The Edge: This and That

This and That

As you may have noticed, this month's Shadis is chock full of Star Wars stuff. We really didn't feel we could present a Star Wars issue, however, without talking a little bit about what it all meant to us. For people of our generation (twenty to thirty or thereabouts), Star Wars is more than just a good movie. It's helped us to define who we are, giving us a sense of legitimate wonder in an otherwise ironic and jaded culture. That means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and the full impact of the trilogy can't really be summed up in a space this short, but we thought that one little recollection might help put it in perspective, and understand just how important it is to us.

When you're eight years old, Luke Skywalker isn't the whiny, snot-nosed punk that more mature eyes see him as. To an eight-year old, he's The Hero, the defender of all that is Right. He is the distillation of the bright happiness of the universe. He stands stalwart against Bad People, he defends the weak from those who would oppress them. Luke Skywalker is everything you want to be, everything you hope you can be. And when you're eight, you spend your life in dead certainty that he will one day defeat the forces of evil.

In The Empire Strikes Back, he got even cooler than he was in Star Wars. He was training to be a Jedi now, with a little green guy who sounded like Grover and who dispensed some of the deepest wisdom a second-grader will ever hear. He showed Luke how to move things with his mind, how to fix problems like the X-wing sinking into a bog, and how to take off Darth Vader's head if he had to. When his friends all got caught by Vader, you knew he was going to go after them, to save them from all the Bad Things that that black helmet represented. With Yoda's wisdom, the strength of righteousness and his newfound Jedi skills, he marched off to finally vanquish the Dark Side…

And promptly got his ass kicked.

Vader stood up to Luke and tossed him aside like a child. You sat there and watched him get beaten around like a crash test dummy for a full fifteen minutes before Vader clipped his sword arm and brought the pathetic contest to an end.

It got worse. Vader didn't seem content merely to defeat Luke. He wanted Luke to join him, to leave all that was Good and help him crush everyone beneath him. And the reason he gave was far worse than whatever you could imagine: he claimed that Luke was his son.

You and your friends debated the legitimacy of that for the next three years, but deep down, in the core of your breast, you understood that Vader wasn't just playing some cheap trick. There was a connection betwen the two of them, and the prospect of joining the Dark Side was a very real one. Our Hero seemed helpless in the face of this evil, unable to overcome it, in danger of being utterly damned by it.

Oh sure, he escaped. He lept down that shaft and was eventually rescued by his friends. But as you watched him there, dangling on that weather vane beneath Cloud City, you knew that that terrible temptation was there. The Dark Side was not destined to crumble; sometimes it even beat the good guys, or worse, destroy everything they represented. Perhaps Luke should have died right there, before those awful promises Vader made could come true.

That was the only time I've ever cried at the movies.

--Rob Vaux

Contest News

Disclaimer Warning! Depending when you read this, this may be dated information and the contest may have ended.--R.L.

We STILL don't have a winner for the dungeon crawl contest — so we'll give you a hint: The Boxing Ring is quite authentic.

The longer it takes to get a winner, the bigger the pile of prizes get. If you already mailed in a response, feel free to try again. Good luck!

On another topic, we're calling off the Rat Race. Our distribution is such that it's not fair to award a prize to the first reader to respond to a contest. Congrats to all the past winners, and don't worry — we'll still have a some sort of contest every issue. . .