Star Wars Visions: Who Is Ronin?

| September 22, 2021 |

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Star Wars: Visions Ronin — *Photo: Lucasfilm*

This Star Wars: Visions article contains spoilers.

The first short motion picture in Star Wars: Visions , "The Duel," sets the anime collection's unique, creative tone. Its main character, a wandering swordsman named Ronin, also challenges the idea of what it ways to exist a Sith. But merely who is Ronin and what is the significance of his proper noun?

Visions sits just to the side of Disney's Star Wars canon. Given free range to create stories inspired past the dearest saga, the seven studios invited to make the nine anime shorts in the collection were able to reinterpret the story of Star Wars in their own ways. (This is as well the case in the upcoming necktie-in novel Star Wars: Ronin : A Visions Novel by Emma Mieko Candon, which comes out on Oct. 12.) In "The Duel," the protagonist but known as Ronin wields multiple red lightsabers like a Sith. So does his opponent. That'south weird — in canon, morality is usually colour-coded with cerise for evil and other lightsaber colors denoting noble Jedi. But "The Duel" isn't interested in assigning morality by color.

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While the verbal land of this alternate universe galaxy isn't explained in the curt, the main graphic symbol'south moniker gives the states a inkling. In Nihon, a ronin was a samurai without a master. Usually employed past daimyō, or feudal lords, samurai were upper class extensions of the will of the shōgunate, the war machine leaders appointed by the empire. When George Lucas took inspiration from them for the Jedi, he made the moral and political elements quite different. With a Western thought of skilful versus evil applied to the concepts of Jedi and Sith, it became more important to distinguish "good" samurai from "bad." Thus the lightsaber colors, which become irrelevant in this story inspired more directly by historical Nihon.

Some other major influence on both Star Wars as a whole and "The Duel" in particular is Yojimbo , the classic Akira Kurosawa samurai flick. In very early on notes for what would become A New Hope , Lucas noted his main character was "Starkiller (Mifune) — a cross between Yojmbo and Seven Samurai ," as quoted in The Making of Star Wars by J.Due west. Rinzler.

Yojimbo too draws on plenty of tropes from Westerns and detective fiction: its nameless hero (or one with a clearly invented proper name) is often compared to the pulp detective hero from the 1929 novel Cerise Harvest . It was also directly inspired past the American crime drama The Glass Key , making "The Duel" merely the latest in a series of cross-ocean inspirations between American and Japanese genre conventions. But the setting of "The Duel" is pure Japan, with the feudal-era hamlet of a type most notably captured past Kurosawa.

While the hero of "The Duel" wields a wicked ruby-red lightsaber, he's also kind, ready to fight on behalf of innocent villagers confronting the greedy bandits. From the novel, we know he's a "former Sith," but the episode leaves open up exactly how "former" that might be.

Emma Mieko Candon discussed this with StarWars.com, saying, "'The Duel' is very much in chat with period dramas a la [Akira] Kurosawa … Jidaigeki [menses dramas] love samurai as protagonists considering they're suspicious of samurai every bit a class, and our Ronin falls right into that trope. I had to ask how this man rejected (or was rejected by) his social role, and why he continues to carve to information technology. Why does he still carry that tell-tale red blade? And why does he hunt his own?"

More than about who Ronin is and how his version of the Star Wars universe works will be revealed in our coverage of the novel side by side month.