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aberration) wrote2020-07-03 05:47 pm
aberration) wrote2020-07-03 05:47 pm
when you're done I'll make you do it all again
There's a lot going on. I'm nervous because I have a lot to do for my job and also my union is having a strike vote in a couple weeks. And I'm afraid that after having been very protected during all this, Rush to Reopen will finally grab me and try to force me into the place I would usually have to work at a lot, which is awful at the best of times but would be a death trap now. But I'm lucky, I also am one of a number of comparatively more forceful and influential people who also don't want to be sent there.
Which is to say... I'm going to be talking about media and Star Wars now
Movies I've logged:
The Iron Giant (1999) ★★★★1/2
The Color of Friendship (2000) ★★★
The Fox and the Hound (1981) ★★★
The Prince of Egypt (1998) ★★★★
Mission: Impossible III (2006) ★★1/2
Babe (1995) ★★★★
Oliver & Company (1988) ★★★
How to Train Your Dragon (2010) ★★★★
I'd originally planned to pair my review of Delilah S. Dawson's Black Spire with I guess my review of the Galaxy's Edge theme park it's a quasi-advertisement for, but that part's getting unwieldy and I'll also want to post it under a lock due to the photos, so instead because I've finished Phasma I’m going to post these together, as Black Spire is really like a sequel to Phasma. Outside of anything else, I enjoyed both of them – Dawson's creation Vi Moradi is a really fun character and I'm glad that whoever TPTB are at Luscasfilm plucked her out of Phasma to be the face of Galaxy's Edge and so gave Dawson the opportunity to write a book more centered on her.
And, well, Dawson may have the wickedest imagination I've seen from a Star Wars writer and yet avoids the performative edginess of the SW comics and some other media so. Good job, thanks for the beetles.
As expected, this book is about Captain Phasma, but it uses a framing device that means Phasma is almost never the actual POV character. She has one chapter near the end of the book, but that's it. The book is framed as a story being told by Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy, who in turn heard it from Siv, a woman from Phasma's home planet. When I talked tovaradia about this, she said that she didn't like how Phasma was basically a cipher even in her own book. While I get that, I do think I also get why this approach was used, which in part is that Phasma as a character just doesn't make a lot of sense.
This isn't a complaint about her being underdeveloped – she is one of the tertiary characters where I do think it's perfectly reasonable for her to be a one-dimensional villain. She can be Finn's Boba Fett, that's fine. The problem is the scene in TFA where she offers no resistance to Finn and Han and immediately complies with their demand that she lower Starkiller Base's shields. Because now she's not this menacing figure from Finn's past but, well, kind of stupid and cowardly. And you can invent whatever blah blah motivations this character could have had like that she's only out for herself or whatever, which this book certainly tries to do, but the bottom line is it was a plot contrivance and we all know it was a plot contrivance. And yeah Boba Fett died stupidly but he at least had to keep being menacing until that moment.
(This is why I actually prefer the film version of the Finn-Phasma fight in TLJ to the deleted scene version where Finn tells the Stormtroopers this happened. The latter just seems like scrambling to make this moment in TFA make sense or be meaningful in any way instead of being a plot contrivance, and it doesn't really add anything to TLJ because if nothing else it’s not like Finn leading a Stormtrooper uprising or something. Because Phasma having betrayed the First Order is not actually the same as the First Order itself being bad.)
So I don't know that there was a way to focus on Phasma's POV that would have made all of that work. I guess that also doesn’t really have to matter, the Thrawn books for instance have long since left a characterization that matches what that character had in Rebels, but I also get why Dawson approached it this way.
Phasma begins instead from the POV of Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy, as her little ship is detected and captured by a First Order Star Destroyer. She's taken into custody by Captain Cardinal, named for his special red armor (which I guess thanks to "Sith Troopers" isn't actually special anymore) and who incidentally is Phasma's major rival in the First Order. The book lays out that Phasma and Cardinal are jointly in charge of the stormtrooper training program, with Cardinal training their "recruits"/abductees as young children, and Phasma finishing their training as teenagers. Cardinal hates Phasma and wants dirt on her, and well, Vi happens to have said dirt. Most of the story is framed as Cardinal interrogating/sometimes torturing Vi, and Vi telling Cardinal what she has learned about Phasma, with an eventual hope of turning him against the First Order.
Phasma's background on her homeworld, Parnassos, is told from the point of view of Siv, a woman who knew Phasma. Siv is really more the protagonist of this book than any other character, but even Siv's story is being told through Vi's words, and the Siv POV chapters occasionally recall this by having Vi's narration explicitly break in. The story itself covers how Phasma was recruited into the First Order – which is that Brendol Hux, a general in the First Order and Armitage Hux's father, crash-landed on Parnassos and Phasma and a small group of others in her clan helped him to find a way to call the First Order for rescue.
