Villain – Page 2 – Colin McMahon

What Writers can learn from Star Wars Rebels

Posted on September 7, 2018September 7, 2018 by Colin McMahon

Last night, I finished watching Star Wars Rebels. The adventures of Ezra Bridger and company came to a close and, overall, I think I will look back on the series with a general thought of “It was all right, but I felt like it could have been so much more.”

The season 4 finale in particular had me scratching my head and sighing, feeling like a letdown after the superior writing of the mid-season finale. The sad part is, after the season 3 finale, I wasn’t surprised.

Star Wars Rebels hopes to teach its audience many lessons about life, morality, and consequences. However, I think it best serves as a message to writers and, unfortunately, I believe it will go down as a cautionary tale more than anything else. Let’s focus on the writing of Rebels and break down exactly what I’m talking about (warning: spoilers to follow).

The Importance of Payoff

When I think of Rebels, I label it as a show that raises many good questions and ideas. Ezra is a jedi trainee outside of the temple – at a time when temptations to the dark side should be at their peak. After all, he’s relatively powerless against overwhelming odds, and his chief drive is to protect his new family. On top of that, he’s a young kid in the middle of a war. Sound familiar?

Ezra Anakin Rebels Writing — The parallels between Anakin and Ezra aren’t hard to spot.

And the show seems to be aware of this. We see Ezra tempted by the dark side. In pervades all of season 2 and is the dominant theme. Kanan is worried, stormtroopers are mind tricked into murder/suicide – it seems like Ezra’s “soul” is in real danger.

Then he meets Maul and Kanan gets blinded and…that’s it? The temptation of the dark side effectively vanishes for the remainder of the show, despite having numerous opportunities to resurface. This makes Ezra look incredibly strong-willed, which is odd because he doesn’t seem to really mature much elsewhere. He is still impetuous, he’ll still do anything for his friends, he still is placed in many life-and-death situations.

But the payoff never comes. Star Wars Rebels does this with an art form – build to events that never happen. Let’s go through the seasons. Season 1: Pretty solid – actually not much to report there. Season 2: The temptation of the dark side – payoff: Kanan gets blinded by Maul and Ezra is forever “cured.” Season 3: The rebels face Thrawn, who continually lets them go – referencing a larger plan – Payoff: Thrawn stumbles onto their base through unrelated events. Season 4: Lothal is revealed to be deeply connected to the Force, including force wolves and a portal that controls time – payoff: Ezra calls in some space worms from season 2 to save the day…?

Yeah it’s not great. Throughout its four season span, Rebels continually raises plot lines that it doesn’t pursue to conclusion. It isn’t the first show to do this, nor will it be the last. Thematically, it is more challenging to explore a theme in its entirety – but also much more rewarding. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the audience gets the feeling that the two writers really thought about war, violence, and resolving conflict. Almost every aspect is thoroughly explored, and I never once got the impression the writers were talking down to me.

If Star Wars Rebels can teach you anything about writing, it should be that plot threads should be fully developed ahead of time (or refined in editing) to erase most of the dangling story points.

Creating Characters with Arcs

All through season 4, there was one character I was wondering about: Zeb Orrelios. Namely, the thought on my mind was “What happened to him?” Zeb has no character-focused episodes in the final season, instead sitting on the sidelines. I also started thinking about his character. Throughout the series, he did have several arcs – he found his people, persuaded Agent Kallus to rebel against the Empire (really easily), and…that’s it.

And while Zeb had his character arcs – I couldn’t really figure out what he ever did for the main plot. He was always there, it’s true, but his stuff felt very superfluous. Kallus’ betrayal never amounts to much (he’s in season 4 even less than Zeb). In the greater struggles of Rebels, Zeb is a passive character, largely just along for the ride. He could have left at any point without making a noticeable impact. There is no “it” that he has that the other characters don’t.

And I feel like this is true of a lot of the main characters in Rebels. Their arcs are general or barely there. How does Sabine Wren really change from the first to the last episode? How does Hera? Most characters are very static – with only small deviations (hey remember that time Sabine left the rebels for all of three episodes?).

