become Darth Vader, Anakin also had another secret apprentice in the Force Unleashed games; in the Rebels cartoon series there’s the surviving Padawan Kanan Jarrus and his apprentice Ezra Bridger, who both disappear from the scene in different ways before the original films start; The Mandalorian features another surviving Jedi Padawan and the return of Ahsoka; and so on, and so on, again.
The frustrating thing is, none of this had to matter if the dialogue in ROTJ had just been phrased slightly differently. In Timothy Zahn’s The Hand of Thrawn, he tries to come up with a philosophical explanation for why Luke had to be the one to fight Vader and the Emperor considering Yoda was still more powerful. In the end, the prequel films showed Yoda being defeated by the Emperor in a straight fight regardless. All you needed as an explanation for why it had to be Luke (or Leia) is that Vader and the Emperor were so powerful together that the only way to defeat them would be for Vader to turn on the Emperor, and the only way to achieve that would be for Anakin Skywalker’s child to reawaken him. However, I suppose that does go against the quite powerful message that Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t think Luke can do it and his faith in his father is rewarded. But my point is, you don’t need to explicitly have Luke be the last Jedi for him to be the last hope. Of course, at the time I doubt Lucas was thinking about restricting future storytelling!
Really, this is just the most obvious and prominent problem of scale in the Star Wars setting. Star Wars is set throughout a huge galaxy with hundreds of named inhabited planets and plenty of implied space to make up new ones. Yet we are told there were only about 1000 Jedi before the fall, the numbers of ships involved in critical space battles always seems far too small, and so on. Planets are often treated more like villages, and characters routinely run into each other by chance. There isn’t a straightforward solution to this, and to some extent I think you just have to suspend your disbelief. Certainly, I don’t think there’s any profit in trying to come up with overly imaginative explanations about what things are ‘actually’ like that end up contradicting everything we actually see on screen, as Star Wars fans seem to love doing.
I’ll end this article with another example, that from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. In general, US superhero comics helped pioneer the idea of a shared setting almost from the beginning. Many of the early superheroes in the 1930s and 40s were very similar in character and concept, with the same, ahem, ‘influences’ from pulp adventure fiction copied in slightly different ways. Over time, writers would branch out and develop them in different ways so they were not so obviously derivative. With them suitably delineated, they could then cross over without it feeling redundant (mostly).
Marvel, then called Atlas Comics, was technically the first to imply any of these characters occupied the same universe rather than each having their own unique setting. In Marvel Mystery Comics 8-9, published in 1940, Bill Everett (creator of the anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner) and Carl Burgos (creator of the more straightforwardly heroic Human Torch) have them meet – and, as became traditional, fight. This trope later became well-established for the first meeting of even two unambiguous heroes, because of the assumption (sometimes justified) that the audience wants to see it, and with some contrived misunderstanding used as the explanation. In this first case, the personality clash of the two makes it much more justifiable, as well as their association with water and fire respectively creating a pleasing elemental opposition.
However, it would be their rivals DC who created the first full superhero team-up a short time later, with the creation of the Justice Society of America (JSA) by Gardner Fox. Interestingly, and perhaps refreshingly from a modern perspective, the first JSA story does not involve the heroes actually teaming up to fight alongside each other: the ‘society’ is literally a kind of clubhouse for heroes to meet up, relax and swap stories. While this is happening, other heroes (including Batman and Superman) are said to be ‘off-camera’ keeping the world safe, a strikingly modern concept and showing how the idea of a shared world was already well under way. The stories that the characters share are new original adventures starring them as individuals, drawn by their usual artists and thus creating a range of different art styles. The comic basically thus works as a sort of equivalent of one of those cereal sampler box sets, allowing the reader to get a glimpse of what each hero’s adventures are like and perhaps tempt them to pick up their own comic.
