Why Star Wars Lore Matters

Hi, my name is Adam Robles, and today is a little bit of a different video. I've never covered a topic like this before, but what I want to talk about is Star Wars. As you can see, I love Star Wars. I've got posters here, I've got ships, I've even got some kind of weird energy drink here that has Star Wars.

I've got a ton of stuff. I love playing Star Wars video games, I love playing Star Wars tabletop games. I've loved Star Wars since I was a little kid. And one of the things I found very interesting about The Last Jedi is sort of the response to it.

Some people really like it, some people really don't like it, and that's not really the point of this video to talk about that, although my opinion will probably come out in the course of this and other videos.

But what I want to talk about is this debate that's been going on. You know, people who really don't like the new Star Wars. One of the main complaints is that it disregards or even disrespects the established Star Wars lore that has been established over the course of six, seven movies.

And they really don't like that. They feel disrespected, they feel slighted by Rian Johnson's interpretation of Star Wars because it doesn't stay with the lore. And the people who do like the movie, a lot of times that really bothers them that people think it disrespects the lore.

In their opinion, it doesn't at all. In fact, it's very, it has a continuity. The lore of Star Wars that's been established over six movies, it continues in The Last Jedi. That's what they would say. But whatever, wherever you fall on that, whether you think it does stay with the lore or if it disrespects the lore, the point is you care about the lore.

Why Star Wars Lore Matters

And I want to explore why is that? Why do people care so much about Star Wars lore? It's just a story, right? In fact, that's what a lot of people will say. They'll say, what's the point of this debate?

It's just a story. It's just a, it's just a fiction. Who cares if it disrespects the lore or not? And the question is, why does lore matter? Because I think it does. I think, you know, lore, Star Wars lore is not the most important thing in the world.

Don't get me wrong. But I do think that it has an impact on reality. I think it actually does have a real life impact. Star Wars lore is interesting because, you know, Star Wars, the first movie, it was released before I was born.

But, you know, it was a one-off movie. I don't think anybody expected it to be a huge empire, a huge intellectual property. And after the fact, it was a huge hit. After the fact, they, the Star Wars brand really started expanding.

And what they found was they needed to start creating details in this universe that they had created. And a lot of people don't know, but these two books are responsible for a lot of the Star Wars lore.

This is a role-playing game that was released in 1987 and the source book for the role-playing game. And a role-playing game, if you don't know, you kind of create your own story. It's like the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure.

And so what they did was they created a lot of details so that you could create a good story while you're playing the game using a lot of the source material in here. So, you know, in the movies, you would see an alien, but you wouldn't know what that alien was.

In these books, they named the aliens, they talked about their characteristics, they talked about where they were from, the planets, things like that. You know, in the movies, you know, you would see an X-wing and you would only kind of know it was an X-wing because, you know, it looked like an X or maybe one line in the movie talked about it.

But these books talked about what X-wings do and what they're capable of and stuff like that. So this is really the source material for the lore. These are lore books, really. And the lore has been established in this and other things as well.

And this is really where the universe sort of took shape. And so here's the question. Why does all this matter? Why do I say that it actually matters in reality? Well, one reason, I think, is that art is an attempt to interpret reality.

Art as Interpretation of Reality

And so if a movie or a painting or a book or whatever, if we're going to take it seriously as art, then we're going to have to say, OK, this is a this is a movie. It's a fantasy world. There's the force.

There's these futuristic ships and things like that. But what is this? What is this saying about reality? What's what? What is this? How should we interpret this movie? And a lot of people would interpret it as, you know, a battle between good and evil or a rise to power or things like that coming of age, you know, stuff like that.

And so, you know, Star Wars isn't saying that there's this real life force that you can do telekinesis with and not saying that that's real, but it's saying that there is something real about these characters and their struggle.

And we want to interpret what that is. And so if so, so the lore kind of works as this this system of rules that allow us to interpret what the story is trying to interpret about reality. And so lore is important because if you break the lore, you can get false positives on interpretation.