Even Ezra – the main character – does the bulk of his changing in the first season, going from a loner to a team player. He doesn’t really sway much past that point. Many character arcs relate to the goals of the story. Here is a chart:

Most of the characters never go through this change, in part because many don’t have serious flaws to be corrected. In much the vein of traditional Star Wars archetypes – the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (in every sense of the word). It fits but…eh, it’s a bit dull for a series.

The Importance of an Intimidating Villain

I’ve already written about this in an earlier post on Thrawn, as well as touched upon the broader writing lessons in my ‘Beat Up Your Heroes‘ post – but it bears repeating here. The villains of Rebels were typically dull and uninteresting. Part of this was the movie armor. Darth Vader is imposing as heck but then…stops pursuing them? The rationale is never given.

Likewise, it is a joke by this point that stormtroopers can’t aim, but Rebels elevates this to laughable heights. The final episode features stormtroopers firing – and missing – a stationary target roughly five feet in front of them. It would be okay if I didn’t think the show wasn’t trying to be serious – but you can’t have serious when your standard villains are less threatening than unarmed children.

The rebels are never beat up – for an oppressed group, they seem to be doing very well for themselves. Only one of them dies, and even then it feels more like the will of The Force than the actions of the villains.

Star Wars Rebels villain writing — Whoever gave this woman control of anything more powerful than a teacup should be fired.

If you want the hero’s victory to feel incredible, they’ve got to earn it. Rebels ends with a James Cameron’s Avatar moment: The intergalactic threat is defeated and just…leaves? Never comes back? What? It’s a happy ending but it doesn’t feel like an earned ending. With everything at stake on Lothal – why would the Emperor, a dude so evil he looks like Satan, let Lothal go?

Also if that’s all it took to free Lothal then they could have done it seasons ago – just saying.

Managing Escalation

At its heart, I think the Rebels‘ writing team had a real problem managing the escalation of stakes. When it was a little show about a small group of rebels on one backwater planet, resisting whatever the Empire had time to throw at them, it was believable and fun.

Toward the end, they were blowing up star destroyers left and right and crippling whole operations like it was nothing. How did these guys not single-handedly defeat the Empire?

There is one episode in season 4 where they fight 2 trandoshan slavers (one voiced by Seth Green doing his Cobra Commander voice) and they struggle. I mean, it takes them a whole episode to capture the freighter. While I liked this hearkening back to the first season’s scale, it stuck out to me. Why were they having so much trouble with 2 non-military personnel? After all I’d seen them do?

I could go on – and I’ll probably reference Rebels again in future articles. For now I will just say this: A lot of good stories can be ruined by laziness or sloppiness. I don’t think Rebels was ruined, but it was never great. If it wasn’t Star Wars, I don’t think people would have been as hooked.

When writing your stories, manage your payoffs – keep character arcs in mind – and write to suit escalation.

Writing tip: Beat up your Heroes

Posted on August 22, 2018August 22, 2018 by Colin McMahon

Author William Faulkner once said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” While some writers (like George R. R. Martin) may take this literally, I personally doubt that Mr. Faulkner meant to imply that you should send all your heroes to an early grave. No, he more likely meant that writers should not be afraid to abandon ideas, even their favorite ones.

When I write, I have many ideas that I personally love but make for bad storytelling. A lot of them involve my protagonists. Mainly, I don’t like to see my main characters get hurt. Well, a little hurt maybe – but not devastatingly crushed. While I’m sure my protagonists appreciate this – as much as any imaginary person can – it can make for a boring story.

In my last blog post, I talked about the unlikely hero character archetype. This person is always the last the reader expects to see saving the day. David defeats the giant Goliath with his wits and a well-placed stone. Well, imagine David didn’t fight a giant. What if he instead fought a middle-sized, slightly overweight man named Gerald? Suddenly the victory isn’t so fantastic.

This gets to the heart of today’s writing lesson: While you maybe shouldn’t kill all your darlings, don’t be afraid to beat them (emotionally or physically) to a bloody pulp.

