Darths & Droids

Episode 1805: Nomad Knows the Hour of His Death

Hahahaha. Best logic bomb ever.

The rant about clones reminds me of a story where an adventuring party of goody-two-shoes ran into their evil doppelgangers. Except, as it turns out, the main villain created them with the intent that they would believe they were the real thing and that the party of heroes were the clones. This involved modifying their memories from the original so that they "grew up" to be meaner people. Fortunately, the party of heroes is, as mentioned, goody-two-shoes and the modified backstories just make the doppelgangers more neutrally aligned jerks than evil.

Also the ruse falls apart when both parties go back home and the doppelgangers find that their "loved ones" don't remember what they remember. As the story focused on the heroes, we don't see much of the doppelgangers after that but it faintly touches on the angst they feel and how they try to build up the lives they remember having. The heroes are all to happy to help their new siblings in this endeavor.

Episode 1806: Sufficiently Advanced Improv

New comic up, and they've announced what will happen with Episode VII-IX.

Oooh, yeah. I'm sure the sequel trilogy will give them tons of good material.

Episode 1808: Like a Circle in a Spiral, Like a Droid Within a Clone

Episode 1809: Am I My Brother's Creeper?

What.

Yeah, Luke kisses Leia here; https://darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0950.html and the very next strip indicates that they're related since nobody else has heard of Blue Milk.

I can't help but notice the use of plural "backups" "copies". Is Mark not the only Luke clone running around?

Episode 1810: The One That Got Away

That idea, of having Paranoia characters interact with their own clones, is great and I'm sure more than one GM has thought of it over the years.

Episode 1811: The Manchurian Logic Gate

Episode 1812: Something Wonderful Happens

Intermission The First:

Episode 1813: Statue of Imitations

Intermission The Second:

Episode 1814: It's a Magic Carpet Ride

Now that we're done with that, I wonder what they're going to do with the sequel trilogy?

Intermission The Third:

Episode 1815: I Think I'm a Clone Now

Right. I get it now!

I only just got that the "Nûwsreader" was the droid-clone of Dooku. -_-

Still, I wonder how much of that will be used in the sequel trilogy. And who will play whom.

My hope is that this entire intermission episode will be completely forgotten about.

Given there'll be a Palpatine clone, I doubt that.

The clone will die because the failure of his plans will make him angry and vulnerable to Force Drain

So the Rise of Skywalker is all Sally's fault then? Wonder if she'll be playing Rey.

So, less than a day until TFA starts, anyone got any last minute predictions?

Who will play Rey? Finn? Poe? BB-8? Will anyone play Kylo? Who will play Rose and why do they seemingly stop playing Rose in TRoS? Which plot points will the Comic Irregulars completely twist around? How many Jim characters will die? Which characters will turn out to be Wedge?

We won't actually get the answers to any of these questions in the first comic, but if you throw out a guess now you get twice as many points if you turn out to be correct. (Note: you get zero points if you turn out to be correct. There is no point system.)

Trying to map the sequel trilogy protagonists onto the Darths & Droids players I'm not seeing any super obvious matches. Of course the original trilogy protagonists will be played by the same players, and we can make some inferences from that. Chewbacca remains part of the "party" for all three films, so Ben might not make a new character at all. Similarly Han Solo is a main character in TFA so Jim probably won't roll up a new character until after Han dies. Before TRoS came out I thought a natural fit would be for Jim to switch to Rose following Han's death, potentially with a gag about him initially playing Paige and then pulling the "my sibling with the same build and backstory is here to avenge me" card, but I don't know why he would switch away from playing Rose, or who he would play in TRoS. Luke is a main character in TLJ but the only main character from TFA who doesn't continue being a main character in TLJ is Han, who obviously isn't played by Corey, so the only way for Corey to not be playing two characters in TLJ would be if he was actually absent for the whole first campaign, and that would still leave a question of who he's playing in TRoS. If Corey is playing a two characters in TLJ I'm going to assume his second character isn't Rey, because an entire campaign of Corey talking to himself would be weird. Leia has a not inconsequential role in each movie, but she's not prominent enough to say that Annie isn't also playing a new character. R2-D2 does roughly one thing in each movie, so clearly Pete is going all in on playing a new character. C-3PO joins the main party in TRoS, but again, every main character from TFA remains a main character in TRoS, so if Sally was playing anyone in TFA she must be playing two characters in TRoS. She presumably brought back C-3PO because of the in-universe decision that C-3PO's skills would be useful for the current mission, she's brought back Jar Jar a few times for similar reasons.

