Numlock News: M. Dean Cooper on Eleven-ThirtyEight and a decade of change in Star Wars
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
Something a little different this week!
I spoke to M. Dean Cooper, who founded the journal of news and opinion Eleven-ThirtyEight, which is one of the most thoughtful, compelling and well-written sites about the Star Wars franchise. I first met Cooper in 2016, when I worked on a story called “Star Wars Killed A Universe To Save The Galaxy,” and I have been an avid reader of his ever since.
All good things must end, and this week Eleven-ThirtyEight is closing up shop after a 10-year run.
I wanted to take the chance to talk to Cooper about what it was like producing this kind of thoughtful fan content during a turbulent time in that franchise, the kind of work they produced he was most proud of, and where things look here.
The site will continue to exist in archive form, and is worth checking out. It’s going out strong: I can’t recommend last week’s essay, “Andor is a Blue Sky,” enough. It’s my favorite piece of criticism of the year.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You are the proprietor and editor of a really exciting and compelling website that has had a really fantastic run called Eleven-ThirtyEight. Do you want to talk a little bit about what the site is and where it originated from?
Well, I had done various sort of fan news reporting for a while. I used to work at a big website called theforce.net, which was sort of the biggest fan-run news site for a long time. It's still around, but its heyday, I think it was probably 20 years ago. After the prequels ended, I kind of got out of the habit of doing that kind of thing because the grind of news reporting started to get to me. For a few years, I wasn't really doing anything other than chatting and message boards and things like that. And I started to miss it. Once in a while, I would find myself with some sort of editorial that I wanted to write, but I had no outlet for it. So I would maybe write, I would post it in the message board or something like that, or the starwars.com actually had blogs for a minute there.
I did a couple things on a Star Wars blog, but I was missing an outlet for what I actually wanted to write. I had a specific argument I wanted to articulate. I had no venue for that. What happened eventually was in 2012, Disney bought Star Wars and I thought to myself, well, there's going to be this big new groundswell of interest coming from that. It seemed pretty likely. I was the books and comics page news reporter, and the books and comics seemed likely to be downgraded with the advent of new movies. I knew that that was going to be a big issue of controversy if it came to that. I thought it would be good for the fandom to position something where you could be supportive of the books, and conversing in what the books brought to the continuity, but still realistic about the fact that this is a movie franchise first.
They're going to lead the show, and here's a way of saying, "Here are all the things that are good about the books that you could use in new movies," whether or not it's strictly the same universe or whether there's a reboot or something like that. A way to establish that you could be a fan of the books and not totally mired in that and not have a fit if they get rebooted, which is what happened. Some people did have a fit, but I think we helped the goal.
The founding intention of the site was to usher in this new era in a way that did not completely sweep aside the fandom of the books more so than the books themselves, and showed that we still had something to bring to the table and that we understood because there had been literally hundreds of these books at that point.
My idea was that the EU as it was called, the Expanded Universe, was a masterclass in what sort of things could happen after Return of the Jedi. Anything the sequels ended up doing, you could trace back to a book and say, "Here's how that worked the last time they did that." The books were a great way of saying, "Here are what opportunities that brings to the table and here are the pitfalls you might want to avoid." As it worked out, a lot, pretty much everything that happens in the sequels can be traced to a book. Now, I don't think they got inspiration from the books, but they can see the first draft of that idea and how it worked out.
I really love the site. It's been about 10 years now in operation and it's just such a breath of fresh air I think when it comes to this fandom. You describe it as a journal of news and opinion, and it's such an apt way to put it. It's just so thoughtful and considered, where so much of the conversation about even pop cultural properties is oftentimes just kind of tossed off and deeply argumentative. You published essays on one of the most interesting slices of pop culture that we've had over the past 10 years. What was that like?