Parnassos is a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic world, which we eventually learn was the result of a nuclear disaster. Those on the planet live in isolated settlements in extremely harsh conditions. Really, this world has everything you'd expect from, well, a Mad Max-style apocalypse – clans fighting each other for resources, dangerous natural phenomena, a cult with a gladiator ring, lifeless and maybe radioactive deserts, remnants of the past that ultimately explain why everything is such a disaster, etc.
And Mad Max is pretty much how this story operates. Siv and Phasma are part of a clan that live a precarious existence along a rocky coast and have a semi-rivalry with a neighboring clan. Phasma's brother is the clan's more cautious leader, while Phasma is depicted as consistently eager to engage in violence to achieve her ends. When Brendol's ship crashes, he and three troopers are initially rescued by the neighboring clan, but Phasma convinces a few warriors to help her attack that clan, kill its leader, and take Brendol and the troopers for themselves. She then attempts to convince her brother that their clan should help Brendol find his ship, based on Brendol's promise that the First Order can provide them needed medical and food supplies and possibly even transport them to a more habitable location. Phasma's brother refuses, and so instead Phasma and a small group of mostly warriors, including Siv, depart in secret to take Brendol into the "wastelands" where they think his ship has crashed. They encounter various dangers, including other post-apocalyptic warrior clans, an old mining facility with droids that try to force them into work there, a city that's turned into a cult due to the lack of both food and entertainment, and golden beetles with a bite that eventually turns you into a bursting sack of water.
That being said, this is an entirely brand new story in the Star Wars universe, rather than A Series Of References And Also Some Action, and I love seeing Put A Different Genre In SW so, you know, this generally worked for me.
Meanwhile, the novel periodically switches back to its framing of Captain Cardinal interrogating Vi for information about Phasma. The parallel story is therefore Vi and Cardinal's developing relationship, and I will say I'm glad that I read Black Spire before this and so knew how this relationship would turn out, as otherwise I would have been afraid of Dawson eventually turning this toward a romance and… she doesn't, and I'm glad for that. Vi uses the story of Phasma's past to try to sow doubts about the First Order in Cardinal's mind, and this actually happens at a fairly believable pace, which is, very slowly and not entirely. While the story eventually reaches a climax where Cardinal has to leave the First Order, there's no magic flip of a switch that makes him Good and For The Resistance now. Even when confronted very directly with the First Order's hypocrisy to the ideals he imagined it had, his resolution in this book is more on 'now I can't be in it' than 'now I want to fight it.'
which you know can also make sense
Phasma's story on Parnassos ends with pretty much every character dead aside from Phasma, Brendol, Siv (who is pregnant), and a young girl whom Phasma had earlier fought to defend given the importance of children in their clan. Once Brendol has been able to call the First Order for a rescue, Phasma takes the girl and abandons Siv in the radioactive desert. And then, Brendol shows Phasma the First Order's true colors by having his rescue ship bombard Parnassos' surface just to show he can. But, you know, she eventually gets him back by putting a poisonous, turn-you-into-water-jelly beetle on him.
This does play into the idea that Phasma is out for herself rather than loyal to the First Order. She shows no particular loyalty to anyone, and ruthlessly turns on others when she views them as potential threats. But. Well. There's still a difference between that and meekly lowering some shields because there's a blaster in your face. That's just not something the Phasma of this book would do, either. So no, it can't solve a problem like Phasma, but as a backstory novel I found it perfectly engaging and well-written.
A few more notes:
- I did in particular like how Cardinal's attempt to attack Phasma played out, with him reporting to Armitage Hux that Phasma had killed his father and Hux, well, obviously knowing that already and telling Cardinal to shut up. I liked how Dawson wrote it as cracking Cardinal's worldview and how that spilled over into Cardinal's life in the First Order in general. Not entirely related, but I also like the look Cardinal gave us both into First Order operations and the parts of a Star Destroyer that aren't hallway, interrogation cell, or hangar.
- Siv manages to survive the radioactive desert by finding a well-stocked factory bunker where she and her child can live for years – Vi says she intends to go back to get her, but also the book indicates that Phasma maybe knows Siv is there and will return to eliminate her as a final witness to Phasma's own past. And then neither this book nor Black Spire tells us what happens there? Did Vi save Siv??? I want to know!
