The High Republic Author Roundtable: “The End of the Beginning”

Twenty-five novels, 139 comic book issues, 22 short stories, six original manga graphic novels, and five audio originals. All released in just four years.

This is The High Republic, the most ambitious initiative in Star Wars publishing history.

With the release of the final novel, Trials of the Jedi, the High Republic authors recently gathered around a virtual roundtable to chat with StarWars.com. (Daniel José Older was unavailable and sorely missed.) They reflected on the journey the story and characters have taken through the height of the Jedi Order, and the fans who went along on the adventure with them through the end. But is it the end of an era?

Minor spoilers for the High Republic follow.

StarWars.com: The first time this team gathered to talk to us was in 2019! In that discussion, Claudia Gray mentioned that while you created the general direction of the story, you knew you’d need to adjust along the way. Can you think of examples of when that ended up happening?

Michael Siglain: Stellan Gios was created to die at the end of the initiative, and then we shifted that to the end of Phase I to have more impact there — to give the Nihil a bigger win and hand the Jedi a loss. But he was a character that when we created him, we knew from the beginning, this guy's not surviving.

Claudia Gray: I feel like the overall arc maintained itself, but I think a lot of us wound up becoming attached to a character or a development in a way that maybe we didn't anticipate. I didn't anticipate really being into the Vessel crew. I don't think we realized how big Lourna Dee was going to be when she first emerged. It was more about the characters developing in more ways than we thought.

Cavan Scott: I obviously had no idea Lourna was going to be such a big part of my storytelling. Keeve’s story was pretty much written out. The reasons for her leaving shifted depending on what was going on with the wider universe, although they're pretty much the same, but Lourna’s part in it all has been quite major. And that's absolutely because people loved her after Light of the Jedi and The Rising Storm, and she sort of fell into my hands. She's been there ever since.

StarWars.com: Which other characters did you grow attached to?

Tessa Gratton: I really was surprised how attached I got to Burryaga. It was in Charles's short story for Tales of Light and Life where I suddenly got obsessed with what Burry did to survive. And I was like, oh, my God, that's just so badass and raw and real. I'm going to write Burry and give myself this opportunity to get to know him better as a character.

George Mann: I loved Reath Silas from the first moment I read Claudia's first book. I think I identified with him because he’s a geeky librarian guy. It was a very different sort of Jedi than we'd seen before. [He ends up] coming out of his shell and becoming the Jedi he always should have been — and put through the ringer a little bit. I think you always see a bit of yourself in the characters you write. Reath was kind of my way into the project both as a reader and as a writer.

Lydia Kang: I really enjoyed writing Amadeo Azzazzo in the short story anthology. And then being able to see somebody cosplaying him in Japan, that was really cool. I was like, I'm meeting my character for the first time! Writing the chancellors in Phase II was really fun. I get really into the politics of stuff. I love exploring that kind of drama. As for the entire initiative, Geode is always going to be my favorite. I just adore him.

Claudia Gray: I did go to a con once and somebody had what to the uninitiated would look like a rectangular gray throw pillow, but it was a Geode plushie.

Alyssa Wong: Did you see the [Star Wars Celebration] cosplayer who showed up as Geode and then vanished?

Lydia Kang: He was probably going to karaoke.

Cavan Scott: Vintians love karaoke. It’s well known.

Charles Soule: They love rock music.

[laughter and groans]

Alyssa Wong: The character I didn't realize I was going to fall in love with, but did, was Driggit Parse, who shows up in Escape from Valo. She wasn't really supposed to be a big part of that book, but she grew with each iteration. And I love writing stories about people whose faith shatters, and it's usually their faith in other people. I love writing sad and angry girls. She ended up making it out of Escape from Valo, and she's been going through the comics and short fiction, and she plays a huge part in the Battle of Eriadu one-shot. She's my girl. She represents all the kids who are that age in real life who are faced with impossible choices.

Zoraida Córdova: I became really attached to Churo the Hutt in Beware the Nameless. If Alyssa likes writing characters whose lives shatter, I like writing characters who know they can be heroes but something's holding them back. I like that character journey and I think that Churo goes through that when he meets the Jedi, and the push and pull between duty to his family and what he wants to do for himself.

Cavan Scott: I think it's Elzar Mann for me. His arc has been so incredible. He started as this alpha male, can-do-everything Jedi, and has just shown us all how to be a guy to ask for help, to get things wrong, to admit he needs people, and just to keep fighting. I would never have thought that of him when we first started discussing him, but I think he's going to be one of the characters I'm going to miss most.

Charles Soule: [Elzar’s] like a cool Jedi with good hair, but then below that he's got all these conflicts that make him fun to write. Whether it's the way he's experimental with the way he approaches the Force, to his own doubts about his connection to it, and all the things that he does and all his failures, that make him a really interesting character to write.

