Philosophy – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Drawing on history

Back in 2015, a museum exhibit in Belarus showed off a set of reconstructed costumes from early medieval (8th-12th centuries CE) Baltic cultures. Shortly afterwards, the outfits began making the rounds online, eventually getting shared to a Middle-earth reenactment group I’m a part of. We all thought they were very impressive: inspiring examples of what culturally-cohesive outfits can look like. Then, a year or two ago, I saw the exact same pictures again—but this time in a Batuu-bounding group on facebook! There, they were prefaced with a message like, “check these out – wouldn’t these make great bounding outfits?!”

While they are still great outfits, as-is, I had to disagree with the idea that they would be appropriate for GFFA use. As Doug Chiang pointed out in a recent interview, the thing that makes Star Wars feel so authentic as a setting is the eclectic use of mix-and-matched historical inspirations* (thanks largely to John Mollo’s foundational designs)—not merely using unmodified, straight-up historical ensembles! [As it’s pure gold, I’ve included Doug’s full quote at the end of this post, so keep reading.]
However, I could definitely see the appeal, especially in the outfits’ silhouettes, and challenged myself to apply a GFFA lens to the Baltic costumes and see if I couldn’t bring them nearer to the Star Wars aesthetic. I challenge you to try the same thing with other historical styles you may be inspired to use in your own outfit!

Let’s start with the red kit first. My main method used was to try and find an in-universe equivalent to each item:

Doing right by (fictional) History

In historic reenacting circles online, rarely do I see anyone say, ‘Thinking about starting on a Fallschirmjager kit. Show me some FJ impressions for inspiration!’. The best and most authentic ‘inspo’ is not other reenactors’ kits, it’s the primary sources themselves!: wartime photography or film, military manuals, soldiers’ diaries, etc.
Reenacting/living history in the Star Wars setting is no different – if you want to build an authentic impression of x, you don’t look for what others have done (that’s how reenactorisms get spread), you look at the media where that impression comes from – the film, TV, book, video game, or comic book.

If one takes a quick scroll-through of facebook’s largest general reenacting group, Living History~ show your impressions (currently 19,000+ members), a pattern quickly emerges:
“Roman auxiliary, Teutoberg, Germania, Autumn 9 CE”
“Loyalist rat catcher, Philadelphia summer of 1781”
“Confederate widow in mourning, Richmond Virginia, early 1865”
“LIFE Magazine photographer attached to C Troop, 82nd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Armored Division in Autumn 1944.”
“Cpl Bradshaw, Automatic Rifleman of Dog Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, Pusan, Republic of Korea, August 3rd, 1950”

How long is a Podrace?

Before I went on Appalachian Trail thru-hiking blog-hiatus, some dedicated Star Wars ‘reenactors’ and I were kicking around ideas for some sort of asynchronous long-distance trek or ‘ruck’ challenge we might organize in the future. We started by brainstorming any known distances from the Saga materials, and one of the first things that came up was the Mos Espa Arena podrace circuit. We figured if the length of the racetrack could be determined, it might serve as a nice basis for some sort of virtual relay race. The question was…how long was it?

As has become disppointingly apparent in my attempts to apply the rigors of realism to the galactic setting, because 90% of stories told under the Star Wars banner are purely plot-driven, the mundane details of life are too often nonexistent. Or if they are included, it is done in the most minutiae-focused manner and overlooks the more relatable pieces of information. Or, to paraphrase Maw Installation Redditor FlavivsAetivs, “plot and visual aesthetics—not technical specifications or internal consistency—are the primary focus of Star Wars“.

Case in point: the Boonta Eve Classic podrace! I could easily tell you the names of all the formations or obstacles on the race course, the names, species, and homeworlds of each racer, which racers did not finish the race, which racers completed the course, how fast they did so, and their average speed. But I have thus far been unable to find any mention of the distance the race covered. Unfortunately for us, the Boonta is not like the Indy 500 (the distance is right there in the name). However, a little math does allow us to calculate the length of the race course!

Guest Post: Is a blaster right for you?

[This submitted post comes from ‘Kantis Nolef’ of the SWLH facebook community.]

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” – Han Solo, Episode IV.

When most people start thinking of props and accessories, they tend to think of blasters first. Blasters in the Star Wars universe seem to be as common cell phones in ours, and with myriad shapes and sizes, there’s something for every species. But does your character need one? Sure, if you’re in the Outer Rim on an inhospitable planet, it’s a matter of survival…but what if you’re not? Would it be necessary for a musician on Corellia to have a rifle slung across their back? Does a cook on Sullust need a pair of Westars?

Whichever career path you choose, I can’t stop you from arming yourself. That being said, I hope I can help you get the best blaster for your persona.

We need to talk about Aurebesh (part 2)

Welcome back to Aurebesh Month! You can read last week’s entry HERE! When the subject of backwards Aurebesh comes up, oftentimes people like to point to LucasArts games as a source of the flipping confusion. I will admit that there have been many times in LucasArts games where Aurebesh (or another in-universe script) has been seen in a horizontally-flipped orientation. However, this is different from the ‘flipped capitals’ reenactorism…because in these cases the letters aren’t flipped… the entire word is, and there’s an easy explanation.

