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“The Queen’s Bloom” is the first of 10 High Republic stories in “Tales of Light and Life,” and features a 17-year-old Axel Greylark in his first dangerous encounter with Elecia, aka “The Mother” from The Path of the Open Hand. Punch it!
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Raw Episode Transcript:
Hey, Rebel Rouser, I’m Allen Voivod, and this is Star Wars 7 by 7, your daily dose of Star Wars joy. Thank you so much for joining me for it. So, Tales of Light and Life is the 10 short story collection of various tales in the High Republic initiative, the mega, ginormous publishing situation that takes place. Actually, the stories do across the entirety of the storytelling, and in fact, going a little bit before it, which is the case in the first story. We’re going to talk about The Queen’s Bloom by Zoraida Cordova, and we’ll do it in a seven-takeaway format. Now, we are in spoiler territory. This short story collection came out last month, so I think we’re pretty cool, but there’s your warning, nonetheless. First takeaway is where this takes place in the midst of everything. This is one of the oldest stories in High Republic storytelling. It takes place in 395 BBY, which puts it at about 13 years prior to the events of Convergence. That’s the novel that kicks off phase two, wave one of storytelling for the High Republic initiative. In that story, when we meet Axel Greylark, the son of Chancellor Kyong Greylark, Axel is 30 years old.
In this story, Axel, who is the main character in there, is 17 years old. That’s how we know it’s taking place 13 years prior to the events of phase two. For a second takeaway, the plot is basically how Axel is a star student and also a complete troublemaker at university. There’s a girl that he’s sweet on, and the girl happens to have family who are rumored to be spice runners, but you don’t know for sure, and she’s never copped to it. Unfortunately for Axel and another frenemy of his, you could say, it turns out that she really is in deep and ends up using and betraying Axel and the frenemy in this story. We’ll get to how that happens in one of the later takeaways.
But for our third takeaway, I want to focus on Axel himself at 17 years old at university, is already described as causing all sorts of pranks like letting mynocks loose in the university, but never getting caught for any of it. But he is getting in trouble. He’s also taken a number of sick days and has been refining how he does it with various peppers or other exercise-related things, just trying to get the situation right so he can get away with it.
He’s been described as having 30 sick days, and every time I see 30, I think of how that just seems to be an apocryphal number in the world of Star Wars where it just means “a lot,” a significant number. And he’s also in a similar place to what we saw in previous phase two storytelling where he is just not comfortable with carrying the Greylark name, basically, and everything that comes with it. His parents are currently senators in the Republic, and Kyong Greylark is already thinking about the possibility of a chancellorship. Of course, we know that she becomes Chancellor later on, but he’s already in the place of feeling like he still needs to figure out how to make his own way. And maybe that might be following in his parents’ footsteps, and maybe not. But he needs time to explore for himself and make his own decisions before that ends up being the way that he really decides to go, which, of course, as we know, he doesn’t. But yeah, those are other stories, obviously.
For a fourth takeaway, I’ll talk about red herrings in the story. So for one thing, Jedi show up in the story. And if you are familiar with Axel Greylark’s backstory, he doesn’t like the Jedi. They’re involved with something that happens that results in the death of his father. Personally, I can’t think of whether we’ve actually been given that story or not. So in reading this short story and knowing that there were Jedi on this planet that were attending for a festival that was happening, and knowing that his parents are going to be on the planet, I had that moment of, Oh, my gosh, we’re about to see the tragic situation that set up his horrible feelings for the Jedi. And it turned out we did not see that. There’s also a thing about this bioluminescent dust that happens because of the Queen’s Bloom, this natural phenomenon that happens on the planet. And there’s a line in there about it gets on everything. And I thought, okay, somewhere that’s going to be used as a thing. It’s going to show up on someone who it shouldn’t have shown up on if they hadn’t been around something or something like that and it would have been a clue to something. It did not work out that way. But those were clever little things that were placed in the story that had you look in one way and then you would get surprised in a different way.
But the real purpose of the story is our fifth takeaway, which is showing us the very first meeting between Axel Greylark and Elicia, who is better known in phase two as The Mother, the head of the Path of the Open Hand. She is already every bit as charismatic and compelling as we’ve seen her in phase two storytelling. Anytime she is telling Axel what to do, he basically either does it and marvels at the strange hold and just musical quality of her voice that she has. If he’s resisting, then he’s resisting just barely because he can see himself doing what she’s asking him to do. And yeah, he just absolutely sees her having a hold on him that he doesn’t understand and can barely resist if he even wants to. And at the end of their encounter, which basically involves Elicia and a bunch of other people scamming all of the attendees at some royal party of all of their valuables and whatnot, which is supposed to pay off some debt to the Hutts, may well just barely pay it off, Elicia says, I admire your bravery and your chaos, and we’ll cross paths again, I’m sure.
And the whole thing about chaos has to do with how she refers to him in phase two storytelling. That’s a codename that she basically comes up with for him, or pet name, if you will. And he thinks that he’s never going to have to see her again because it’s a big galaxy after all. But obviously, we know it’s not going to be the case.
For a sixth takeaway, the relationship between Axel and his dad is fleshed out a little bit, and it’s beautiful and sweet and gives you an idea of how it’s going to definitely affect Axel very poorly when bad things happen to his dad, finally. There’s also a hint of what the relationship is like with his mother, that she’s definitely going to be a little bit stricter about things comparatively speaking. The tension between Axel and his mother is already evident based on this conversation that happens toward the end of the story between him and his dad.
For a seventh and final takeaway, I’ll just say that there were some great conversational moments, some great dialog exchanges, funny repartee, as it were. I really enjoyed the story. It was a great way to dive back in to High Republic storytelling.
This one was like 36 pages long, so definitely longer than the “No Big Deal” short story that we talked about in Star Wars Insider. But those ones are micro short stories by comparison. This one had a little bit more room to play, and Zoraida Cordova used it very well. That’s what I’ve got for you about The Queen’s Bloom, which is the first of the 10 stories in Tales of Light and Life. That’s 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.