I specifically didn't do news reporting, and I held us to a schedule the whole time. I was very adamant about the idea; the reason I use the word journal was because we don't just toss off an article the second it's done. We published Monday, Wednesday or Friday, and that's it. If something is done on Saturday, it waits two days. The idea is that it's more deliberate and it's more predictable, and the readership knows when to expect something. For the first few years we held to that schedule pretty well, we almost never skipped a day, which I was very proud of. But I eventually as interest waned, as staff people came and went, we sort of slackened off. It got to the point where the last couple years, we post maybe once a month if we're lucky, which is part of the reason I'm ending it.
I wanted to forsake the idea of just getting the word in first and let things cool for a while and revisit ideas. As it's gone on, I think I've only gotten more into that idea, where things will get drafted and redrafted, and sometimes I'll get a piece in that needs more work and I'll send it back and they'll rewrite it.
I wanted it to be a site where rather than the article reacting to what everybody was talking about, the ideal was that the articles would be the thing that people were talking about. Things where we would be looking for new ways, new angles in the conversation so that we're not reactive, but actually proactive and trying to say, "Here's the thing that nobody's saying that I think deserves to be said." That's the platonic ideal of an Eleven-ThirtyEight article. Here's the thing nobody's saying.
Why don't you tell me about some of your favorite articles? Because you've had some really, really compelling stories that explore elements of this universe that are just so deep and so far from the surface level analysis of it, that I'd love to hear some of your favorite works.
Well, I'm going to avoid tooting my own horn for a while if I can. The early years of the site before we really knew anything about the sequel trilogy and before the books had officially been written, there was a lot of framing around the books specifically: Here's what they've done and here's what we should preserve and here's why we should get rid of this thing and stuff like that. We had two series early on, one that was a short-lived series by an individual writer called “A Case for Starting Over,” which was by a guy named Alexander Gaultier. That was, I think, I believe it was a six- or seven-part series, and it ran circa 2014, shortly before the reboot.
It just laid out topic by topic: Here's what the books did, and here's a good idea to get rid of this and start over because we can lose this. We can prune this area out that didn't work. We can rethink this idea. It covers the whole gamut of the franchise. It's not just about continuity, it's about all the benefits that can come from bringing in new blood and starting over again. That was very much, like I said, that was the pinnacle of what I wanted the site to do at first.
Then the other one that began early on, but we actually still have published articles for recently, is in a series called “Escape Pod,” which is where we take a specific element from the books that we think should be brought into the new canon and used the way that — we never did an article about this, but for example — the way that Grand Admiral Thrawn was originally an EU character, and then Dave Filoni brought him into the cartoons and now he's going to be in a live-action show in a couple months.
Things like that, something that we think, "Here's the thing I love from the books, and if the continuity doesn't count anymore, here's the way that you could use this character in a new continuity, and here's what they bring." Not just, "I want to see him." Not just, "Oh, this is a cool character and I miss him," but, "Here's what he brings to the table in terms of the larger universe, and here's an element that Star Wars will be worse off for not having." Even if it has to be rebooted, it still has value.
The most recent of those was maybe three or four years ago, I think, and it was actually, as it happened, I know I said I wasn't going to toot my own horn, but I believe the most recent one we did was about essence transfer, which was the way that Palpatine came back to life in the EU. And that's exactly what ended up happening! Obviously, I wrote that before I knew that was going to happen, but that was exactly the point of it, was to be able to say, Dark Empire is considered sort of one of the cornier stories. Even before The Rise of Skywalker tackled the same idea, that was considered one of the more loosey-goosey stories, continuity-wise. The point of that article was, "Here's an interesting idea that actually has meat to it in terms of the varying ways that the Jedi comes back to life versus the way that Sith would come back to life and how different that experience would be." There's real dramatic weight in that, and I think we got a little bit of that in the movie, though not as much as I would like. I think the book helped a little bit, but that was sort of the vehicle to talk about something from a comic book that came out 30 years ago, but in a way that's relevant to what's going on now and it being super relevant a year later.