- Like I said, Dawson shows a pretty wicked imagination here, not just with the beetles but also the "oracle salve," an apparently protective paste that Siv and Phasma's clan makes by using a tool called a "detraxor" to suck out "nutrients" from the corpses of their dead. While it certainly sounds distasteful, I think it also shows Dawson's talent for incorporating creepy or gruesome elements without feeling, well, performative about it. The salve sounds disgusting but at the same time it's a sacred and important part of many of the major characters' lives, and as the story progresses you can understand the cultural significance and even beauty those characters see in it. And I think that's more interesting than, well, 'look at all the vile things I can think up for my post-apocalyptic death cult to do.' I mean even when the apocalyptic death cult did come into play, that at least had a semi-interesting brief backstory of "our factories only make cloth we're drowning in cloth help."
- This is the only canon source I didn't read while working on my fic about Hux's mother and… I don't know, maybe I would have written it differently? This describes him as a jackass child going all the way back to the Academy on Arkanis, which I depicted in the fic, but I guess at the time I felt like… he was five idk how much he could do. I guess mainly I think some people who like that fic are Hux fans and I didn't really mean it to be sympathetic to Hux in particular, it was just that I had the impression that this book depicted Brendol as having been pretty terrible to Hux and so I wrote that and that's… true, but not exactly in the way I imagined? Though maybe in not such a way that would've made a significant difference. Anyway, regardless, having a shitty father does not make you less of a Space Nazi.
- Also there's this passage:
"You know how I feel, Captain Cardinal. Your numbers are superlative, but your clever simulations and Armitage's automated regimens are no match for real experience. No matter how pretty, such insubstantial simulations can't compare to a flesh-and-blood foe." Her hand brushes the Twi'lek's face, then slaps it. The droid underneath the holographic Twi'lek skin bobs from the hit. "You can't have a real reaction to a fake fight. You never know a soldier's true worth until they've stood on the battlefield, faced with death.
And anyway sometime I'm going to need to write something about this universe's EXTREMELY WEIRD relationship with Twi'leks and how consistently pervasive it is.
- The ship Brendol actually uses to contact the First Order ends up being an old Naboo yacht so yes Phasma's shiny chrome armor is made from those shiny chrome Naboo ships
- I've always felt that Phasma definitely sounds like a cool name you make up for yourself instead of a given name. This book makes it her given name, but also in this story it would make way more sense for it not have been – it doesn't have any similarities to the names of the other characters in the clan, and more than that, given that the book really ends on Phasma's desire to destroy any remnant of her past that could come back to haunt her, it would have made way more sense for 'Phasma' to have been her New First Order name to replace whatever she'd been called before. It's really to the point that I wonder if Dawson had wanted to do that, but maybe editorial told her that having Phasma be called something else for most of the book would have been too confusing.
- I do like that Vi has a diplomat brother who lives with his husband on Pantora.
In any case, this book ends with Cardinal (whose birth name is Archex) allowing Vi to escape from her interrogation room (as he can't confess to having detained her anyway because he did it secretly to get dirt on Phasma) and then attacking Phasma. Phasma beats him and leaves him for dead, and Vi, having obtained a Stormtrooper disguise, whisks him off the Star Destroyer and to the Resistance, which takes us to the next book by Dawson, Black Spire.
The protagonist of this book truly is Vi Moradi, who while she originated in the Phasma novel seems to have become The Galaxy's Edge/Black Spire Outpost Character. Is there another Disney parks costumed character who has never actually appeared onscreen before?
In a lot of ways, as much as this book is a Disneyland advertisement, it also seems like something of a sequel to Phasma. I hadn't read Phasma before reading this, but for me Dawson walked the line of giving me enough information that I understood what was going on when it referenced the events of that book, but also not so much that it distracted from the story she was telling now. Really, she brought up the events of Phasma when they were immediately relevant to what was going on in this book, and that's it. Which is generally what works.
So this book begins roughly around the end of Phasma, which itself was just pre-TFA. It glances in somewhere near TFA, and then jumps back in to post-TLJ with the Resistance in tatters and in desperate need of new help and a new base. Leia sends Vi to Batuu to investigate it as a potential location for a Resistance base, but also assigns her to go with Archex, that ex-First Order officer she rescued. Which is, you know, awkward. And they also have a Grumpy Droid(tm) called Pook.
This story ultimately operates as a prequel to 'Black Spire' as it is in the Disney parks. It follows Vi & co as she crash lands on Batuu, finds her way to Black Spire Outpost, and encounters the major personalities like Savi who runs a "scrap workshop," Dok-Ondar the antiquities collector, and Oga, the cantina owner and crime boss who runs the town. Vi befriends and recruits local Batuuans Dolin, a farm boy from a relatively sheltered nearby community, and Kriki, a Chadra-Fan tech expert, as well as the boisterous? flamboyant? whatever smuggler Zade (look my brain cast him with Jordan Gavaris okay). Meanwhile, a small First Order contingent arrives specifically to track down Vi. And so Vi has a clear end goal that will ultimately get us to Black Spire as it is as a theme park – drive off the First Order contingent, and establish a base for the Resistance.
