- Adaptation Displacement: The novel series started out as a tie-in to the video game.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Lampshaded in-universe when Elassar is first introduced. Is he genuinely bonkers, or is he playing it up to impress his new squadmates?
- The possibility of Isard being entombed on Lusankya for life, something Iella threatened to do to her given that she couldn't be taken to trial, is something that's brought up a couple times in-universe. Iella probably actually killed her...but even New Republic officers in-universe agree that the idea has a certain poetic justice.
- Angst? What Angst?: Everyone is really casual about Lara's story of being captured by Admiral Trigit before he killed everyone else in her hometown, then kept drugged for months in a secret part of his quarters as his unwilling mistress. It's not even just a case of her underplaying it (after all, she made it up as a Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story). There's very little transition between the New Republic picking up her escape pod and her living in a bad part of Coruscant doing a menial job, with no mention of people trying to help her adjust. Face, trying to convince her to be bait for a trap to catch a crooked colonel, says the man uses people, like Trigit did. No one seems to think about what a huge deal that whole experience would be.
- Complete Monster: Director of Imperial Intelligence Ysanne Isard is Empress in all but name after the death of Palpatine, having risen to her position by betraying and killing her own father. Brutally oppressing nonhumans and ordering strikes against the Rebels, Ysard has her rivals assassinated, while having countless people taken aboard her Executor-class Super Star Destroyer, the Lusankya, and tortured to be mindless drones or sleeper agents. Worse still, Isard ordered the creation of the Krytos Plague, which causes infected nonhumans to die horribly, and set it loose on Coruscant before the Rebels captured it. This was so that the New Republic would both bankrupt itself trying to treat the infected and tear itself apart along species lines, as resentment towards immune humans rose. When Coruscant falls, Isard flees on the Lusankya, tearing out of the heart of Coruscant and slaughtering untold numbers of innocents. Willing to torture countless sapient beings and tear the galaxy apart in her quest for power, Isard repeatedly demonstrates why she is worthy of the moniker "Ice-Heart".
- Crazy Is Cool: The Wraiths are prone to some wildly off-the-wall improvisational tactics and strange, baroque strategies that take Refuge in Audacity, don't always work, and are tremendous fun to read about. Take how they capture the Night Caller despite having been stranded in space with few tools and a lot of their machines disabled. Wedge himself shows pretty audacious creativity in several of Allston's books but it's less wild.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: After the Emperor's death at Endor, the Rebel Alliance's military strategy has devolved into a race to seize Coruscant, with Fey'lya and the Bothans jockeying for the honor on one side, and Ackbar counseling sound caution on the other - creating a close resemblance to the Allies' rush to seize Berlin and end World War II, with Patton and Montgomery each furiously advocating his respective plan over the other's, and several voices urging Eisenhower to reach Berlin before their Soviet "allies" could.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Tycho Celchu. Stackpole didn't know he would become so popular when he created him. And in a way, Wedge Antilles, who has a small but devoted set of fans; Allston's greater focus on him as a creative thinker probably helps. There's also Wes Janson, who was offscreen for the first four books, reached this status incredibly quickly when he replaced Tycho as Wedge's "on-screen" second-in-command and brought the funny with him. See here for a bigger list.Janson: Performing a puppet show while flying is a felony on some worlds.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Go here.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
- Narm Charm:
- Isard's line "I am Iceheart, I do not burn" is rather narmy, but it also fits her pretentious, overbearing nature rather well.
- There's also some of Kirtan Loor's trying to be The Dreaded, which may come off as narmy, but they also serve to show how he's not nearly as much of a bigshot as he thinks he is.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- Wraith Squadron: Seeing the effects of Gaslighting from the victim's perspective is not pleasant. It's easy to see how Grinder might have ended up passing out from shock over the squadron's counter-prank.
- The horrifically gruesome deaths caused by the Krytos plague are pure Body Horror. Made even worse in that it was specifically engineered to exploit the Republic's compassion so that they'd exhaust themselves trying to cure everyone instead of writing them off as a loss like The Empire would. Moreover, it was specifically designed not to effect humans, meaning that it exploits the concept of Fantastic Racism by turning non-humans against the human leaders within the New Republic.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Warlord Zsinj originated in The Courtship of Princess Leia as a one-note Large Ham villain. The Wraith Squadron trilogy retcons him into a reasonably competent commander who trades in a lot of deception and sometimes plays up buffoonery as Obfuscating Stupidity. And also because he really enjoys hamming it up, especially in the company of people who can actually figure out how much of his persona is an act.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- It's a pity that Plourr Illo from the X-Wing Rogue Squadron comic books never appears or is even mentioned, even in Isard's Revenge, which brings in several other characters who'd appeared in the comics. Certainly it's understandable that she'd retire from piloting for the New Republic to focus on her homeworld, but she's an interesting character and could have come up in any of a range of contexts. Among other things she's not impressed by Corran Horn.
- Kasan Moor from the Rogue Squadron game never comes up in either the comics or the books. An Alderaanian Imperial pilot, like Tycho, who was part of a renowned squadron and defected to join the Rogues, like Fel? There's a lot that could have been done with her.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Certainly there are plenty of lively and likeable characters and fun moments, but Mercy Kill, taking place as it does after the New Jedi Order, is considerably darker in tone than the other books. Important characters died in the other ones and the other characters mourned them but that aspect was smaller in scope. Since the X-wing books focus on more "normal" people than much of Star Wars Legends and doesn't feature huge new threats which put the previous danger to shame, dealing with the changes the Yuuzhan Vong invasion made to the setting is an important part of Mercy Kill and those changes are often dire. Worse when you recall that this is still Star Wars, and there's still the Dark Nest Trilogy, Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, and Star Wars: Crucible to come, each of which cause further wide-scale devastation.
- The Woobie: At various times Iella Wessiri, Tycho Celchu, Tyria Sarkin, Lara Notsil, Myn Donos, Piggy, and Dia Passik all count as this, whether of the iron, stoic, or original variety.
- Woolseyism: Arguable, but Russian versions of novels have a lot of text that wasn't in the original - it really debeigifies Stackpole's books, making them much more entertaining to read.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/XWingSeries
Go To
