ive heard it said that part of the appeal of the original star wars movies was the suggestion of a much bigger world in which this story was taking place. As the characters frantically flew from planet to planet, much more was hinted at than was shown. Like… to me, Cloud City is special. The idea of a colony in a gas giant, and that George Lucas was able to depict that, to show it on screen. It’s the site of a brief rescue, but you can imagine more going on there.
The difference between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings is that in Star Wars these hints of a bigger world are illusions whereas in Lord of the Rings it’s real. Well of course they’re both illusions, they’re both fiction. But Star Wars, if you take a moment to really examine it, is clearly just an assembly of cliches, which makes more sense in reference to what inspired it (this is an Old West saloon, that is a kung fu master, etc) than in its own internal logic. Attempts to fill in the gaps consistently (and there are many) quickly become ridiculous. Whereas Lord of the Rings hints at a world and a long history of which our story is just the latest development, but then also delivers on that promise: it has coherent answers to as many questions as I have the patience to ask.
And I don’t ask that much. I haven’t read the Silmarillion for example, and I never will. I don’t care that much. But the fact that Lord of the Rings is always deeper than the extent to which I’m willing to investigate, that makes a big difference to me.
Because, part of the appeal of an adventure story is precisely these hints at something bigger, partially explored. It’s a report of a journey, and the strange things that were seen there… Lord of the Rings both provokes curiosity and rewards it. There’s almost nothing like it.
okay with Tolkien you know that if you point at some background character and say what’s his deal then you can get his complete family tree going back to Numenor and similarly for every tree, brook, and stream the fellowship passed on their journey, yes that’s good, but the world is only “consistent” in the sense that you’re exploring the imagination of a medieval literature professor with a Catholic worldview adapting his elvish conlangs into stories for children, like it might be an impressively deep work but consistent it is not! the first thing he had to do in Lord of the Rings is retcon the Hobbit!
and in a similar way I think you can consider Star Wars a consistent universe not at the concrete object level – even though yes the Expanded Universe will give you more background information than you wanted to know about every stupid alien in that Mos Eisley cantina – but at the abstract conceptual level: you’re exploring the world of pulp serialisation and movies that influenced George Lucas, so of course there’s a Ben Hur chariot race scene and of course Darth Vader wears a samurai helmet, it all makes perfect sense and if you ask “well how long is a parsec then” you’re asking the wrong question, much like if you asked how long it takes to sail to Valinor and how Middle-earth shifted from flat to round without cracking.
(Discworld is another interesting reference point here as it’s a huge world with tons of background detail that is so inconsistent that it’s a legitimate plot point with the wizard wars and the sourcerer and the history monks and the trousers of time and quantum, but ultimately the consistency also rests on the world being a fantasy parody of our own, and you’re exploring the implications of that premise).
Me [pointing to a stream on the map]: what’s up with this lil’ guy?
