20 Years Later, Star Wars Is Reclaiming A Wild Legacy
The next Star Wars movie will bring back a strangely familiar name.
What’s in a Star Wars name? That which we call a Tauntaun would, by any other name, still smell worse on the inside. Inspiration for names could come from anywhere, be that Lucasfilm employees, Eastern references, or just syllables that sound right together. Because of that, anything could be a Star Wars name, from Elan Sleazebaggano to Sio Bibble.
So when Star Wars reuses a name, it’s clearly for a reason. Recently, Lucasfilm revealed its next hero has an oddly familiar name, one that first emerged from one of the strangest eras of the franchise.
Shawn Levy and Ryan Gosling show off Kade Auberon’s post-Rebellion logo.
Cade Skywalker? Nope. Kade Auberon
At D23, Ryan Gosling appeared on stage to promote his upcoming Star Wars film, Star Wars: Starfighter. With the help of director Shawn Levy, he swapped out his old Mickey Mouse Club jacket for a much cooler one with his character’s Rebel-influenced skull-and-crossbones logo on the back. Then, we finally learned this mysterious character’s name: Kade Auberon. “Kade is a guy from the wrong side of the galaxy, whose fate is intertwined with the fastest starfighter ever built,” Gosling said, according to StarWars.com.
But the most interesting thing about this character for a certain section of the fandom isn’t where he’s from, but his very name itself. “Kade” sounds just like “Cade,” as in Cade Skywalker, the oft-overlooked “bad boy” from the 2006-2010 Dark Horse comic series Star Wars: Legacy. Set in the distant future of the Star Wars timeline, these comics followed Luke’s descendant Cade as he tried to navigate his life as a Force user. Much like Rotta the Hutt, he wasn’t his ancestor; he was his own man. He was a deathsticks user, flirted with the Dark Side, and used Force Healing, just like Grogu and Rey before him.
Cade Skywalker may not be canon, but his bad boy appeal made his mark on the fandom.
Reusing names in Star Wars isn’t completely unprecedented. In Rogue One, Jyn Erso’s father was named Galen Erso, which garnered many comparisons to Galen Marek, the non-canon Legends figure Galen Marek, aka Starkiller, which is in turn a reused name since that was an early choice for Luke’s surname.
And the connections aren’t limited to the first name, either. “Auberon” sounds just like “Oberon,” the mythological figure who appeared in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the king of the fairies. So of all the names in the galaxy, this character has a first name pulled from Star Wars history and a last name pulled from Earth history. That may just be a coincidence, but if you want to speculate about this movie we know so little about, these two names are a great place to start.