One might imagine that the biggest issue with reading comics from the 1930s and 1940s is outdated attitude around racism or sexism, and while that can be a problem (though much more the former than the latter – comics from this era tended to be more progressive on gender roles than the post-Comics Code ones from the 1950s and 60s) the biggest wince-inducing, aged like milk moment in the first JSA story is when the Flash says that the Director of the FBI (one J. Edgar Hoover at the time) is a swell guy. He even appears in the follow-up story, when true team-ups begin.
Anyway, this digression sums up how the idea of a shared superhero universe is actually a very old one. From the beginning, it has presented plenty of storytelling opportunities, but also a lot of challenges. Suddenly, writers have to worry if the nature of a character, their backstory, powers and the kind of adventures they have, is too similar to another and whether they will be judged redundant. Inevitably there will be fan questions in the letters page about “why couldn’t this person with these powers have solved this problem?” and we see pre-emptive editor’s notes or unnatural dialogue about how Superman is off solving a problem in space so can’t be part of this. But one of the biggest problems created by the idea of a shared universe is the problem of absolutes which I discussed above. As an individual in their own comic, a superhero can be described as the strongest man in the world, or the world’s greatest detective; but what happens when you put several people with those superlatives together? And who is said to have come first?
When one tries to establish a new superhero universe from scratch today, one can at least benefit from the fact that others have faced these problems beforehand. This is very apparent in the recent Superman film (2025) by James Gunn, in which he explicitly establishes (through background murals) that this world has had superheroes in some form for centuries, albeit not necessarily with large-scale superpowers. In doing so, he takes advantage of DC Comics’ rich trove of characters, including many from other companies that merged into it as discussed above, to populate a whole timeline visible in the background of the Hall of Justice. He is also able to pick and choose three characters from this vast array to form a prototypical ‘Justice Gang’ and ensure they are all very different in character and power set from Superman. This is very sensible.
But Gunn is also benefiting from observing Marvel’s successful, but not flawless, construction of the MCU from 2008 with the debut of Iron Man. One thing which Kids Today(TM) will never believe is that Iron Man used to be a pretty obscure hero to anyone who didn’t read comics themselves; he had a cartoon with a nice theme song but that’s about it. He certainly wasn’t a Marvel A-lister. However, Robert Downey Jr.’s performance (in part informed by parallels between himself and Tony Stark) and the writing propelled the film to great success – though at the time many compared it unfavourably to the contemporaneous The Dark Knight. Marvel went on to release several more films introducing characters like the Hulk, Thor and Captain America, before combining them and others into the highly-successful Avengers Assemble (a.k.a. The Avengers) which set the gold standard for superhero team-up films.
However, when Iron Man came out it was far from certain that any of this would happen. Thus, Tony Stark is introduced in a manner that implies Iron Man is something new and unprecedented in the world. Now even then, I am exaggerating this problem because Marvel did cleverly include the iconic after-credits scene in which Nick Fury explicitly says “You think you’re the only superhero in the world? Mr Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe; you just don’t know it yet.” Thus leaning on the fourth wall as well. It’s a great moment and does lead into the idea that, unlike previous superhero films in which we never got more than a wink to the idea that a setting was shared (like Robin in Batman Forever complaining he could’ve been halfway to Metropolis on his motorbike) these new Marvel films are going to be different.
Nonetheless, though Marvel did a decent job of mitigating against this problem from the start, as they gradually trace out a backstory it does cause some issues that it becomes less and less believable that the recognisable ‘our world’ of 2008 we see in Iron Man could really be indistinguishable from our own. Not only do we learn that Captain America was active in the Second World War, but every Marvel film and spinoff adds more hidden lore and super-powered characters scattered across the history and geography of the world. I don’t think it’s a serious issue, but it does become noteworthy when you go back to look at the earliest MCU films and we have civilian characters reacting with shock to things that should later feel like another Tuesday at the office.
What other examples of restrictive absolutes have you seen in writing? Answers in the comments.
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Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
among others.