So is this pure Disneyland advertisement? Well – there is definitely some of that, especially in the beginning. A helpful Batuuan gives Vi a tour of Black Spire, which includes a stop at Ronto Roasters for a ronto wrap and a rough overview of a layout of the 'town.' The characters frequently visit Oga's Cantina (though one of the cantina's signature elements in the parks, DJ Rex, isn't seen here – it seems to perpetually be his first day at work), and find work scavenging for Savi's Workshop (the park location where you can build those $200 lightsabers). Vi makes brief stops in Dok-Ondar's Den of Antiquities and the Droid Depot, and I believe the Toydarian toymaker and animal stall might also be mentioned. And Kat-Saka's kettle?
But Dawson gets through this pretty quickly, and this book has what I thought was an interesting and engaging story outside the Disneyland advertising. Vi is a fun protagonist, presenting the closest to some actual spy fiction I've seen yet in Star Wars. I was initially wary of her being partnered with Archex/Cardinal, but I'm actually impressed with how that story turned out. I really liked Vi's recruits on Batuu – I love Kriki and basically everything about how Dawson handled her as a Chadra-Fan, and I thought Dolin's background in being from this sheltered, luddite community on Batuu was some interesting world-building (from these two books at least I've been impressed with Dawson's Star Wars world-building and her eagerness to engage in it). While I'm sure she was just given a lot of the info about Black Spire and Batuu that was developed for the parks (Oga's dispute with her boyfriend, for instance), Dawson really makes this story her own, does a nice job incorporating the various perspectives of all of her characters, and brings it to what I thought was a very satisfying conclusion.
I really only have a couple pretty minor complaints. One is that Vi's willingness to reveal that she's working for the Resistance, given that she's supposed to be a spy, would break way through my suspension of disbelief if not for the fact that I know this was written with younger audiences in mind. It didn't get to me much in light of that, but that Vi pretty frequently reveals who she is and what she's doing and decides who is likely to have betrayed/informed on her based on her vague sense of who is 'good' or who would do something like that just didn't make her come off as the talented spy I know she's supposed to be. But again, I can set that side.
The other is that the characters refer to the main small town as "Black Spire Outpost" or "BSO" in conversation and this may not be Dawson's choice, maybe the corporate overlords told her to do it, but no one would call it that when it would take fewer syllables to just say "Black Spire." … I know this is an absurdly minor thing but at one point a character referred to it as 'BSO' in dialogue and it read so weird and unnatural…
Also early on there's an incident involving Oga and her Wookiee boyfriend, which I know is a bit of lore developed from the parks, but as I recall the text isn't explicit that the Wookiee is her boyfriend, I think we're supposed to infer it, and I… didn't and the whole incident read super weird without that knowledge.
ANYWAY. Some misc. thoughts:
- Dawson makes Vi textually ace in this, which is pretty cool. I particularly appreciate seeing an ace character who is not a supernatural being who's "above sex" or whatever, or you know, literally a robot
- Particularly near the end Dawson writes a POV chapter for every major character and it's a nice touch that works well in this story, and I'm glad she took the time to do that.
- On a similar note, if this had been the Vi-Archex story with some other people in the background, I don't think it would have been as interesting, and Dawson also averted a lot of tropes that might have come up concerning those two. Vi helps Archex, but she can't save him from his First Order past, and I found the way he eventually confronted it very satisfying even without having read Phasma. Now having read Phasma, I further appreciate that I don't think Dawson let Archex off the hook as simply as "well he's on our side now." I appreciated that Vi still suffered from the effects of his actions and that this was brought up directly to him.
- Archex's story in this also resolved a plot issue in a way that I… was getting skeptical it could be resolved. So good job on that.
- That being said when I read this I thought Vi and Archex were around the same age, maybe mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties, but now I've read Phasma and Archex is like 40??? Because being in the First Order was maybe mentally arresting?
- That all being said this book had some of the most intense body horror in an interrogation scene that I've seen in Star Wars. I mean it's still in a firmly PG-13 area, but these scenes tend to go a certain way in SW and this… didn't. So Dawson's wicked imagination strikes again.
So yes, I do think this book rises above being just a Theme Park Advertisement, and is a fun, satisfying Star Wars story in its own right. I'd also say that despite a lot of it being 'this is that thing from the park,' Dawson gets a lot of her own worldbuilding in there, and definitely doesn't rely on 'Look At The Thing That Is Familiar To You!!!!!' any more than she absolutely has to because yes they did partly commission this book from her to get you to go to the parks.
In other Star Wars book news, I had been thinking about reading Queen's Peril to see if it had less of what made me really dislike Queen's Shadow, but thenvaradia read it and spent the entire day sighing loudly at me so I'm probably going to hold off on that.
