Rebecca Roanhorse, author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, tells StarWars.com that writing in the Star Wars galaxy is intimidating, she says “You know, you’re walking into somebody else’s universe and you’ve got to figure it out pretty quickly.”
Spoiler warning: This article discusses details and plot points of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn.
Still, she had a secret weapon.
“But it’s something that I’ve lived with my entire life at the same time,” she says. “I saw the original Star Wars when I was eight or nine years old. I remember waiting in line outside the movie theater with my older brother and playing with the original action figures. I’ve never not known Star Wars.
So — challenging, intimidating. But also just joy.”
Resistance Reborn was released last week, and it’s a key story in the lead up to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It picks up literally right after the events of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and tells how the Resistance rebuilds and seeks out new leadership after being essentially decimated by Kylo Ren and the First Order. And significantly, the story features older pilots, like the legendary Wedge Antilles, being brought into the fold to give the Resistance another shot.
“Getting to write Wedge was a lot of fun,” she says. “Building out his backstory, figuring out who he is, what drives him.”
In turn, Resistance Reborn grapples with how guards old and new mix, and how the new generation of Star Wars heroes deal with the events of The Last Jedi.
“One of the main controversies is how do some of the older pilots, especially Wedge’s old friends that he’s going to round up and bring in, how do they feel about Poe?” she says. “I mean, he really messed up, right? So a lot of the book deals with [Poe] coming to terms with his insubordination.”
Leia plays a big part in the book as she leads the effort to rebuild, feeling a responsibility to make things right for the next generation. But Roanhorse also took the opportunity to go deeper, exploring Leia’s thoughts on losing Han, her son, and fighting wars for most of her life. “I think she’s battling depression a lot,” Roanhorse says. “I think she’s fighting through it. She knows that people are looking up to her. She knows that she’s one of the few people who can bring these different personalities together. So she’s got to hold it together, even though it’s tough.”
In crafting the story, Lucasfilm developed an outline of basic beats and some characters to include, and then Roanhorse got in the pilot’s seat. “The story has really been mine,” she says. “They gave me a lot of freedom to basically write what I want to write and develop the characters the way that I want to develop them.” Roanhorse created a number of Corellians, new rebel pilots, and even old Imperials (yes, Imperials) brought in to help the Resistance. “There’s gonna be tension there, of course, too,” she says. “Because some people are gonna be like, ‘We don’t want these people here at all!”
Read the interview in full here.
