aurebesh – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Galactic Style Guide – Text

Welcome to another installment of our ‘Galactic Style Guide counterpoint’ subseries, where we help you strengthen your ‘Star Wars eye’ by highlighting and remedying common faux pas that can make your kit look Not Star Warsy. As part of the GSG, the ultimate goal is still to help you create a more accurate ‘outer persona’ – but we approach the goal from the opposite direction!
This month, we’re taking a look at a design phenomenon that’s big on the Disney side of things (whether it be in films made under them, things sold by them, or costumes worn by fans while visiting them) but which was only ever a minimal part of the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’: text on stuff!

The fact that we went six films with zero non-technical Aurebesh (and the first two, most seminal films had NONE at all) should tell you everything you need to know: when it comes to Aurebesh on kit items, it’s always superfluous.
With that in mind, I want to look at some examples to illustrate why you’re better off omitting Aurebesh entirely. Out of respect for the SW costuming/maker community, I’m focusing on publicly-available items sold by Disney, but the point is still applicable: even when executed correctly it’s still largely* unnecessary, and—if used at all—should act as a garnish, not a side dish – let alone the main course! If your impression is relying on Aurebesh to make sense, something’s not working and it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

*As we saw before, pretty much the only folks we saw wearing Aurebesh pre-Disney are prisoners and biker-gang types. Occasionally we see small identifiers like ‘crew’ or ‘staff’, but these simply serve to demonstrate the wearer’s membership in a group as separate from the public.
For a refresher on examples of places where we do commonly see in-universe lettering, check out this GSG entry.

Let’s start off with a couple items featuring completely redundant Aurebesh additions. Did you ever notice that all the top brass at the Death Star’s conference room had matching drinkware?

Here’s the version sold at Galaxy’s Edge:

From one side, it just looks like a slick space-fascist travel mug. From the other side though, it looks like the Empire thinks its officers need to be constantly reminded of who they work for.

more Bad aurebesh products, and how to prevent them!

Galactic Style Guide – Aurebesh II

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide (where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’) and the end of Aurebesh Month! In last week’s installment we showed how before the Disney buyout, Aurebesh words on clothing were incredibly rare. This week, we’re taking a look at some places where using in-universe lettering IS appropriate!:

**Tattoos or scarification:** Force Hounds (26,000 BBY), Morlish Veed (Legacy), Kaddak (Cry of Shadows), Enviro-suit (FFG), Sketch, Kix (The Clone Wars)

Note that while there are plenty of tattoos in-universe, these were the Only examples of letters-as-body-art I could find in the rather complete listing of Aurebesh appearances.

Galactic Style Guide – Aurebesh I

Welcome back to Aurebesh Month and our first of two installments of the Galactic Style Guide (where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’) taking a look at something that’s become really popular among the Batuu-bounding community in recent years: using in-universe Galactic Basic lettering—the Aurebesh—on kit items.

I see folks incorporate Aurebesh words into their clothing so often, it inspired me to do some digging and see how many examples I could find from the various visual media sources.
The first instances I found are all a certain segment of the galactic populace that I don’t think I’ve ever seen re-created before, but which would make for an excellent living history impression:

**PRISONERS:** from Agent of the Empire—Hard Targets and Empire: The Wrong Side of the War

I was a little disappointed that these guys are just wearing yellow/orange jumpsuits, and that there wasn’t a little more consistency between them and the more interesting prisoner uniform of the Imperial Remnant in 12 ABY (Jedi Outcast):

And speaking of Jedi Outcast…

more examples of aurebesh on clothing after the jump

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 innacuracy 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???