Raising the stakes

Beating up your protagonist raises the stakes. David is fighting a man – not just any man, a giant – not just any giant – a warrior – not just any warrior, an undefeated warrior, someone everyone else is absolutely terrified of. At every increase of Goliath, David’s struggle seems more hopeless. However, it is making the reader that much more invested in the story. Beating an unbeaten warrior giant sounds a lot more interesting than getting the best of middle-aged Gerald.

setting stakes writing — Adventure stories are often in “exotic” locations because these are seen as more dangerous. The stakes are higher than say, an American city, where most people live in relative comfort.

Let me use a more personal example:

Throughout my blog you’re going to see a lot of criticism of my own writing, well let me begin with The Dreamcatchers. While I am overall pleased with my first effort, I won’t pretend it is perfect. In Dreamcatchers, the main villain is a night terror named Incubus. He’s a dangerous dude.

As a reader, you know this because he badly injures the protagonist early on, poisoning and nearly crippling him. In addition, he wins the next two encounters that he and the protagonist have. This sets up a final confrontation where it is unlikely that the protagonist (Vakarian) will win on his own.

While all this is great, part of me wished I had Incubus win more. One of the difficult aspects of The Dreamcatchers is that we never see the “real” world. Our main human character, Tony, is always asleep. Therefore it is difficult to see how Incubus is really threatening him – outside of disrupting his sleep patterns. I attempted to combat this problem by including a prologue where we see another human character suffer direct, substantial complications from a night terror attack.

Was it enough to raise the stakes? I’m not sure. I hope so. It is one of the issues I hope to address more in The Night Terrors.

Since my main human character was a child – and the book is young adult – part of me wanted to shield him from a life-and-death struggle, but this is not conducive to great writing. Look at the Harry Potter series: Aimed at (and starring) children, these books feature death, maiming, and a whole lot of broken limbs. I remember always feeling like Harry and his friends were in real danger – and that is what made their victories all the more incredible and satisfying.

To put it in simple terms: Your characters can’t get up if they don’t fall. While a stagger is less painful, it is also less interesting to read about.

Establishing a strong threat

Your protagonist isn’t the only one who benefits from a bruising plot line. One of the chief problems I see with villains today is that many of them are not very threatening. The conflict, especially in a lot of children’s entertainment, is often in stalemate – with the heroes achieving many more victories than the villains.

A huge example of this is the original Transformers cartoon. It opens with a grim situation: The war is practically over and the Autobots have all but lost. Their home planet – Cybertron – lies in the hands of the Decepticons. Megatron has more people, resources, and strategic locations. Despite this, he loses every single episode.

Megatron villain writing — While Megatron still served his purpose (and his design plus Frank Welker’s voice acting made him popular), he was never really that intimidating. Before the animated movie, Megatron didn’t have many victories.

Suddenly Megatron doesn’t seem threatening. He’s cool – yes – but competent? He keeps a second-in-command who literally betrays him every third episode. Megatron is a victim of bad writing. He is never winning the situation because the heroes aren’t having any real challenges.

In contrast, the Megatron in Beast Wars wins every major struggle up to the end. This is made more impressive by the fact that he doesn’t have the resources of his predecessor, nor the manpower.

If you want to write a strong villain, they have to win at least 66% of the time. Not only does this make them a serious threat, it also makes it that much more satisfying when the hero prevails.

Producing a satisfying climax

A lot of this ties into plot structure. Here is the classic plot outline:

As you can see, everything builds to the climax. The higher that point is, the more satisfying it will feel to the reader. Everything in a story is functionally in service to the climax. All of the hero’s trials and failures make that final moment – that point of either victory or defeat – all the more meaningful.

If you haven’t truly endangered your protagonist in some way then expect this moment to hit without its full impact. If you’ve written a story about a relationship for instance, but we never doubt that it will end, then the moment of salvation will come off as less of a “YES!” and more of a “Oh yeah, makes sense…”

Again, in order to pick themselves up, the protagonist must fall, albeit not always literally.