(I have Shadowfall with all its precious Hera Syndulla cameos to read, anyway. Which speaking of the next EA game is going to be a fighter pilot game and yes okay one of my first thoughts was 'can I get a Hera cameo' and YES, YES I SURE CAN.)
Which is to say... I'm going to be talking about media and Star Wars now
Movies I've logged:
The Iron Giant (1999) ★★★★1/2
The Color of Friendship (2000) ★★★
The Fox and the Hound (1981) ★★★
The Prince of Egypt (1998) ★★★★
Mission: Impossible III (2006) ★★1/2
Babe (1995) ★★★★
Oliver & Company (1988) ★★★
How to Train Your Dragon (2010) ★★★★
I'd originally planned to pair my review of Delilah S. Dawson's Black Spire with I guess my review of the Galaxy's Edge theme park it's a quasi-advertisement for, but that part's getting unwieldy and I'll also want to post it under a lock due to the photos, so instead because I've finished Phasma I’m going to post these together, as Black Spire is really like a sequel to Phasma. Outside of anything else, I enjoyed both of them – Dawson's creation Vi Moradi is a really fun character and I'm glad that whoever TPTB are at Luscasfilm plucked her out of Phasma to be the face of Galaxy's Edge and so gave Dawson the opportunity to write a book more centered on her.
And, well, Dawson may have the wickedest imagination I've seen from a Star Wars writer and yet avoids the performative edginess of the SW comics and some other media so. Good job, thanks for the beetles.
As expected, this book is about Captain Phasma, but it uses a framing device that means Phasma is almost never the actual POV character. She has one chapter near the end of the book, but that's it. The book is framed as a story being told by Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy, who in turn heard it from Siv, a woman from Phasma's home planet. When I talked to
varadia about this, she said that she didn't like how Phasma was basically a cipher even in her own book. While I get that, I do think I also get why this approach was used, which in part is that Phasma as a character just doesn't make a lot of sense.This isn't a complaint about her being underdeveloped – she is one of the tertiary characters where I do think it's perfectly reasonable for her to be a one-dimensional villain. She can be Finn's Boba Fett, that's fine. The problem is the scene in TFA where she offers no resistance to Finn and Han and immediately complies with their demand that she lower Starkiller Base's shields. Because now she's not this menacing figure from Finn's past but, well, kind of stupid and cowardly. And you can invent whatever blah blah motivations this character could have had like that she's only out for herself or whatever, which this book certainly tries to do, but the bottom line is it was a plot contrivance and we all know it was a plot contrivance. And yeah Boba Fett died stupidly but he at least had to keep being menacing until that moment.
(This is why I actually prefer the film version of the Finn-Phasma fight in TLJ to the deleted scene version where Finn tells the Stormtroopers this happened. The latter just seems like scrambling to make this moment in TFA make sense or be meaningful in any way instead of being a plot contrivance, and it doesn't really add anything to TLJ because if nothing else it’s not like Finn leading a Stormtrooper uprising or something. Because Phasma having betrayed the First Order is not actually the same as the First Order itself being bad.)
So I don't know that there was a way to focus on Phasma's POV that would have made all of that work. I guess that also doesn’t really have to matter, the Thrawn books for instance have long since left a characterization that matches what that character had in Rebels, but I also get why Dawson approached it this way.
Phasma begins instead from the POV of Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy, as her little ship is detected and captured by a First Order Star Destroyer. She's taken into custody by Captain Cardinal, named for his special red armor (which I guess thanks to "Sith Troopers" isn't actually special anymore) and who incidentally is Phasma's major rival in the First Order. The book lays out that Phasma and Cardinal are jointly in charge of the stormtrooper training program, with Cardinal training their "recruits"/abductees as young children, and Phasma finishing their training as teenagers. Cardinal hates Phasma and wants dirt on her, and well, Vi happens to have said dirt. Most of the story is framed as Cardinal interrogating/sometimes torturing Vi, and Vi telling Cardinal what she has learned about Phasma, with an eventual hope of turning him against the First Order.
Phasma's background on her homeworld, Parnassos, is told from the point of view of Siv, a woman who knew Phasma. Siv is really more the protagonist of this book than any other character, but even Siv's story is being told through Vi's words, and the Siv POV chapters occasionally recall this by having Vi's narration explicitly break in. The story itself covers how Phasma was recruited into the First Order – which is that Brendol Hux, a general in the First Order and Armitage Hux's father, crash-landed on Parnassos and Phasma and a small group of others in her clan helped him to find a way to call the First Order for rescue.
