Star Wars’ new web series fixes a big High Republic issue

Star Wars has launched a new web series for The High Republic. Will this fix one of the series’ bigger issues?

It’s been a few weeks since the launch of Star Wars: The High Republic, and the series is already off to a big start. Within a little over a week since the first titles launched, both Justina Ireland’s A Test of Courage and Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi became New York Times best-sellers. And of course, fans are also loving this new literary series.

With this being a literary series that takes place 200 years before The Phantom Menace, that meant the authors of The High Republic had to come up with almost everything in this new world from scratch. Yes, there are a lot of familiar elements in this story. There’s the Force, and there are still practicing Jedi around who know how to use it. But other things are missing like the Sith (swapped for the Nihil) and, in general, most familiar characters who we’ve come to know throughout the Skywalker saga. (That is, save for Yoda, who is old enough to have lived through the High Republic era.)

One of the biggest issues with the latter point, though, is that these unfamiliar characters mean we’re leaving a lot to the imagination. Of course, this can be looked at as both a positive or negative thing depending on how you enjoy reading, but it becomes a bit more difficult when it comes to Star Wars. Light of the Jedi, for example, threw several new characters at you within a short amount of time in the book. And between the abstract space-names and different species, that makes it hard to keep up with who’s who. Sure, Wookiees, Togrutas and Twi’leks probably scratch the surface of what the average Star Wars fan knows. But did they actually expect me to know what a Dowutin or Weequay is without looking it up?

It’s that moment of pause that causes frustration when reading, and it takes you out of the moment from an otherwise brilliant story. Luckily, now, it seems that Star Wars will be doing these characters justice with a new web series coming out. Called Characters of Star Wars: The High Republic, each video will include an animation with a quick and to-the-point summary of the character they’re profiling. Star Wars kicked off this series on Tuesday by sharing the first animated feature about Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh, who’s featured in A Test of Courage. You can watch the video down below.

I’m excited to see more of these short-and-sweet videos coming from Star Wars. The character issue may not be a problem for everyone, but it does help either way to have a visual reference for the characters you’re reading about. In the Star Wars Databank, there are already concept art drawings of a few main characters, but I hope many more characters will be profiled in this digital-short series.

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