The High Republic: this will be the new era of 'Star Wars'

Detail of the cover of the book 'In the dark', by Claudia Gray.

“For over a thousand generations,

Jedi

Knights

were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before these dark times. Before the Empire ”. In those 29 words the promise of a mythical time was condensed, the golden age of Hesiod, where the

Jedi

were not an almost extinct lineage, but the brand-new guardians of order and justice. This promise has been seen as "a silhouette, a backlight," according to author Claudia Gray, during the more than four decades of myth that

Star Wars

has bequeathed. And now, from his hand, and from dozens of writers and artists, the promise is coming true. The High Republic is the new era in the

Star Wars

universe

,

shooting, from now on, novels and comics as the first phase of advancement of what (it is assumed) will also end up being films for theaters and series for the Disney + platform.

It all stems, as Gray emphasizes, from that Obi-Wan quote.

“It is that spark of curiosity that we try to capture during the process, which Obi-Wan suggests there.

Millions of fans around the world, myself among them, have wondered how we can fulfill that promise, "says the author in an interview with EL PAÍS along with Michael Siglain, the creative director of the franchise at Lucasfilm, or what is himself, the archivist in charge of "volumes and volumes of hundreds of pages of art and history that are updated daily."

The bibles that define, in short, the creed of the Jedi and Sith.

Claudia Gray (sitting in the middle in a black T-shirt) and Michael Siglain (standing right), meeting with various creatives in a room at the Skywalker Ranch.

To envision the new republic, Disney made an effort with a striking starting point.

During two three-day trips to the mythical Skywalker Ranch - for decades, a macro-complex where George Lucas managed the most advanced companies of his empire, a property 40 minutes from San Francisco of almost 2,000 hectares and that now only permanently houses the sound division , Skywalker Sound— nearly a score of creatives came together to define the pillars of this world.

Palimpsests and meditation

More information

• Mark Hamill: "I never thought I would step on the Millennium Falcon again"

• These 'Star Wars' plots were a lot crazier than 'The Rise of Skywalker'

Gray remembers that phase of the process with a smile, because the ranch, he says, is "a place designed, in all the breadth of the term, to fire the imagination." The palimpsests are one of the things that most marked her. “They have this amazing library full of books to stimulate you. Treatises of comparative mythology, underwater photography ... Everything. And in them, from time to time, you would find handwritten notes and you would realize that there, on that same page, such an artist from such a film had been inspired by the same thing as you. His footprints were visible ”. The long walks in nature, according to Gray, were essential to settle the ideas of the team of storytellers. "You have to walk from place to place, in this beautiful, natural landscape, and that gives you time to meditate on what we were doing."

The personals of the novel 'The High Republic', by Claudia Gray, Leox Gyasi and Reath Silas.

And what they were doing was planting their own flag in

Star Wars

. One with different objectives and to a certain extent somewhat irreverent with certain central points of

Jedi

mythology

. Especially in the prequels directed by Lucas, the

Jedi

manifested (Yoda included) a rigid bureaucracy and a martial state occasioned by the gigantic wars in which they embarked by the Republic, that left little room for freedoms of creed. “Sad to see Yoda turned into a bureaucrat, right? In the prequels, there is a rigidity to the order that does not exist in the High Republic. Each

Jedi

can express his spiritual relationship with the Force. We even have a type of

Jedi

, the

walkers of the path (wayseeker

in the original), who undertake that spiritual path in their own way, as nomads. "

In Grey's individual case, his

Jedi

from the novel

Into Darkness

couldn't be more atypical.

The author compares her character, Reath Silas, to Hermione Granger, Harry Potter's intelligent companion.

“He is someone who feels more comfortable with a book in his hands.

Someone who if you say to him, 'you have to go to a planet full of dangers' answers:' Who, me?

Gray argues that in the new stage they have created in

Star Wars

, by downloading it from the monumental wars ("of billions of contenders"), the range is opened to create characters so they fulfill roles in the

Jedi

order

very atypical. “And we have a lot of matches, too, because it's fun to write them in narrative. But we can afford a character that can be defined without having to draw the lightsaber the first time. " Curiously, these literary characters did not stop at what was evoked. Lucasfilm and Disney artists, the same ones who designed the iconic Darth Maul or Queen Amidala, captured in illustrations what the writers were proposing in their words.

The diversity of the cast is one of the points that this new era of

Star Wars

places the most emphasis on

. Keeve Trenis, the main protagonist of the Marvel comics line focused on the High Republic, is black and female, with a very contemporary hairstyle (half shaved skull, half hair). And on the penultimate page of the first issue of the comic you see how

very diverse and young

Jedi

swear their ascription to the order amid smiles and tears and lightsabers at the ready. But what remains, according to LucasArts creative director Michael Siglain, is "escapism": "Especially in these times, if we can get people to evade, we will have done our job well."