Mauri's Reviews > Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide

Seeing the new Star Wars movies as someone who spent 7 years as the kind of fan who could rattle off all of the components necessary to build an astromech droid is frankly, weird. Rogue One, with its chronological proximity to the films of my youth, was a treat. My dad and I left the theater trying to name everything we recognized from the original trilogy.

So this book was a fun combination of new details to add to my database, but also a source of a lot of cognitive dissonance. The council's jackets being based on "traditional Alderaanian military livery" is hard to reconcile with "Alderaan is a pacifistic planet with no weapons". Another disquieting bit was the continued erasure of established pilots like Wedge Antilles, Biggs Darklighter, Wes Janson, and Hobbie Klivian. Jek Porkins gets a mention, but not Biggs? Hrm. That all added to the bummer that was the confirmation of what I saw in the film - a few token background rebel women and POC pilots and infantry, but 85% white men. If they had kept pilots we already had names for for the white guy coalition and made everyone else a woman, I would have been a lot happier.