living history – Page 3 – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Thoughts on ‘The Passenger’

Welcome back to my breakdown of The Mandalorian Season 2 episodes, this time Chapter 10 ‘The Passenger’. Overall, this was by far my least favorite episode of the series, and after a single rewatch to collect some more notes for this post, I can pretty confidently say that I won’t be casually watching it again. (My favorite episode, I think, has so far been S01E04 ‘Sanctuary’, which seems to be many folks’ least favorite.)
The episode opens with Titular Mando trucking along on a swoop toting Fett’s armor, when he is ambushed by some frontier trash/space pirates/bounty hunter types. I really liked that they use ye olde cable trap to knock him off the bike (see this old post where I apply some real-world maths and see just how much time you’d need to get such a trap set properly).

Among the ambushers is a guy whose face we never see, wearing a Rebel-pattern arm patch. This style first appeared on Hoth in Episode V, although it has since shown up on troops in ‘Rouge One’. I find it hard to believe that this guy was in the uniformed Alliance military, so it’s likely a case of double-dipping by the costume department I mentioned last episode. Similarly, the bald pirate wears a puffy R1 trooper vest.

Upgrading the Rebel persona: captured armor #2

While a good partizan should ideally do all their ambushing from a distance, after binge-watching a cool edutainment series on the SOE training curriculum (Churchill’s Secret Agents—highly recommended) this summer, I realized that sometimes up-close-and-personal hand-to-hand combat can’t be avoided. Adding to this realization were nightly examples earlier this summer of my city’s ‘finest’ beating protestors with batons just a few blocks away from my apartment. With these motivations in mind, I started thinking about what kinds of hard kit items I might use to improve my odds in the area of personal defense.

Upgrading the Rebel persona: captured armor

Reb-leg 202010-2 When I started putting together a Rebel partizan impression a few years back, I initially had the idea—inspired by real-life guerillas’ practice of appropriating enemy equipment—to include a piece or two of captured Imperial hardware in the kit. I was very aware of the temptation to overdo it…too many cosplayers let their imaginations run wild and pretty soon a simple ‘Rebel fighter’ costume becomes an unrealistically fully-armored supertrooper. Since s Alliance doctrine holds that “complete freedom of movement is more useful than the dubious protection provided by armor—which rarely stops a blaster bolt anyway” (WestEndGames, Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, p99), we don’t have a ton of examples of Rebels wearing extensive armor; even this more modern source depicts a Rebel ‘heavy’ gunner with only an arm’s worth of armor:

reb-heavy — FantasyFlightGames: *Age of Rebellion* – Forged in Battle, p 82

I reasoned that while a Rebel partizan would probably do most of their shooting from a prone position, anything to give an advantage in taking a stable shot would be desirable, so with this in mind (and to keep things simple), I decided to order a single Stormtrooper shin/calf from Walt’s Trooper Factory, along with a ‘sniper’ knee plate: Continue reading “Upgrading the Rebel persona: captured armor”

Building the Inner Persona: Similes

In this installment of the Inner Persona miniseries, we’ll continue to expand our mental ‘word-hoard’ by adding some galactic similes – phrases that compare things using like or as:

“as acquisitive as a Neimoidian” (Darth Plageius chapter 5)

“as ostentatious as a Hutt” (ibid)

“as slippery as a greased Dug” (Outbound Flight)

“as nervous as a Trandoshan in a wallet factory” (Outlander part 1)

“slick as a slime toad” (Jabba’s Game Galaxy)

“Green as a monkey-lizard” (ibid)

Finding Your Place in the Galaxy

I was recently sent this video of the ‘Mando march’ parade held at Star Wars Celebration ’17. Since social gatherings are now few and far between in these days of COVID, I wanted to share it with you here, not only as a visual aid for my points in this essay, but also just for a vicarious dose (albeit virtual) of the con experience for which many are currently in withdrawal.
After watching, I had two (okay, three) reactions:

1) Man, the Mando costuming community is bloody Inclusive. There are folks of ALL ages, abilities, body types, and (I’m guessing, since they’re all helmeted) races, genders, and sexual orientations on display in that parade, all with their love of all things Klingon Mandalorian proudly on display. Good on them! With that said, though… Continue reading “Finding Your Place in the Galaxy”

Building the Inner Persona: Galactic Idioms

As we’ve touched on before, one of the last stages (in Townsends’ model) of putting together a living history impression is the ongoing process of building the ‘inner persona’. This means going beyond the superficial ‘outer persona’ (one’s clothes and gear), and working to inhabit the mental headspace of your chosen individual – for our purposes, a citizen of the Galaxy Far, Far Away. While this level of detail is probably not necessary if you just want to be a GFFA reenactor, if you’re interested in using your impression as an historic interpreter—especially a first-person one—it can be very helpful to have at least a few in-universe sayings stashed away in your mental ‘word-hoard’. We may take such phrases for granted in our everyday life, but they can really help sell the illusion when speaking in-character!
We’ll begin with variations on familiar phrases from Earth.

for “bull in a china shop”: “A nerf in an antiquities bazaar” (I, Jedi, Chapter 6) Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? 😉

for “making a mountain out of a molehill: “making meters out of microns” (X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, Ch4)

Continue reading “Building the Inner Persona: Galactic Idioms”

More Galactic Whittling – V35 landspeeder

Because research and living history are never complete (one’s persona can always be improved), as part of my continuing efforts in refinement, I am always on the lookout for more goodies to put in my pockets to flesh out or embellish my personas, and as I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of whittling. It’s easy to pick up, requires a little brainpower but is still relaxing in the moment, and the end results–like this V-35 landspeeder–are lots of fun to show off. Why did I decide to whittle this vehicle specifically? Continue reading “More Galactic Whittling – V35 landspeeder”

The issue of Original Characters

It’s been a while since I’ve done a ‘back to basics’ post, so we’re taking a break from the usual projects-and-research content and taking a turn for the nitty-gritty. The vexing issue this week is that of the ‘OC’, or ‘Original Character’ (differentiated from a recognizable ‘Face Character’). Stick around at the end for a list of character ideas to take your OC to the next level!

After hanging around a popular SW cosplay facebook group for the last few years, I have noticed a pattern that my historical-authenticity-focused mind finds quite aggravating: Continue reading “The issue of Original Characters”

Project: The Jedi Path – an exercise in distressing

One of my eventual goals for my NRAC impression is to attend an event and publicly ‘interpret’ a collection of in-universe artifacts from the Star Wars galaxy in first-person. While I’m always on the lookout for such items, it is especially fun when one comes along that seems tailor-made for this purpose.
TJP_before-after2 Continue reading “Project: The Jedi Path – an exercise in distressing”

The Cure for Temporal Headaches

Whenever you begin putting together a new persona (in any setting, fictional or historical), it always helps to firmly ground yourself in a specific time. This is simply Good Living History—the narrower the range, the more focused your research can be, contributing to a more accurate impression. If you’re portraying a ‘longhunter’ (an 18^th century market hunter), you don’t want to be drawing your ‘outer persona’ (aka clothing and accoutrements) from the 1720s or 1790s (even though they’re technically still in the 18^th century); rather, you would focus on the 1750s through 1770s, since that’s the period in which these folks operated. If you have enough information from primary or secondary sources, you can even pin your impression down to a specific year, month, or week (this becomes easier to do the closer to the present one gets, as the amount of raw information (and therefore, potential sources) increases exponentially).
Deciding on a specific span of time makes your persona more authentic, especially if you’ve done your research.
Continue reading “The Cure for Temporal Headaches”