But for me, when it’s time to write a scene with this character in it, I get very excited and it flows effortlessly. And that’s Porter Engle. He's not exactly a Jedi superhero, but he can really pull off some impressive things. It’s fun to come up with things that illustrate just how good he is with a lightsaber. Marchion Ro is the same way; any time you put him in a scene, it starts to sizzle. I would probably say those two, the most uplifting, lightest characters in the whole High Republic.

StarWars.com: Was Marchion Ro always supposed to be the big villain?

Cavan Scott: We planned for there to be multiple red herrings. In fact, at one point I was really trying to make the Drengir's name an anagram for ‘red herring.’

Michael Siglain: We wanted to make sure that Marchion Ro was very different from the Emperor, and there were a lot of conversations about that and about the Nihil themselves. The idea was, we're creating these new villains, and they are, for lack of a better description, our punk rock space Vikings. Who would be the leader of them?

But we always knew it was going to go beyond the Nihil; we knew the Nameless were going to be in there. We were riffing off the question from Cavan of what scares the Jedi, and we wanted people to think, oh, it's the Drengir. No, wait, it's the Nihil. And then when we came in with the Nameless, that was yet another turning point where hopefully readers said, “Wait a minute, we didn't see this thing coming either. What is this?” And then people would start to think, okay, well maybe it's this that scares the Jedi. Really, it was much bigger than that. We answer that in the final novels and comics.

StarWars.com: You mentioned earlier that you met High Republic fans at Star Wars Celebration. Does anyone have a favorite interaction with readers?

George Mann: The meetup at Celebration Europe. It was like nothing we could have imagined. We came out as a group looking to meet whoever was going to be there, and there were four or five people standing in a little huddle. We went, four or five people, that's cool, we'll get some photos. We started talking to them, and they're the ones who realized and said, “Oh, you think we're the meetup? No, no, you want to be over there.”

And we looked and there were hundreds of people in this massive sea of cosplay waiting for us. We spent two hours doing photos and talking to fans, and loads of them brought us presents and postcards they'd written to us. It was so humbling and moving, hearing people's stories about how they'd interacted with the books and what they meant to them. I came away from that thinking, I have to strive even harder and do even better with the books for the next round because they clearly mean so much to people.

Alyssa Wong: My very favorite experience was that panel at Celebration Europe where it was announced that I was joining the initiative, and nobody knew [beforehand]. I got to sit in line with all the fans leading up to the publishing panel and I was like, “I can't wait to see what's going to happen on the panel!” I got to have that time to talk with them and ask them what they like the most and share that excitement.

Justina Ireland: Just to add to that, one of the reasons Imri Cantaros made it to the end was because somebody came up and told me how much they loved him at Celebration Anaheim.

Tessa Gratton: Do you remember, Justina, at New York Comic Con when Path of Deceit had just come out, the young man who came up to us? He said, "I've only read three-fourths of the book, but Kevmo Zink is my favorite." And you and I were just like, don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact.

Zoraida Córdova: I had an experience a couple of weeks ago when I was coming home on a flight and there was a man sitting directly behind me. He saw my Lucasfilm hat and asked, do you work there? And my friend was like, she writes for Star Wars! And as we're all getting our bags, he asked what book, and I said Convergence. He said, I just read that. That was such a weird experience that's never happened to me before.

Charles Soule: There’s a category of interaction that I think a lot of us have had. People come up to the table at a signing sometimes and they'll say, I didn’t read books at all. I read books as a kid, and I've come back to reading because of these High Republic books. What better endorsement for what we do than that?

Cavan Scott: The amount of people who have come up and said, I now read comics because of the High Republic. They followed the stories from the books to the comics and now they've got pull lists every Wednesday at the local store.

Michael Siglain: It’s overwhelming and humbling when you hear it once or twice. But to hear this over and over again means that these authors have done something right and they've really struck a chord.

I had a woman come up to me and say, “I could speak to my son again because we found common ground through the High Republic books.” People saying they've met friends, they've met fiancés. Just seeing how it brought the fan community together was completely overwhelming.

What the authors have accomplished is unbelievable and I think it will allow this to live on. I can't wait for people to come back to it and experience the whole thing, maybe in a different order, or experience it for the first time, and see just how it's all connected.

Charles Soule: Not to be overly earnest about it, but the group of us were brought together to do this. The group was strongly connected throughout this, and it's neat to see that core idea of the High Republic — bringing a group of people together and doing something new — has extended outward through the fans and the readers. And I think we'll continue to do so for many years to come, as Mike said.

StarWars.com: Speaking of connections, does anyone have a favorite High Republic reference or element in other Star Wars storytelling?

Claudia Gray: I was delighted to no end to find out that Geode has a dessert available at Galaxy’s Edge. Vintians know their mousse, apparently.

Zoraida Córdova: When we went to Oga’s Cantina and we were looking through the cocktails, I was like, "This drink is called the High Republic? Is this for real?"

