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5 Years Ago, Star Wars Finally Told the Deep Cut Origin of the Best Sequel Trilogy Character

Star Wars has had a hard time in the 2020s; for all the success the franchise has found within the TV format, it’s suffered setbacks in virtually every other area. Star Wars movies have been down bad since The Force Awakens was released in 2015. Meanwhile, Disney’s hopes of creating one official, cohesive Star Wars canon has largerly backfired as novels and comics have largely become knotted up in trying to explain the holes in the sequel trilogy lore. And it’s been that way for nearly a decade now.

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Case in point: it’s been 5 years since Star Wars took the time to give the most popular sequel trilogy character a proper origin story. The most frustrating thing about it isn’t how deep that origin story was; it’s the fact that fans still don’t even know this lore exists, nearly a decade later.

Star Wars Comics Revealed How Poe Dameron’s Parents Met

Lucasfilm

5 years ago (20210, Star Wars released issue #12 of the latest Star Wars comic book series, from Marvel. To mark the one-year milestone of the book, issue #12 gave fans a very special tale: “Reflections on the Lost!”, an issue of the comic that sees Leia Organa sit down for a chat with rebel fighter Kes Dameron, father of Poe Dameron, discussing how each of them met the love of their lives.

For Kes Dameron, the story was about how he met his wife, Shara Bey, while on the planet Galator III, where he was attending the water-based racing sport known as “crestracing.” It was there that he saw a racer whose daring resolve won a neck-and-neck race with near-fatal stakes. Kes was enamored with the mysterious racer that he tracked her down, and she flipped the script by inviting him out for a drink.

Star Wars has been building lore around Kes Dameron and Shara Bey ever since Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) first made his debut in The Force Awakens. That same year (2015), Star Wars released the comic miniseries Star Wars: Shattered Dimensions (by writer Greg Rucka and artists Marco Checchetto and Andres Mossa). That miniseries tracked Kes and Shara’s activity as a Rebel sergeant and pilot (respectively), following the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi.

Additional Star Wars comic series, miniseries, one-shots, and novels have all explored Kes and Shara’s legacy and service to the Rebellion, painting them both as heroic figures who sacrificed their formative years with Poe to defeat the Empire. So by the time Star Wars #12 was released in 2021, it was crazier to think that half a decade had gone by without us learning how Kes and Shara became the power couple they did.

Kes Dameron & Shara Bey in Star Wars: Shattered Empire / Marvel Comics

As stated, however, there are still a lot of Star Wars fans who don’t know the backstory of Poe Dameron and his legendary parents. Like so many other aspects of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Poe Dameron has largely been left by the wayside. After being arguably the focal point character in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Poe was relegated to a supporting role in The Rise of Skywalker, and never got the epic climactic moment that solidified his legacy as (another) Star Wars great. Some fans are hoping Oscar Isaac gets another shot at glory in a mainstream Star Wars project. More likely than not, however, fans will have to take deeper dives into the lore to get to know Poe and his parents.

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