Parnassos is a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic world, which we eventually learn was the result of a nuclear disaster. Those on the planet live in isolated settlements in extremely harsh conditions. Really, this world has everything you'd expect from, well, a Mad Max-style apocalypse – clans fighting each other for resources, dangerous natural phenomena, a cult with a gladiator ring, lifeless and maybe radioactive deserts, remnants of the past that ultimately explain why everything is such a disaster, etc.
And Mad Max is pretty much how this story operates. Siv and Phasma are part of a clan that live a precarious existence along a rocky coast and have a semi-rivalry with a neighboring clan. Phasma's brother is the clan's more cautious leader, while Phasma is depicted as consistently eager to engage in violence to achieve her ends. When Brendol's ship crashes, he and three troopers are initially rescued by the neighboring clan, but Phasma convinces a few warriors to help her attack that clan, kill its leader, and take Brendol and the troopers for themselves. She then attempts to convince her brother that their clan should help Brendol find his ship, based on Brendol's promise that the First Order can provide them needed medical and food supplies and possibly even transport them to a more habitable location. Phasma's brother refuses, and so instead Phasma and a small group of mostly warriors, including Siv, depart in secret to take Brendol into the "wastelands" where they think his ship has crashed. They encounter various dangers, including other post-apocalyptic warrior clans, an old mining facility with droids that try to force them into work there, a city that's turned into a cult due to the lack of both food and entertainment, and golden beetles with a bite that eventually turns you into a bursting sack of water.
That being said, this is an entirely brand new story in the Star Wars universe, rather than A Series Of References And Also Some Action, and I love seeing Put A Different Genre In SW so, you know, this generally worked for me.
Meanwhile, the novel periodically switches back to its framing of Captain Cardinal interrogating Vi for information about Phasma. The parallel story is therefore Vi and Cardinal's developing relationship, and I will say I'm glad that I read Black Spire before this and so knew how this relationship would turn out, as otherwise I would have been afraid of Dawson eventually turning this toward a romance and… she doesn't, and I'm glad for that. Vi uses the story of Phasma's past to try to sow doubts about the First Order in Cardinal's mind, and this actually happens at a fairly believable pace, which is, very slowly and not entirely. While the story eventually reaches a climax where Cardinal has to leave the First Order, there's no magic flip of a switch that makes him Good and For The Resistance now. Even when confronted very directly with the First Order's hypocrisy to the ideals he imagined it had, his resolution in this book is more on 'now I can't be in it' than 'now I want to fight it.'
which you know can also make sense
Phasma's story on Parnassos ends with pretty much every character dead aside from Phasma, Brendol, Siv (who is pregnant), and a young girl whom Phasma had earlier fought to defend given the importance of children in their clan. Once Brendol has been able to call the First Order for a rescue, Phasma takes the girl and abandons Siv in the radioactive desert. And then, Brendol shows Phasma the First Order's true colors by having his rescue ship bombard Parnassos' surface just to show he can. But, you know, she eventually gets him back by putting a poisonous, turn-you-into-water-jelly beetle on him.
This does play into the idea that Phasma is out for herself rather than loyal to the First Order. She shows no particular loyalty to anyone, and ruthlessly turns on others when she views them as potential threats. But. Well. There's still a difference between that and meekly lowering some shields because there's a blaster in your face. That's just not something the Phasma of this book would do, either. So no, it can't solve a problem like Phasma, but as a backstory novel I found it perfectly engaging and well-written.
A few more notes:
- I did in particular like how Cardinal's attempt to attack Phasma played out, with him reporting to Armitage Hux that Phasma had killed his father and Hux, well, obviously knowing that already and telling Cardinal to shut up. I liked how Dawson wrote it as cracking Cardinal's worldview and how that spilled over into Cardinal's life in the First Order in general. Not entirely related, but I also like the look Cardinal gave us both into First Order operations and the parts of a Star Destroyer that aren't hallway, interrogation cell, or hangar.
- Siv manages to survive the radioactive desert by finding a well-stocked factory bunker where she and her child can live for years – Vi says she intends to go back to get her, but also the book indicates that Phasma maybe knows Siv is there and will return to eliminate her as a final witness to Phasma's own past. And then neither this book nor Black Spire tells us what happens there? Did Vi save Siv??? I want to know!
- Like I said, Dawson shows a pretty wicked imagination here, not just with the beetles but also the "oracle salve," an apparently protective paste that Siv and Phasma's clan makes by using a tool called a "detraxor" to suck out "nutrients" from the corpses of their dead. While it certainly sounds distasteful, I think it also shows Dawson's talent for incorporating creepy or gruesome elements without feeling, well, performative about it. The salve sounds disgusting but at the same time it's a sacred and important part of many of the major characters' lives, and as the story progresses you can understand the cultural significance and even beauty those characters see in it. And I think that's more interesting than, well, 'look at all the vile things I can think up for my post-apocalyptic death cult to do.' I mean even when the apocalyptic death cult did come into play, that at least had a semi-interesting brief backstory of "our factories only make cloth we're drowning in cloth help."