One thing that I've always enjoyed about the work being published on your site, which again includes dozens of contributors, is you were talking about I think some of the most interesting and compelling ideas in Star Wars that hadn't been explored before in the past, things like slavery, things like race and the nature of rebellion and all that kind of thing.
Only recently has the actual mainstream franchise and shows like potentially Andor actually deigned to address those. What kind of drove you to cover some of those topics?
Honestly, a lot of that was just the people that I chose to work with. I had a handful of friends that were people I knew from the literature forum on a site called the Jedi Council Forums, which was the community group for theforce.net when I was writing there. There were a handful of people that I've known from that message board for 20 years now. When I knew I wanted a new site and I knew the tone, I knew I wanted to strike this sort of tone and have people who were smart and could really dig into things but who weren't going to be freaked out about every new book that came out and say, "Oh, this is terrible. I hate this."
A couple of the specific people I'll highlight are Jay Shah and Nick Adams, who both worked for the site and have been with me more or less since the beginning, and they both are very good at striking that tone. And Nick is very into military history, and Jay is very into real-world history and politics and things like that. He actually had a series, I believe in the first couple years, that was “Politics in the EU” and was sort of singling out those kind of issues and saying, "Here's what the books did, here's what I think worked, here's what I think didn't work."
Most recently, he had a great article that he'd been talking about for years, and I finally prodded him to writing, which is about war crimes and the idea that early in the Clone Wars cartoon, there's a point where Obi-Wan pretends to surrender to lure the droid army into a weak point, and then they swoop in and kill everybody and it’s like, "Hey, this is a funny cartoon idea, but that's actually a war crime. Here's why that matters."
He has a lot of legal experience in the real world that I knew that this was something that he really had a bone to pick about and I was able to get him to write it. And I'm very proud of that article and it's done very well.
Yeah. You were able to get to topics that I think that some of time the actual work itself was too flinching to actually approach.
That's definitely one of the things that I want the site to be about. It doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it, but it doesn't seem like anybody is even talking about that really. It's a way of taking a thing, a silly moment in a cartoon, and actually really having a serious conversation about it, while still realizing that it's a cartoon and we don't need to rend our hair over it. We can have an adult conversation and appreciate the comical aspect of it, but still educate people who are interested in knowing more about it.
You and I first started talking, I want to say in 2014, which was after basically Disney announced a significant shift in what was considered Star Wars and what was considered no longer officially Star Wars. And some of our conversations were about a site called Wookieepedia, which is I think one of the most fascinating fan works on the internet, that you also follow rather closely as well.
I guess, do you want to talk about what it's been like to just be a person who is very interested in this intellectual side of fan work over the course of what is undeniably a massive transition in what is considered to be canonical and whatnot in this very specific and very, very popular franchise?
I didn't realize this at the time when I started. I didn't get into Star Wars until I was a teenager. I didn't already have the formative early childhood experience that most people would have with it. I think I've been able to approach it a little bit more analytically all along without really realizing I was doing that.
But the thing that's kept it front of mind to me as I've gotten older and as the continuity has shifted so much, is that you can find these intellectual angles to it that are really, really meaty. Even though you don't need to know these things, they work totally well for a 7-year-old and it's fine, but you can look at the same story that a 7-year-old is watching, like Attack of the Clones.
Attack of the Clones, superficially, is one of the corniest, kid-iest movies of the Star Wars franchise. But you get in there and, "Oh shit, there's a slave army." That's really interesting. What are the human rights of these people and what are the Jedi responsible for by taking command of this army? There's so much in that and it's fascinating.
We've done so many articles just about that, and just about the Republic and the idea of forming a new government after the Empire falls, and what are the ways to do that that work and why can they really do that? Can you do that when some of the people that are doing it were former Imperial senators? Are we just rebuilding the same bad structure and things like that? I think there are maybe two or three core ideas that that are specifically embedded in the first six Lucas movies that you can unpack forever.
