'The High Republic' Is Ending...What’s Next?

Star Wars

Apr 7

The High Republic is coming to an end. The era of the High Republic however, won’t, as it is already part of Star Wars lore outside of the formal initiative. Games like Jedi: Survivor, and print media like the upcoming manga Path of the Lightsaber include the High Republic as key background elements to their stories.

Even after the formal storytelling ends this summer, the branding will surely carry on as well with new authors able to write stories set during this era. But the question comes: what’s next? Well, here at CultureSlate, that’s what we’re going to explore! With a little under two weeks before Star Wars Celebration Japan, here’s our theories for just what they might tease or reveal as the next big publishing initiative!

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The Final Years of the Old Republic

Past CultureSlate articles have mentioned the many gathering clues that seem to hint at the next publishing initiative jumping back in time yet again, this time into the days of the Old Republic. However, the specific era of that jump back is unclear, though it seems likely to be sometime within a few centuries of or in the decades leading up to the Fall of the Old Republic. This event, which saw a triumphant victory for the Sith over the Old Republic, was only temporary and was reversed by the Jedi. It saw the rebirth of a new Galactic Republic to replace the institution the Sith and their allies destroyed, one which would persist until the rise of the Galactic Empire in the Skywalker Saga.

Why would this era be where canon focuses next? For starters, a number of notable Sith Lords have been mentioned over the past decade of canon, and several have been getting a few too many mentions. These include:

Lord Gol: This once unnamed Sith was introduced by Charles Soule in Star Wars (2020) in a unique storyline that saw Luke Skywalker come into contact with a bled kyber crystal imprinted with the Sith’s memories. Luke was able to heal the crystal, and in doing so, learned a great deal about the Sith, told to us in flashes of Gol’s history. The character’s name was revealed later, in Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy.

Lord Momin: Momin is certainly not a new character, and was introduced in 2017 with Charles Soule’s comic run about Darth Vader. Momin is an infamous Sith artist whose mask became haunted by a vestige of the Sith’s spirit and went on to survive into the era of the Skywalker Saga. What is specific to Momin is the estimation on when he lived, with the recent reference book Star Wars: Timelines placing the end of his life between 1100 BBY and 1000 BBY, a surprisingly recent date in the long history of the Sith.

Darth Caldoth: A Duros Sith created by George Mann and initially explored in his tales of myths and legends in the Star Wars galaxy, Caldoth has since been mentioned more directly in canon. He had a rivalry with a Jedi who battled him while wielding the unique shield used by Silandra Sho in Phase 2 of The High Republic, which is now in the hands of Reath Silas by the time of Phase 3.

There is also the specific example of the Tythonic Resonator, a special spherical device constructed by Elzar Mann to try and communicate with Avar Kriss while she was behind the Stormwall prior to the end of the novel Eye of Darkness. A tricky to use device (it gave Elzar a nosebleed and earbleed), he specifically notes that it had been roughly a thousand years since the Jedi Order had last built a Resonator. This device was revealed in Charles Soule’s Shadows of Starlight miniseries, and feeds into the biggest point in favor of this theory.

All of these prominent drops of information alluding to events centuries ago have been released throughout The High Republic and have also emerged in other storytelling. The High Republic itself was teased for a few years prior to the reveal of Phase 1 by the authors involved in the initiative. Given the initiative’s delay of Phase 3 (which added an extra year of time spent in this era), many of the teases from The High Republic and other storytelling would seem to suggest a similar pattern is taking place. There is also the fact that many of these characters have been created or have had their first appearances/mentions shepherded by noted, long-time Star Wars creatives, like Soule, Cavan Scott, and George Mann. If anyone would be involved in major future storytelling, it would likely be these veterans. As for the broader storytelling angle, showing powerful Sith in contrast to a weakening Jedi Order and Republic, but ultimately showing or knowing that good will triumph, certainly speaks to recent political events not just in America, but across the globe. Even when evil wins, or is ascendant, there is still hope, and ways to fight back.

The New Republic Or Elsewhere

But it may be that instead of jumping back, we will be jumping forward, at least from the position of when The High Republic is set. Fans have clamored for years to get more information on the era of the New Republic, to explore Luke’s Jedi Academy on Ossus, to understand more of the New Republic’s struggles, and to see how we got to the events of the Sequel Trilogy. Certainly, content exists in this era, but it is heavily clustered to the end of the timeline, close to the latest trilogy of films since the stories aim to support the storytelling seen there.

Already, we’re getting some new storytelling during this period. Alex Segura is writing Star Wars (2025), set to explore the time after the Battle of Jakku, but there could easily be more on the horizon. With a real-world decade since The Force Awakens, and the next films to focus on Rey jumping over a decade of in-universe time beyond The Rise of Skywalker, Lucasfilm may want to support exploration of the time before the Sequel Trilogy since those films are no longer being actively developed.

The complex weave of story elements can now be looked at from a distance, and be shown to make sense from within the new canon. The novel Shadow of the Sith did great work in this arena, and unlike the High Republic, hints and links to the New Republic do not need to be seeded into existing story material given they are already quite common.

There are other options on where we could be headed though. Many fans of The High Republic are hoping for a less-substantial jump of a few centuries before that era, to explore the dawn of the Galactic Republic and some of the smaller teases we’ve had regarding that period of time. Some also believe that the Prequel era, specifically around The Phantom Menace and before Attack of the Clones could use more attention, though we have recently seen an expansion to that era through several new stories. Finally, there is the idea that whatever is coming, it would be entirely new, unexpected, perhaps thousands of years before even the time of the Sith, or centuries after the time of Rey. When The High Republic was in development, Lucasfilm was extremely willing to give its authors total freedom in this arena, and why not maintain the same ideas with the next major publishing initiative?

Nothing!

While this is the most depressing option, it may also be the most likely. The High Republic was only able to exist as it did because Lucasfilm knew there would be a gap of time after The Rise of Skywalker before the next film reached theatres. While they almost certainly did not expect the next film to take as long as it has, they put their resources into the development of the initiative, and the extra time spent before getting a film into the theatre probably allowed for the delay to the completion of The High Republic. Because of that delay though, if there was to be another major publishing initiative, it would almost certainly run into the marketing push for the upcoming film The Mandalorian and Grogu. Every Star Wars film since the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm has seen tie-in storytelling release alongside a major film. While the Mandoverse as a whole has almost entirely shunning such material, that might change. Grogu is big, Din Djarin is big, and to support the first new Star Wars film in theatres in over half a decade, Disney is surely going to want to pull out all the stops.

But that means authors focused on creating those tie-ins, money going toward that marketing, and attention firmly locked on the main prize. Resources for Phases 2 and 3 of The High Republic were dramatically scaled back by Disney for various reasons, and they might also be hesitant to move forward with the same kind of expansions into the past or elsewhere after The Acolyte. This streaming series, set in the High Republic era, did not meet the expectations Disney had, resulting in the show not getting renewed for a second season. If the purpose of the print material and other media in publishing initiatives is to try and create new avenues for live action to explore, it appears to have fallen short of that goal. But, only time will truly tell what we might see next. Just two more weeks, and we might find out…

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