If you are anything like me, you love the original Star Wars for its iconic triumph in modern storytelling, but couldn’t get over how stupid the “design flaw” in the first Death Star was. I mean, are we really expected to believe that Imperial engineers would be stupid enough to create an unobstructed thermal exhaust port connected directly to the station’s 6.67x10^17 Gigawatt power reactor left completely unprotected, except for ray shielding, 13,000 turbolaser emplacements, 1,900 garrisoned TIE fighters, a planet-destroying superlaser, a fleet of Star Destroyers, and could only actually be targeted by a space wizard who had the ability to launch missiles at a 90 degree angle? I mean, come on! Give us a break!
Worst. Plot hole. Ever.
Luckily, last December’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story explained this distracting — and quite honestly, lazy — plot hole by showing us how the “design flaw” was actually intentionally placed there by a Rebel sympathizer, and that the Battle of Yavin IV wasn’t actually an incredible feat of reconnaissance, engineering, tactics, and piloting.
THANK GOD.
But there are a ton of other problems in the Star Wars universe that goes completely unexplained by LucasFilm’s newest addition to the Star Wars franchise. Leaving these issues unaddressed completely ruins the movie, all of Star Wars, and frankly life itself.
Sound a little crazy? Maybe not!
For instance, we are all familiar with X-Wings, Y-Wings, A-Wings, and B-Wings from the original trilogy. Who isn’t? It’s pretty clear where these iconic ships get their namesakes: the X-Wing looks like a big X, the Y-Wing looks like a big Y, the A-Wing looks like a big A, the B-Wing looks like a… well, that one’s a mystery, but you know what I mean.
But ever since the 2004 DVD rerelease, George Lucas ingeniously (or perhaps foolishly!) re-edited the original films to not have any of the Latin writing system on screen, instead using the alien-looking Aurebesh writing system. It’s not really a completely different language, but instead just a simple substitution cipher for the Latin alphabet: A is Aurek, B is Besh, C is Cresh, and so forth.
Why is this a problem? Well, just wait!
Assuming that Star Wars is a documentary of events that took place in real times, and we’re just watching a dub of the film from the original Galactic Basic, we can only assume that these ships actually Xesh-Wings, Yirt-Wings, Aurek-Wings, and Besh-Wings, right?
WRONG!
Although Aurek stands for A, it does not look like our own A. You can see in the chart above that it actually looks more like a pair of pliers; Xesh looks like a delta; Yirt is a futuristic V; and Besh is sort of like a sideways TIE fighter. And so on.
This all raises a perilous series of questions:
- Are these ships just arbitrarily named after random letters in the aurebesh?
- Maybe the aurebesh prefixes of these ships stand for something else. Like different words? But if so, then what words?
- Isn’t it a coincidence that all the ship names that have nothing to do with their Latin letter equivalents just happen to look like their Latin letter equivalents?
- Since ship names have nothing to do with what the ships look like, then how come other ships that don’t look like Latin letters don’t have aurebesh prefix names? Like, it’s just those ships.
- If this doesn’t make any sense, then does anything in Star Wars make sense?
- If nothing in Star Wars makes sense, does anything make sense?
These burning questions have dogged the franchise as some the biggest blunders in sci fi history, and could have been easily answered in Rogue One, but were sadly left out for some unfathomable reason. Did they not think that people were thinking about this? Did they think no one would notice? Or perhaps it got left on the cutting room floor, and we’ll be seeing some deleted scenes in the forthcoming home media release that will address this problem.
And everyone would have been like, “Ohh, now it makes sense!” But no.
Honestly, it’s pretty easy to imagine where this would have been addressed in the film. During the Rebel assault on Eadu, there was probably a missing scene with Cassian calling out to Jyn on the radio, saying, “Watch out for the incoming Xesh-Wings! That stands for Xernardi, the planet where they’re built!” And Jyn would have been like, “Why are they shaped like crosses?” And he would have been like, “Because no one crosses the Xernardi!” And everyone would have been like, “Ohh, now it makes sense!” But no. We saw none of that in the theater.
Nothing will fix this — not even a deleted scene where Princess Leia talks at length about how Yirt-Wings were so-called because Yirt is the symbol made when extending two fingers on a humanoid hand, which is a very offensive in many Core-system cultures, and when doing a bombing run, the Rebels were “giving the Empire the yirt.” Or even a Blu-Ray bonus feature that goes in depth with director Gareth Edwards about the history of the Besh-Wing, and how the Besh-Wing was built, and how many galactic credits it cost to build a single Besh-Wing, and how many Besh-Wings were lost in the Battle of Endor, and the names of all the Besh-Wing pilots.
Instead, LucasFilm decided to ignore this massive plot hole and leave us all waiting until Episode VIII, when hopefully some of this will finally be addressed.
One can only hope.
POST TROS UPDATE: Three years ago, who could have guessed that this major issue still wouldn’t have been addressed in Star Wars Episode VII: The Last Jedi (thanks, Rian Johnson) or Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (thanks, JJ), even though there were PLENTY of opportunities to do so?
For instance, when Rey confronts the ghost of Luke Skywalker, doesn’t it seem weird that she asks him about unimportant things like her destiny and her place in the Force, but not about why his ship has a name that is not internally consistent with established fictional language, grammar, and syntax?
So weird.
And with the premiere of Disney+ and the newly edited A New Hope where Greedo utters the phrase, “maclunkey,” which means “I would never hurt you brother, now help me clean my blaster!” in Rodian, they could have included even more edits and re-recorded lines and reshoots and digital tinkerings to the classic films to finally put this eternally maddening problem to rest once and for all!
Wouldn’t that be nice?
But no — with the conclusion of the series, Disney has seen fit to hold its loudest and maddest fans in absolute contempt, thereby ruining this beloved series forever and ever, once and for all, for all eternity.
Sad.