We need to talk about Aurebesh (part 1)

In a post earlier this year, I brought up the idea of ‘reenactorisms’—the spread and perpetuation of an inaccuracy being unknowingly (or knowingly) passed around because somebody didn’t do their research. After that initial post, I realized one of the biggest reenactorisms in Star Wars costuming was my most infuriating pet peeve: the phenomenon of backwards Aurebesh letters. Having spent probably-too-much-time thinking about the issue, I thought I’d try something new and devote an entire month to the topic of writing in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. That’s right, folks: welcome to Aurebesh Month!

A quick search of Etsy for the term will easily reveal the problem we are facing: an annoying lack of consistency in how the letters are to be written. A number of these items are geared towards the Batuu-bounding crowd—patches, ID tags, Aurebesh ‘translators’, luggage tags, etc.—and I suspect it is the popularity of the Disney parks (coupled with the recent rise of Cricut-type machines that make cranking out crispy stickers so easy) that has caused the proliferation.

At the heart of the issue is the erroneous idea that Aurebesh has capital letters at all, let alone that it indicates them by horizontally flipping the letters. None of the Aurebesh texts seen at the Galaxy’s Edge park—the writing system’s most high-profile manifestation—includes these backwards capitals, so where did this idea originate???

The great Twi’lek mix-up

I’ve explored the idea of Reenactorisms—the acceptance and perpetuation of an innaccuracy—several times before, but it is worth pointing out that these are not limited to fan creations: official resources can still fall into the pit.
Work on this month’s Style Guide post got me thinking about a key confusion in the depiction of the Twi’lek species: males have ears, but what do females have? The past 20+ years of visual sources suggest they all have cones where their ears should be, but prior to the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, Twi’lek females most definitely had ears! We can trace the source of this confusing inconsistency by noting the examples of ‘cone’ or ‘ear’ as they appeared in order of release.

1983: Oola—the first depiction of a female Twi’lek—is green. The cones on Oola’s headdress are clearly white, and are also clearly part of the headdress, not protruding from within it.

January 1995: art development/pre-production begins on Episode I

Some further thoughts on in-universe branding

In an earlier post, I wrote that I like to play a little game whenever a ‘custom Mandalorian’ costumer comes across my feed. The game is called ‘how many mythosaurs will this costume have?, and which pieces of kit will they randomly adorn?’
Unlike the ur-Mandalorian example (Boba Fett) who bore a single small mythosaur on a pauldron, the ‘custom Mando’ crowd seemingly can’t help but slap them everywhere: side of the helmet, on their cape, covering their entire chest armor, on their blaster stocks, on their belt buckle…sometimes all of the above???
What does this have to do with a truck covered in bald eagles and American flags? I’m glad you asked!

Avoiding the Perils of Reenactorisms!

As I closed a previous ‘prop philosophy’ post last year I said, “If research and authenticity aren’t kept at the forefront, it is all too easy to fall into the pit of reenactorisms…” However, I realized that while I refer to the concept here from time to time, the term reenactorism may not be well-known to the average reader, so I wanted to use a post to explore what reenactorisms are, their pitfalls, and a few examples from the history of Star Wars.
So: what does the word mean? F.L. Watkins, writing in The Reenactor’s Encyclopedia (2004), describes reenactorisms as practices or items which are “incorrect and have no documentation but are commonly believed to be correct and are widely used”. In other words, it’s when one reenactor copies another reenactor’s mistake—acting under the assumption it is accurate—and thereby perpetuates an inaccuracy. Almost always this is the result of not doing one’s own quality research and assuming others have. A reenactorism is the Costumed Arts version of the ‘telephone’ game, where one person whispers a phrase to their neighbor, who whispers what they (mis)heard down the line, usually mutating the phrase with each iteration and becoming unrecognizable by the end. Whereas those playing the game could easily check if the phrase being passed down is correct by asking the speaker, ‘What did you say?’; in reenacting, we can prevent reenactorisms by asking for evidence or documentation.

For example…quick: what color is a standard Rebel Fleet Trooper’s helmet? If you said ‘White’, consider this:

Improve your Mandalorian cosplay with one easy trick!

Familiarity breeds contempt as they say, and once I notice a trend, it starts to bug me and becomes hard to unsee. Each week, I see scores of ‘Custom Mandalorian’ costumes, and like the diehard Disney fans who hide an obligatory ‘hidden Mickey’ in their props, whenever I see a Mando come across my feed, I like to guess how quickly this standard cockeyed, off-kilter, cracked-skull Mythosaur will show up: “Is it hiding in the first photo? Second photo? Third photo?”

A kit which turns out to be sans mythosaur, on the other hand, is always a pleasant, refreshing surprise! (One of the things I really appreciated in The Mandalorian was that—so far as I can tell—none of the non-Boba Fett character designs included this stock symbol.)