With all that "sorted out"... I haven't actually narrowed anything down, have I?

Annie: She's always looking to expand her range, the last kind of character she'd want to play is one who feels like Anakin 2.0, Leia 2.0, etc. Not that a sequel character similar to one of Annie's previous characters would wind up being an exact copy. For example Rey and Anakin are both Jedi with troubled childhoods but they react to that in completely different ways, Poe and Cassian are both Rebel Ace Pilots but their attitudes are very different (without even getting into how Annie's Cassian was totally different from movie Cassian and we have no idea how Poe will be characterized here). But I'm going to guess that Annie will play the character with the least similarities to all of her previous characters: BB-8. She could see playing a Droid as an interesting new avenue for roleplaying.

Pete: I've seen people suggest he plays BB-8 because BB-8 is the sequel trilogy equivalent of R2-D2, but I think Pete setting aside R2 to play a character with the exact same build as R2 would be kind of boring. The other most common suggestion is Kylo Ren, which makes sense considering that the First Order's goal is to take all of the Empire's left over weapons after the war and use them to establish their own rule, something that Pete would definitely try to do, and it's possible that he's attempting to make the strongest Force using build he can. There is a sticking point here that Pete hates intra-party conflict, would he really be willing to play three full PVP campaigns of him vs. everyone else? I'm not sure. If he's not Kylo that "attempting to make the strongest Force using build he can", could just as easily apply to Rey, couldn't it? Well that has a sticking point that is both small and large: Would Pete, when building a character from scratch, choose to play as a woman? Again I'm not sure. Could he be Finn? Perhaps he starts as a Stormtrooper because he found out about a Stormtrooper perk that synergizes really well with some other trait. Or maybe he's Poe, because I've just listed reasons he could be everyone else, so why not Poe? I'll come back to this.

Sally: Sally has technically played the most characters of any of the players, due to all of that character switching in The Silence of the Clones, but the unifying trait about how she plays her characters is that she's mostly just goofing around. I think if Sally's playing any main character other than BB-8 then she'll necessarily be playing a more serious sort of character than her previous ones, and it's hard to guess what she'll do with that. A lot of people suggest Sally as Rey, I can see that, but I'd also like to suggest: wouldn't it be fun if Sally was Kylo Ren?

Corey: Corey has played the fewest characters of all of the players, with just Luke, and he didn't entirely create Luke but did play Luke with a personality completely indistinguishable from his own. He'll probably play Finn as another in-over-his-head character.

Ben: He'll be Chewbacca. For a lot of TLJ Chewbacca has nothing important to do, but that's a scenario Ben winds up in a lot. Wait, maybe he plays Rose while Chewbacca is stuck not doing anything important?

Jim: He'll start as Han Solo (or start as a character who dies immediately and then switch to Han Solo, same difference). After he loses Han Solo he'll switch to... Vice Admiral Holdo! Yes, this is the one prediction in this wall of text that I've decided to wholly commit to: Jim will play Vice Admiral Holdo in The Last Jedi. In fact maybe Poe will be an NPC causing trouble for our hero Holdo, and ironically he will become Jim's character following her death.

Okay, okay, a full cast prediction is crystalizing:

Annie as BB-8 (and Leia)

Corey as Finn (and Luke)

Ben as Chewbacca (and Rose)

Jim as Han then Holdo then Poe

Pete as Rey

Sally as Kylo Ren (these last two could be switched but I'm going with a less common prediction for fun)

I spent all afternoon writing up this post and I'm pretty sure it's going to be the bottom of the page.

Anyone else got predictions? Don't need to be (and probably shouldn't be) as long winded as this one.