History Literature / XWingSeries

* EjectionSeat: An anecdote about the "official" ambassador to the Adumari, a former Rebel Alliance pilot named Tomer Darpen. Apparently, just after he successfully crash-landed on a low-gravity planetoid, his EjectionSeat malfunctioned and ''he achieved escape velocity''. He was stuck with the moniker "Ejector Darpen" for the rest of his career.

** Also serves as a no holds barred {{Deconstruction}} of the [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Proud Warrior Race]] trope, by showing in detail just what a horrific military force an army with those values would be. The desire for glory and honor through waging war leads to Cartann in particular, the most powerful (and stereotype-adherent) of the nations of Adumar, acting as imperialist belligerents (at one point Wedge asks his pilots if they even ''want'' Adumar in the Republic anymore). The endless dueling leads to a high attrition rate among Adumari pilots, which means few of them live long enough to become proficient. Etiquette prevents the Adumaris from being as effective as people who fight without rules. Shunning teamwork in favor of personal glory makes them undisciplined and uncoordinated, and ignoring battle objectives in favor of personal glory makes them inefficient as a military force, all of which leave them vulnerable to more professional armies like the Republic and the Imperials. Earlier X-wing books had already touched on this: cocky aces Corran Horn and Kell Tainer were both introduced to Wedge's unit with grueling and deeply unfair training sessions, designed to hammer home the notion that it's not their personal achievements, but the squadron's (or army's) as a whole that matters in this job.

* ''Rogue Squadron''
* ''Wedge's Gamble''
* ''The Krytos Trap''
* ''The Bacta War''
* ''Wraith Squadron''
* ''Iron Fist''
* ''Solo Command''
* ''Isard's Revenge''
* ''Starfighters of Adumar''
* ''Mercy Kill''

* {{BFG}}: Voort "Piggy" saBinring takes over an Imperial vessel armed with a two-meter-long cannon stripped from his starfighter.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: A squadron has twelve pilots, up to twelve potentially distinct (i.e. quirky) astromech droids, a lead mechanic and his team, a quartermaster, and a couple of superior officers. Main characters also have love interests, friends, and enemies. Pilots who die are replaced by new pilots, with new astromechs. There are two primary squadrons in the series, plus the occasional extra character for good measure. And that's just the ''good guys''... Allston is better at this. A lot of the members of Stackpole's cast tend to fade into the background.

* MoralDissonance:
** The New Republic picking a fight with the neutral (if admittedly pro-Imperial) Ciutric Hegemony. Prince-Admiral Krennel is obviously not a nice man, but the best pretext the New Republic can come up with for starting the war is Krennel's execution of a defecting Imperial several years previously, during the comics, before Krennel himself left the Empire, a cynical justification which even the Rogues admit is "pretty thin". Even the generally saintly Admiral Ackbar more or less confesses that going after Krennel is as much about New Republic saber-rattling to deter bigger warlords like Teradoc from getting aggressive in the wake of [[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy Grand Admiral Thrawn's prior invasion]] as it about "liberating" the people under his rule.
** And that's before considering the fact that [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sate_Pestage Sate Pestage]], the Imperial in question, was a total scumbag (basically a less cool, non-Sith version of Emperor Palpatine), and only defected to save his own hide. While Krennel's murder of Pestage's family was definitely horrible and unwarranted, his murder of Pestage is, at the very worst, KickTheSonOfABitch. Wedge notes that he was sorely tempted to kill Pestage himself, even though he was an unarmed prisoner at the time, because the man was so repulsive.
** Another character adds to the dissonance by mentioning her homeworld of Toprawa, which had been subjugated back to the Stone Age by the Empire for their support of the Rebellion, but which the New Republic hasn't even considered liberating because they want Krennel so badly. And presumably because they consider Torpawa, fairly deep in Imperial-held territory, to be more difficult target than Cuitric (which was unable to call for help from any of the larger warlord factions or from the remnants of Thrawn's fleet).

** [[spoiler:Wedge, Tycho and Lara have a [[BigDamnHeroes cameo]]]].
** [[spoiler:Lara and Myn are married and have a family, and she made Voort repeat himself, four times, that he [[MamaBear would not recruit her children]] like Face had recruited Wedge and Kell's (and Shalla's nephew)]].

* MercyKill: Piggy gives one to [[spoiler: Runt]] after being bitten by an amphistaff.

