Examining Deaths in Star Wars

I've seen some posts talking about writing death scenes. Some tips sound good like, go ahead if it advances the plot or motivates others. These are good things to keep in mind, but I think perhaps most important is this: the death needs to have the emotional weight corresponding to the audience's investment in the character. To explore this idea, let's look at some deaths in Star Wars. Good and Bad ones. (Obviously spoiler alert for various Star Wars movies) Let's start with a good example. What was our investment in Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movie? When he dies, Luke shouts out "No!" which was an appropriate response for him. However, the audience's reaction was not like Luke's in this scene. Instead, we are more like Darth Vader because our investment in Obi-Wan was in his mystery. His death scene corresponds perfectly to this investment as not only are his final words mysterious, but then he disappears! Darth Vader is confused like we are. This is further reinforced when we hear Obi-Wan speak to Luke in the final scenes. To be fair, if we watched the prequel trilogy first, we might have different emotions, but for storytelling, the way it was done in the original movie was good. Now let's compare with a bad example. Han Solo in The Force Awakens. What is our investment of the character? Not that of a father, and the movie does nothing to seriously reconcile that issue as it tries to make him a mentor instead. However, we were already heavily invested in him as a war hero and a friend. It would be more fitting for him to go down either in a ship in action, or as someone saving someone we know he is close to. Since there was no investment in the relationship with his son, his death did not carry the right weight. Even if it was saving Rey or Finn, that would have worked. But for him to try to emotionally save his son that he spent no time with on screen? No. And it did not help that his death was telegraphed for so long, filling the audience more with dread than with the proper emotion. Finally, let's look at Luke in The Last Jedi. This one the audience probably expected due to The Force Awakens, but it was beautifully done. Sure, we would have liked to see Luke be an epic action star, but what was our real investment in the character both throughout the series and in the movie? He was not a great lightsaber duelist but more like a pacifist. Instead we wanted to see him restore the Jedi order. While we did not see that directly, we see him show off an awesome new force technique and restore hope. Not only that, but his death scene mirrors one of the first scenes we see him in, including the beautiful music. We see him in peace after seeing him suffer for so long. Finally, he vanishes like his mentor (Did you notice the lightsaber strike being roughly the same position as well?). While we would have liked to see more from him alive, his death as a Jedi was perfectly fitting. I hope that helps with better understanding how to write good death scenes. It has at least helped me finally understand why I hated The Force Awakens death scene but loved The Last Jedi's ending. It also has provided me some new things to seriously consider when writing the death scenes for Neostriker. J. D. Nyle

Plan for Neostriker Sabre

Happy New Year!

Over the course of the New Year holidays, I published my short story Intent to Join on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. It's approximately a 30 minute read and only $1. While it's not the first story I wrote for SABRE, it was one that I felt like was in good shape and a good story that would convey my intentions for the series. (Sample with first scene below)


SABRE is indeed set after Neostriker: Shining, but I'm also trying to make it not necessary to read the novel. This is helped by the facts that the main cast is not the same and it's set in the future.

One thing I wanted to do with Shining is to make each episode like an episode of the TV shows I grew up watching. Arguably this was before arcs started to be a main thing. What I liked was this meant each episode pretty much stood on its own with only a quick explanation about maybe an event or character required. This was also important because I would miss a lot of episodes and reruns were not always in order. At the same time, I liked being able to know which episode I liked so that I could re-watch it as much as I liked. As my son has been watching Thomas and Friends, I have greatly grown to appreciate this stand-alone structure more.

In the end, I made partial success in my goal for Shining. Each episode was pretty much unique and could be enjoyed at least partially if not mostly on its own. This is in part because Shining is a complete story and a novel. SABRE, on the other hand, was always intended to be serialized like Sherlock Holmes stories. I did plan a couple of novels to bookend SABRE, but I think I'll toss that out. As a result, SABRE may resemble more like Detective Conan where many episodes and cases are stand-alone, but there are a few arcs scattered around.

Now let me explain the tone idea I have for SABRE. The way I view Shining is that it's like the original Star Wars movie. It's mostly light-hearted and fun, establishes the core of Neostriker, and I think can be enjoyed by a large age range. My youngest reader was in middle school and oldest non-biased reader is late-twenties/early thirties. If it was animated or in comic form, I think even 4 year-olds would have fun, just like they would with the original Digimon series.

In contrast, I intend SABRE to be more like Empire Strikes Back and the 90's Batman the Animated Series and the Spectacular Spider-man TV series. What I hope this means is that it can be enjoyed by younger audiences, but I also don't intend to talk down. Occasionally there may be a dark scene or episode that covers more mature topics, but I plan for the stories to be more of platforms for allowing kids to talk to their parents about them and potentially propose a solution to dealing with an issue. To that end, I think Intent to Join is a fair representation of how I plan to go about.

I hope you take a look at Intent to Join and enjoy it. I'm also trying out a few new things and storytelling tactics so I would love to get some feedback. And if you enjoy that, I hope you would also take a look at Neostriker: Shining.

Dream on!

J. D. Nyle