This Star Wars: Visions article contains spoilers.
The first short film in Star Wars: Visions, “The Duel,” sets the anime collection’s unique, creative tone. Its main character, a wandering swordsman named Ronin, also challenges the idea of what it means to be a Sith. But just who is Ronin and what is the significance of his name?
Visions sits just to the side of Disney’s Star Wars canon. Given free range to create stories inspired by the beloved saga, the seven studios invited to make the nine anime shorts in the collection were able to reinterpret the story of Star Wars in their own ways. (This is also the case in the upcoming tie-in novel Star Wars: Ronin: A Visions Novel by Emma Mieko Candon, which comes out on Oct. 12.) In “The Duel,” the protagonist simply known as Ronin wields multiple red lightsabers like a Sith. So does his opponent. That’s weird — in canon, morality is usually color-coded with red for evil and other lightsaber colors denoting noble Jedi. But “The Duel” isn’t interested in assigning morality by color.
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While the exact state of this alternate universe galaxy isn’t explained in the short, the main character’s moniker gives us a clue. In Japan, a ronin was a samurai without a master. Usually employed by daimyō, or feudal lords, samurai were upper class extensions of the will of the shōgunate, the military leaders appointed by the empire. When George Lucas took inspiration from them for the Jedi, he made the moral and political elements quite different. With a Western idea of good versus evil applied to the concepts of Jedi and Sith, it became more important to distinguish “good” samurai from “bad.” Thus the lightsaber colors, which become irrelevant in this story inspired more directly by historical Japan.