Charles Soule: The one I'm going to choose is the Stellan Gios lightsaber, which is a legacy lightsaber you can get at Galaxy's Edge and Disney Store. That one's particularly special to me because when they launched it, we went to Disneyland at four in the morning. We got to see Galaxy’s Edge waking up. We were in the shop with Dok-Ondar, and a guy dressed in High Republic robes was there getting ready to launch this lightsaber. And it felt like we were in the High Republic. It was really special. People bring it to shows and [it makes] the High Republic real to people by having an element of it that they could lift and hold.

It's really been amazing how this initiative has found its way into the rest of the canon.

Cavan Scott: And they keep cropping up. The other day I was looking at Disney Records and there's a Star Wars lo-fi album with a Starlight Beacon track on it. Seeing Starlight Beacon in Young Jedi Adventures… just seeing it on screen and going, “There it is!” That was an emotional moment because it feels real in the books and the comics, but then when you see it on screen and you've got the music and everything, it crystallizes it all.

George Mann: There's another bit of it as well, which is the fun that we have seeding stuff into other Star Wars stories and helping build those connections. I’ve done it with a few stories, like the Qui-Gon Jinn graphic novel that had some of the minor villains from Battle of Jedha in it. I did a story for the Star Wars Insider set during Attack of the Clones, but it’s got an EX droid in it. We can just put these little bits in, and you know that the fans are going to see it and smile, and that it's also strengthening that relationship between the original stories and what we've done.

Zoraida Córdova: In A Crash of Fate, I created a planet called Eroudac for one of the main characters, Izzy, who's from there. As I was working on Beware the Nameless and the one-shot with “The Adventures of Churo the Hutt,” I set him on that planet, so I was tying those things in together. Finally getting to see the planet, which I never really thought that I would because it was always off the page, was really cool.

Michael Siglain: My answer from the macro level is The Acolyte, but from the micro level, it was seeing those white temple robes in live action. That was a surreal moment, only topped by seeing Vernestra Rwoh and, eventually, her lightsaber whip in action. Truly breathtaking.

StarWars.com: Did anyone get a chance to play Jedi: Survivor?

Alyssa Wong: I did! Seeing the characters in those robes and having them reference [the High Republic], it was so amazing. I was like, “It's real!” Which is a hilarious thing to say when you're making canon. But as other people have said, it feels extra real when you see it outside of what we're doing. Also, Dagan Gera’s my boy, unsurprisingly. Love that guy.

StarWars.com: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take one High Republic book with you, which one would it be?

Cavan Scott: Temptation of the Force. I love that book.

Justina Ireland: I'm not taking any books. I've read these so many times looking for things! I'm just going to sit there and be sad with my sand.

Tessa Gratton: My instinct was to say Out of the Shadows because I really enjoyed that one, but the Stormwall starts in that one, and I hate the Stormwall so much.

Cavan Scott: Oh, the days we've lost to the Stormwall!

George Mann: I reckon Rising Storm, because it was the first time you get to see the Nameless and there’s some cool action in there. I might be able to model myself after some of those fight scenes in my time on the desert island. I could learn those moves.

Lydia Kang: Can I bring all the comics? Like an omnibus? I would love the actual tactile experience of flipping through them one by one slowly, with time.

Charles Soule: I would bring the audiobook of Midnight Horizon. And the reason why is because I wish Daniel were here right now and I'm thinking of him. I also feel like if I were on a desert island, I’d want to spend my time surviving. So the good thing about an audiobook is you can't actually spend any time listening to it on a desert island.

Cavan Scott: How are you powering---

Charles Soule: That’s my point!

Justina Ireland: Like a comfort file.

Charles Soule: I would have a comfort file.

Zoraida Córdova: I would take Temptation of the Force, obviously, and we know why. Because it's beautiful and sexy.

Alyssa Wong: My answer is also Midnight Horizon because I miss Daniel, but I'm taking the hard copy because this hair heats up a lot and I'm going to use it as a hat.

Claudia Gray: I would take Tales of Light and Life. It’s everybody's writing, and the least amount of stress. Like, oh, God, does that thing with the Stormwall conflict with the other thing with the Stormwall? I don’t have to worry about that. I think it would just be the most nostalgic and fun and give me the most characters to visit.

Editor’s note: StarWars.com reached out to Daniel later to find out his pick.

Daniel José Older: Light of the Jedi! I remember vividly reading it for the first time and really seeing all the pieces we'd brainstormed as a team coming together on the page. Something fell into place for me, another piece of the puzzle, and I knew this was going to be something special.

StarWars.com: As we wrap up, I have to ask, is Trials of the Jedi the last time we'll see the High Republic era?

Michael Siglain: No, it is absolutely not the last time you'll see the High Republic era. It's the end of this particular story, but it's definitely not the end of the era. And we absolutely have plans for other stories. I wouldn't say it's Phase IV, but you could say it's sort of Phase More.

[laughter]

I can't say much more than that at the moment, but it's definitely not the end. It's the end of the beginning.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.