- This is the only canon source I didn't read while working on my fic about Hux's mother and… I don't know, maybe I would have written it differently? This describes him as a jackass child going all the way back to the Academy on Arkanis, which I depicted in the fic, but I guess at the time I felt like… he was five idk how much he could do. I guess mainly I think some people who like that fic are Hux fans and I didn't really mean it to be sympathetic to Hux in particular, it was just that I had the impression that this book depicted Brendol as having been pretty terrible to Hux and so I wrote that and that's… true, but not exactly in the way I imagined? Though maybe in not such a way that would've made a significant difference. Anyway, regardless, having a shitty father does not make you less of a Space Nazi.
- Also there's this passage:
"You know how I feel, Captain Cardinal. Your numbers are superlative, but your clever simulations and Armitage's automated regimens are no match for real experience. No matter how pretty, such insubstantial simulations can't compare to a flesh-and-blood foe." Her hand brushes the Twi'lek's face, then slaps it. The droid underneath the holographic Twi'lek skin bobs from the hit. "You can't have a real reaction to a fake fight. You never know a soldier's true worth until they've stood on the battlefield, faced with death.
And anyway sometime I'm going to need to write something about this universe's EXTREMELY WEIRD relationship with Twi'leks and how consistently pervasive it is.
- The ship Brendol actually uses to contact the First Order ends up being an old Naboo yacht so yes Phasma's shiny chrome armor is made from those shiny chrome Naboo ships
- I've always felt that Phasma definitely sounds like a cool name you make up for yourself instead of a given name. This book makes it her given name, but also in this story it would make way more sense for it not have been – it doesn't have any similarities to the names of the other characters in the clan, and more than that, given that the book really ends on Phasma's desire to destroy any remnant of her past that could come back to haunt her, it would have made way more sense for 'Phasma' to have been her New First Order name to replace whatever she'd been called before. It's really to the point that I wonder if Dawson had wanted to do that, but maybe editorial told her that having Phasma be called something else for most of the book would have been too confusing.
- I do like that Vi has a diplomat brother who lives with his husband on Pantora.
In any case, this book ends with Cardinal (whose birth name is Archex) allowing Vi to escape from her interrogation room (as he can't confess to having detained her anyway because he did it secretly to get dirt on Phasma) and then attacking Phasma. Phasma beats him and leaves him for dead, and Vi, having obtained a Stormtrooper disguise, whisks him off the Star Destroyer and to the Resistance, which takes us to the next book by Dawson, Black Spire.
The protagonist of this book truly is Vi Moradi, who while she originated in the Phasma novel seems to have become The Galaxy's Edge/Black Spire Outpost Character. Is there another Disney parks costumed character who has never actually appeared onscreen before?
In a lot of ways, as much as this book is a Disneyland advertisement, it also seems like something of a sequel to Phasma. I hadn't read Phasma before reading this, but for me Dawson walked the line of giving me enough information that I understood what was going on when it referenced the events of that book, but also not so much that it distracted from the story she was telling now. Really, she brought up the events of Phasma when they were immediately relevant to what was going on in this book, and that's it. Which is generally what works.
So this book begins roughly around the end of Phasma, which itself was just pre-TFA. It glances in somewhere near TFA, and then jumps back in to post-TLJ with the Resistance in tatters and in desperate need of new help and a new base. Leia sends Vi to Batuu to investigate it as a potential location for a Resistance base, but also assigns her to go with Archex, that ex-First Order officer she rescued. Which is, you know, awkward. And they also have a Grumpy Droid(tm) called Pook.
This story ultimately operates as a prequel to 'Black Spire' as it is in the Disney parks. It follows Vi & co as she crash lands on Batuu, finds her way to Black Spire Outpost, and encounters the major personalities like Savi who runs a "scrap workshop," Dok-Ondar the antiquities collector, and Oga, the cantina owner and crime boss who runs the town. Vi befriends and recruits local Batuuans Dolin, a farm boy from a relatively sheltered nearby community, and Kriki, a Chadra-Fan tech expert, as well as the boisterous? flamboyant? whatever smuggler Zade (look my brain cast him with Jordan Gavaris okay). Meanwhile, a small First Order contingent arrives specifically to track down Vi. And so Vi has a clear end goal that will ultimately get us to Black Spire as it is as a theme park – drive off the First Order contingent, and establish a base for the Resistance.
