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“The Lonely Traveler Is Home” epitomizes the idea of a tale of light and life, in #TheHighRepublic short story collection. It’s short, sweet, and speaks to our solo journeys and the joy of being in community. Punch it!
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Raw Episode Transcript:
Hey, Rebel Rouser. I’m Allen Voivod, and this is Star Wars Seven by seven, your daily dose of Star Wars joy. And thank you so much for joining me for it. So this story actually is very much a dose of Star Wars joy in its own right. It’s called The Lonely Traveler Is Home, and it’s Daniel José Older’s story, which features a lot of the characters that he introduced to us in the High Republic Adventures comic series and also in his storytelling including Ram Jomaram, who first showed up in the phase one, wave two novel Race to Crashpoint Tower.
So this story takes place on Starlight Beacon, and it takes place about a year before the terrible, tragic ending of Phase One when Starlight Beacon takes a dive, quite literally, and it features a homesick Ram and a homesick Zeen Mrala. But Zeen Mrala is homesick in a way that doesn’t necessarily translate to a place. It translates to a person, though that isn’t explained so much in the novel. But if you have a sense of other storytelling where her connection with Lula Talisola is made more evident, then, yes, you will understand that homesickness a little bit more clearly.
But in this story, Ram decides to do something sweet, thinking that the homesickness is about a place for Zeen, and wants to set up a surprise party for her and remind her of pleasant things about home and invite all their friends to it and just create a moment for her, which is wonderful. And we end up getting a fun twist on that situation. In the story, we also get an appearance from Jedi Master Torbin Buck, aka Buckets of Blood, who is also referred to as Master Buckets by the various Padawans. So that’s fun. And yeah, he’s just one of the laugh-out-loud characters where it’s always something that brings a smile to your face anytime that character shows up in anything.
And the story itself is titled based on what is loosely translated as an old Aloxian saying, which is, when the heart smiles, the lonely traveler is home. And they don’t necessarily dig into the meaning or the implications of that phrase. It’s just reflected in the goings on in the story. And if you sit with it, you do end up arriving at ideas about how just all of our individual journeys through life are very solitary and lonely in their way. There’s all sorts of stuff that we’re experiencing in our own internal worlds that isn’t necessarily available to everyone else.
But when we are around people, when we are around community, that’s when we can make our hearts smile. And that’s where all of us, as lonely travelers throughout the world, throughout the galaxy, far, far away, that’s when we feel at home. That’s when we feel most the sensation of being at home.
It also reinforces the idea of found family that is such a significant part of the fabric of Star Wars too. So, yeah, that’s pretty much everything that I want to share about The Lonely Traveler Is Home. It’s not a high stakes story or anything like that. It’s just a sweet story, well told, and that is going to do it for this episode of the podcast. It just remains for me to say thank you so much for joining me for it, as always, and may the Force be with you wherever in the world you may be.