Girl Power, Lore, and False Positives

And here's what I mean by that. So a lot of people have said, and I would tend to agree with this, a lot of people have said that the new movie, The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens, it is pushing this sort of girl power narrative that girls can be powerful, too.

And and, you know, they can be warriors as well. And I think that's definitely one of the messages of these movies. And I'm not saying I have a problem with that necessarily. But what happens is, is that if the movie breaks the lore of how power works and how the force works, for example, then the interpretation is not believable.

It's not actually true. It's a lie. So a lot of people have pointed out that Rey is just powerful automatically. She doesn't have any training. She doesn't earn it. She doesn't try very hard to get her powers, but she just has them.

And she's like this ultimate powerful person. And, you know, the problem with that is if you're trying to give us this message that that girls can have girl power, then that's totally fine. But you but when you break the lore that says, you know, Jedis have to train for a certain amount of time, Jedis have to work at it, they have to be disciplined and all that.

When you break that lore and you just make her powerful for no reason, then the interpretation is a lie. So it's like, oh, so can girls really be powerful? Because this movie is lying to me about about this girl being powerful.

Do you see what I'm saying? So it's it's not like it's not like you can't make up a story where there's this powerful girl that's just powerful automatically. That's totally OK. But when your movie is the eighth in a series of movies, it's the eighth one.

And all this time, we've learned that if you're going to be a good guy using the force, you need to put all this work and time into it. And then all of a sudden there's this girl power character who doesn't put that that time in.

See, you've got a problem there. What you're trying to say about reality, it doesn't it doesn't land. It doesn't make any sense. And people don't believe it. And so I wouldn't have a problem with with Ray as a powerful character if she earned it the way everybody did, because that would fit with the lore.

They see the established rules of the universe. She's following them, too. And she's powerful as a girl as well. You see, that's the thing. When you break lore, your message is undermined. And so it leads you to a false positive in your interpretation of reality.

And so that's why lore matters, because, look, whether you like the girl power message of Star Wars, the new ones or not, you know, you have to admit that the art does a poor job of of of showing it because it breaks that lore, at least in my opinion.

And so that that's one reason why I think lore matters. The other thing is, I would say that a lot of times art is not just trying to interpret reality, but it's also trying to project what their hope, what their vision for reality should be.

Art as a Vision for What Reality Ought to Be

So so sometimes art will show you what the world ought to be like, not really what it is. And so they're trying to attempt to kind of shape the future, in other words, through their art. And again, if if you do that by just breaking the rules of your universe, then it's very ineffective again, because, you know, in history, we can't just break the rules of how the universe works.

We can't just change the way the universe works in order to establish our hopeful future. You still have to work within the rules of the universe, the laws of nature, the laws of physics. They don't change just because you want them to.

And so, again, if if if the force awakens and the last Jedi is attempting to show us what a world ought to be like, doing it by breaking the lore gives you, again, a false narrative. It gives you a false hope of how the future could go, because, again, if you work within the rule set, like if again, if Rey had trained with the force and she became very powerful, then, yeah, of course, we can see how women could sort of get more powerful in reality.

But if they can only do it because there's no reason it just happens and that's not how the lore works, that's not how the established universe works, then it's a lie. It's not believable. And so, you know, that that's why I think that was one reason why I think the lore of Star Wars matters.

And so let's let's, you know, we'll over the course of the next few videos, we're going to talk a lot more about this. I think it's important because Star Wars lore might not have thought about it like this before, but but really any story, any lore of a universe that's just sort of a fantasy universe does have an impact on reality.

And I think when you just sort of disregard aspects of it, the message that you think you're you're saying, actually, it's not no one buys it. No one believes it's not it's not good art, really. And, you know, so so I hope this is interesting at the very least, if you've never thought about Star Wars lore before and you never had an opinion about it, maybe you will now going forward.

And again, if you like the movie or didn't like the movie, that's not really my concern. My concern is that you understand how to interpret art, interpret Star Wars, because I think it actually matters in real life.

Anyway, hope this is helpful. God bless.