* ScreeningTheCall: In a rare successful example, Kirney Slane's cameo shows her insisting, several times, that ex-squadmate Piggy is ''not'' dragging her children into his latest mess (not an entirely unfounded fear, since a number of current Wraiths are the children or students of her companions). He eventually has to promise point-blank that he won't, twice, before asking her about the information he really came for.

* ADayInTheLimelight: While the series has a fixed {{Protagonist}} in Wedge Antilles and {{Tritagonist}} in Lara Notsil, the {{Deuteragonist}}} rotates between novels with each character confronting their own book-long character arc.

* ADayInTheLimelight: While the series has a fixed Protagonist in Wedge Antilles and Tritagonist in Lara Notsil, the Deuteragonist rotates between novels.

* ADayInTheLimelight: While the series has a fixed [[Protagonist]] in Wedge Antilles and [[Tritagonist]] in Lara Notsil, the [[Deuteragonist]] rotates between novels.

* ADayInTheLimelight: The entire series is this for Wedge Antilles and to a lesser extent Lara Notsil (who enters main character territory at the end of ''Wraith Squadron''), but more specifically, each novel is this for one of the other members.

* ADayInTheLimelight: The entire series is this for Wedge Antilles, but more specifically, each Wraith Squadron book is this for ''at least'' one of the members.

** ''Iron Fist'' - Face, Lara
** ''Solo Command'' - Myn, Lara

* AirstrikeImpossible: Regularly. It ''is'' about ''StarWars'' fighter pilots, after all.

** As the books deal with everyday life more than most EU books, we get a lot of StarWars terms for items. For example, refrigerators are 'conservators', bathrooms are 'refreshers', and showers are 'sanisteams'. (Sanisteam even sounds like a brand name that got genericized, like kleenex or aspirin.)

* CoolStarship: We ''are'' talking about ''StarWars'' novels, after all...

* AndNowForSomethingCompletelyDifferent: The first four books are relatively straight military SF in Stackpole's BeigeProse, which revolves pretty resolutely around Corran Horn; all other characters are secondary. The next three are along those lines, but Corran is absent and a good deal of humour and personal issue melodrama creep in. The eighth is another Corran book, but the ninth is almost entirely Wedge's personal story about duty versus doing the right thing, as well as probably having more jokes than any other book in the EU. The tenth is back to the same style and unit as five, six and seven, but decades later and an almost-entirely new cast (made up mostly by the kids of the previous protagonists, a fact lampshaded multiple times).

** Ysanne Isard has odd-colored eyes and a SkunkStripe.

* ArtisticLicenseStatistics: Kirtan Loor deduces that a certain squadron of X-Wings is Rogue Squadron through noting that their equipment performance is within two standard deviations of the norm, making them very well maintained and therefore a top-end unit. Two standard deviations places one in a range consisting of 94% of the entire sample set. The ''middle'' 94%. Being in a range that large proves nothing.

* JustPlaneWrong: Averted in one key respect that is usually ignored in ''Franchise/StarWars''. The novels note on a number of occasions that New Republic starfighters are much more capable than Imperial TIE designs while fighting in atmosphere because of their superior aerodynamics. In space, [=TIEs=] other than bombers are generally faster and more maneuverable than anything but an A-Wing, in aerial combat, the more airplane-like design of an X-Wing allows it to pull off maneuvers a TIE couldn't hope to match.

** The Imperials, as [[FantasticRacism speciecists]] by and large, naturally are less than pleased by Humans who have relationships with members of other species. In ''Wedge's Gamble'', a stormtrooper on Coruscant tells an undercover Nawara (Twi'lek) and Rhysati (human), who by now are a couple, that "Your kind makes me sick." Without missing a beat, Nawara retorts that the stormtrooper's "kind" makes ''him'' sick.

** One particularly impressive example has the Rogues and General Salm's Y-Wings faced with a ''Lancer''-class frigate, designed as an [[AntiAir ack-ack platform]], backed up by a ''Carrack''-class cruiser which is less well-protected against fighters but outguns the Corellian corvette the Republic force brought with them. The Y-Wings can't get close enough to the frigate to get a lock and kill it, so Corran has them lock onto his X-Wing's transponder, and then uses a random number generator with the autopilot to evade the frigate's fire and lead the torpedoes into it. [[spoiler:One pair of torpedoes actually gets ''past'' the frigate, but his astromech Whistler kills the transponder before they can catch up.]]