When we say that Star Wars has a complicated relationship with death, it’s usually about how the franchise is unwilling to let go of its own past, or how a desire to cheat the final end has driven much of the series’ theological explorations recently. Sometimes, it just means you have to be persistent as hell to survive being dragged away by giant monsters into the bowels of an exploding space station.
That was the case for young Wookiee Jedi Burryaga Agaburry, a breakout highlight of the first phase of Lucasfilm’s prequel publishing initiative Star Wars: The High Republic. The face of multiple children’s storybooks and a supporting character across the novels of the first phase of the initiative—set several centuries before the Star Wars prequels—Burryaga (Burry to his friends) seemingly met a dire fate in the climax of phase one in Claudia Gray’s The Fallen Star. There, the Padawan was hauled into the dark by a group of escaped Rathtars, the tentacled creatures introduced in The Force Awakens, aboard the rapidly destabilizing space station Starlight Beacon. Burry was thought dead when the station crash-landed into a planet shortly after his disappearance, but good news! This is Star Wars and we’ll be having none of that, please and thank you.
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The news was confirmed today by Lucasfilm during an episode of The High Republic Show, a companion webseries hosted by Krystina Arielle. Simply noting that “Burry Lives”—akin to a similar declarative statement made by Star Wars producer Dave Filoni when the fate of his creation Ahsoka Tano was left uncertain during the second season of Star Wars Rebels—it was further confirmed that the details surrounding Burryaga’s fate will be revealed in a short story contained in Tales of Light and Life, an upcoming anthology release making its first-to-market debut at San Diego Comic-Con later this month.
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I mean, on the one hand, I don’t want to sound like I’m advocating for the death of a child (Burryaga’s age has never been explicitly confirmed, but he’s a Padawan, so he’s presumably the Wookiee equivalent of a tween). On the other, there is something spectacularly silly about a Padawan surviving being hauled away by giant monsters even further deeply into the innards of a space station that was in the process of breaking in half, and then plummeting through the atmosphere and crashing into a planet’s oceans with extreme force shortly after.
In the age of the High Republic, when the Jedi were at the height of their power, influence, and ability to bullshit death itself, they truly were built different, apparently. More details about Burryaga’s fate, and the third and final phase of the High Republic publishing line, will be revealed during the Lucasfilm publishing panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 21.
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