That’s why they exist.”īy taking the idea of Jedi as samurai back to its roots, Candon found an angle on it different from what has been portrayed in Star Wars lore before. Sometimes it’s ‘we’re the empire and we suck!’ Sometimes it’s ‘we’re the empire and we just live in it, we’re just here, it’s what we are.’ It felt a little more honest to the source to the Jedi and the Empire are in alignment because the samurai are in alignment with the emperor and the shogun. “Often you’ll see the hero trying to overcome the corrupt government, but also a lot of the time ‘no, we’re the empire!’ And there are varying feelings about that.
“But that doesn’t quite code the same way in Japanese storytelling,” Candon says. Some of that comes down to changing the story’s relationship to the idea of “empire.” Since the days of A New Hope, the Empire has been the unquestionably evil opposing force with little political specificity that the underdogs must fight against. So bringing the George Lucas interpretation a little closer to the original Japanese sensibility is a lot of what I was doing.” “What do jidaigeki think about samurai? What do they feel about ronin ? And also coming back to what about Kurosawa films George Lucas was like ‘I see the lone swordsman, I’m going to interpret him as this.’ Or the lone swordsman with a code of honor. “Jidaigeki were a huge part of what I was thinking of when I was looking at what the anatomy of the drama would be like,” Candon explains. Speaking to Den of Geek, Candon says the novel is heavily influenced by Japanese art, culture, and folklore. Without anything so literal as Marvel’s multiverse, Ronin opens up a new well of creativity in terms of how Star Wars stories can be told. Forget lore about Darth Bane or the Old Republic - or rather, set Ronin aside as its own alternate universe. In the novel, it’s the Jedi who are affiliated with Imperial lords and the Sith who have rebelled against them. Her novel redefines pop culture vocabulary like “Jedi” and “Sith” in order to bring them back to the ideas that inspired them: Force-users as samurai, and all that implies.
Emma Mieko Candon, author of Star Wars: Ronin, is pulling from Star Wars the way George Lucas drew from Akira Kurosawa films.