So is this pure Disneyland advertisement? Well – there is definitely some of that, especially in the beginning. A helpful Batuuan gives Vi a tour of Black Spire, which includes a stop at Ronto Roasters for a ronto wrap and a rough overview of a layout of the 'town.' The characters frequently visit Oga's Cantina (though one of the cantina's signature elements in the parks, DJ Rex, isn't seen here – it seems to perpetually be his first day at work), and find work scavenging for Savi's Workshop (the park location where you can build those $200 lightsabers). Vi makes brief stops in Dok-Ondar's Den of Antiquities and the Droid Depot, and I believe the Toydarian toymaker and animal stall might also be mentioned. And Kat-Saka's kettle?
But Dawson gets through this pretty quickly, and this book has what I thought was an interesting and engaging story outside the Disneyland advertising. Vi is a fun protagonist, presenting the closest to some actual spy fiction I've seen yet in Star Wars. I was initially wary of her being partnered with Archex/Cardinal, but I'm actually impressed with how that story turned out. I really liked Vi's recruits on Batuu – I love Kriki and basically everything about how Dawson handled her as a Chadra-Fan, and I thought Dolin's background in being from this sheltered, luddite community on Batuu was some interesting world-building (from these two books at least I've been impressed with Dawson's Star Wars world-building and her eagerness to engage in it). While I'm sure she was just given a lot of the info about Black Spire and Batuu that was developed for the parks (Oga's dispute with her boyfriend, for instance), Dawson really makes this story her own, does a nice job incorporating the various perspectives of all of her characters, and brings it to what I thought was a very satisfying conclusion.
I really only have a couple pretty minor complaints. One is that Vi's willingness to reveal that she's working for the Resistance, given that she's supposed to be a spy, would break way through my suspension of disbelief if not for the fact that I know this was written with younger audiences in mind. It didn't get to me much in light of that, but that Vi pretty frequently reveals who she is and what she's doing and decides who is likely to have betrayed/informed on her based on her vague sense of who is 'good' or who would do something like that just didn't make her come off as the talented spy I know she's supposed to be. But again, I can set that side.
The other is that the characters refer to the main small town as "Black Spire Outpost" or "BSO" in conversation and this may not be Dawson's choice, maybe the corporate overlords told her to do it, but no one would call it that when it would take fewer syllables to just say "Black Spire." … I know this is an absurdly minor thing but at one point a character referred to it as 'BSO' in dialogue and it read so weird and unnatural…
Also early on there's an incident involving Oga and her Wookiee boyfriend, which I know is a bit of lore developed from the parks, but as I recall the text isn't explicit that the Wookiee is her boyfriend, I think we're supposed to infer it, and I… didn't and the whole incident read super weird without that knowledge.
ANYWAY. Some misc. thoughts:
- Dawson makes Vi textually ace in this, which is pretty cool. I particularly appreciate seeing an ace character who is not a supernatural being who's "above sex" or whatever, or you know, literally a robot
- Particularly near the end Dawson writes a POV chapter for every major character and it's a nice touch that works well in this story, and I'm glad she took the time to do that.
- On a similar note, if this had been the Vi-Archex story with some other people in the background, I don't think it would have been as interesting, and Dawson also averted a lot of tropes that might have come up concerning those two. Vi helps Archex, but she can't save him from his First Order past, and I found the way he eventually confronted it very satisfying even without having read Phasma. Now having read Phasma, I further appreciate that I don't think Dawson let Archex off the hook as simply as "well he's on our side now." I appreciated that Vi still suffered from the effects of his actions and that this was brought up directly to him.
- Archex's story in this also resolved a plot issue in a way that I… was getting skeptical it could be resolved. So good job on that.
- That being said when I read this I thought Vi and Archex were around the same age, maybe mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties, but now I've read Phasma and Archex is like 40??? Because being in the First Order was maybe mentally arresting?
- That all being said this book had some of the most intense body horror in an interrogation scene that I've seen in Star Wars. I mean it's still in a firmly PG-13 area, but these scenes tend to go a certain way in SW and this… didn't. So Dawson's wicked imagination strikes again.
So yes, I do think this book rises above being just a Theme Park Advertisement, and is a fun, satisfying Star Wars story in its own right. I'd also say that despite a lot of it being 'this is that thing from the park,' Dawson gets a lot of her own worldbuilding in there, and definitely doesn't rely on 'Look At The Thing That Is Familiar To You!!!!!' any more than she absolutely has to because yes they did partly commission this book from her to get you to go to the parks.
In other Star Wars book news, I had been thinking about reading Queen's Peril to see if it had less of what made me really dislike Queen's Shadow, but then
varadia read it and spent the entire day sighing loudly at me so I'm probably going to hold off on that. (I have Shadowfall with all its precious Hera Syndulla cameos to read, anyway. Which speaking of the next EA game is going to be a fighter pilot game and yes okay one of my first thoughts was 'can I get a Hera cameo' and YES, YES I SURE CAN.)
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