All Andor is doing is taking this thing that was always in the background and just making a big feature narrative out of it. Those ideas were already there. Even The Bad Batch has been going on the last couple years, and The Bad Batch is very much a kids cartoon right now, and at the same time, there are some meaty ideas there that lead into Andor in a way about what happens to this slave army when they're no longer needed and what happens to the rights of these soldiers who were never considered a real person in the first place. You can do that in a show like Andor and really make it serious and adult, but you can even do it in a cartoon, and it still works. I think kids can still get it. And I love that. That's something that I just really, really like about Star Wars, is that it's as serious as you want it to be.
There are moments where you want to kind of throw your hands up in the air and just say, "Aw, screw it. It's a franchise for children." But then at the same time, you just keep on finding these depths. I think that one thing that the site was so adept at doing was just genuinely asking provocative questions before even the actual mainstream creators had the ability to do so.
The site, you'll continue to run it, but it is kind of moving into a more dormant phase. You've run for 10 years at this point, which is a genuinely phenomenal run. I guess, any thoughts on the experience of doing that before you kind of close up shop for a little bit?
Well, like I said, the founding idea of the site was there's this new era starting, that we wanted to sort of usher the fandom into this era in a certain way and occupy a certain rhetorical territory within this new thing that was happening. How much of a difference we made in any larger conversation, I wouldn't say.
But I think the main reason that I'm ending it is that I realize that was a point in time with this specific end date. That era, with the sequel trilogy being over, that era definitely is behind us now. Whatever success or failures we had, that already is behind us. I think that's part of the reason that the content has sort of fallen off the last few years, is because there's less to say without any new material coming out.
I feel like we did what we set out to do. I'm very happy with it. I think we've never had a gigantic audience number-wise, but the people that are into it are very into it. We had a couple fundraisers to pay for it over the years and we had a lot of great success with that. There's clearly a lot of respect that we've earned over the years. I feel great about where it is now, and I feel like it's better to end on your own terms while you're on a high than to sort of just keep going. There are a lot of sites that would just keep going forever and just publish one article a month, an article every two months, an article every three months, and just sort of chug along.
Partly, I didn't want to do that for editorial reasons, and partly just the logistics of running a WordPress site in 2023 are getting more and more frustrating and more and more expensive. I'm in my 40s now and I'm kind of over it, so I still have ideas, but I want to be able to offload the responsibility of running a site and just be able to have it as an archive somewhere. My intention is to move it to some kind of a free hosting situation where it can just sit there forever and then the people that still want to link to the old articles, they're all still there to access. But I don't have to worry about some WordPress update tomorrow, breaking the site, which is something that happens every once in a while.
There's nothing quite like it within the Star Wars cultural fandom, or just in fandom in general, the seriousness that you guys approached your topic with. I'm going to link a few of my favorites, but I would actually just love to hear what recommendations you have for folks who are potentially either just hearing about you or want a chance to go through some of the site's history. Any particular articles that you want to call out?
Well, for a good spectrum of things, I definitely think the “Escape Pod” series is a great sort of overview. Also:
Republic Rising — A Political and Cartographic Look at the Post-Galactic Concordance Galaxy
Burden of Empire: The Complex Relationship Between Star Wars and Fascism
Let Every Village Send a Warrior — The Case Against a Galactic Republic
Heisenberg’s Principle for Peace and Justice: Why the Jedi Never Seem Very Good at their Job
From the Computer Comes a Stranger: CGI Luke Skywalker and the Obsession with Nostalgia
Dean, where can folks find you? Where can folks find your work moving forward in your writing?
I'm mostly on Twitter. My personal Twitter that I specifically don't talk about Star Wars on is @NoTheOtherLeft. The Eleven-ThirtyEight Twitter handle that I use for my sort of day-to-day Star Wars thoughts as well, which will continue once the blog doesn't work anymore, is @eleventhirtyate spelled out.
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.
