Star Wars

Well, Into the Dark is coming out next month.

Here are the High Republic books released so far:

• Light of the Jedi (novel)

• A Test of Courage (junior novel)

• The Great Jedi Rescue (young readers book)

Edited by AngrokVa on Jan 5th 2021 at 9:19:57 AM

In other words: The people preemptively hating The High Republic are the usual reactionary cockwombles that should been excised from the fandom a long time ago?

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jan 5th 2021 at 5:53:59 PM

Yep. Pretty much.

Well, I like what I've gotten so far. Only at chapter 7, but it did a great job of setting up the stakes, demonstrating how the bad guys are an Outside-Context Problem mostly just because the Republic is in a golden age so that no one expected a problem of this magnitude.

I suppose the thing that is probably rubbing the fascists the wrong way is the Republic's rallying cry of "we are all the Republic." It is repeatedly demonstrated (and stated) that the reason for the golden is that they are extremely inclusive of all species and cultures. Even when people realize that their pacifism has left them open to attack, that's not used to argue against pacifism, it's just like "well, of course it left us open to attack. Why would we expect someone to randomly do something so horrible?"

I'm reading Light of the Jedi now and I think Avar Kriss is probably one of the things people are mad about.

To those people I say this: Fuck off.

Avar Kriss is a stone cold badass. I'm only on chapter 20(early in part 2) but she's already won me over.

Another thing that people are probably mad about is how the diversity of the Republic and Jedi is on full display but the message is very clearly: We are all one society and we're stronger together. It's unsurprising a bunch of nerds get annoyed by this.

Granted I'm sure somd people have less questionable reasons for disliking the series but so far I haven't come across them.

In the old legends continuity were there any books that were released before Revenge of the Sith that hint or strongly imply that Anakin will kill Padme? I have distinct memories of being on the bus a year after Attack of the clones was released and my classmates referring to that and when I asked how they got this info they said "read the books." At the time I was timid and easily bullied so I didn't say: that's less than useless the star wars expanded universe is huge! I could be remembering wrong, but I don't think I am. If it is true it's an interesting bit of trivia I feel.

None that I recall suggested it explicitly but she was very much Doomed by Canon. She was definitely going to die and Anakin was going to become Vader so it was always a possibility.

The novelization of The Phantom Menace had Anakin telling Padmé he had a dream of her leading a resistance against a dark figure. Since dreams tend to be premonitions, the general idea seems to be that Padmé was, at the very least, going to face Darth Vader and a founder of what would be the Rebel Alliance.

But it's likely that Lucas forbade any explorations to status of Luke and Leia's mother just he did with the term Sith. Looking at the Return of the Jedi novelization, there's a subtle implication that Padmé wasn't killed by anyone, just died of natural causes (or possibly of a broken heart).

Edited by Shadao on Jan 13th 2021 at 9:21:27 AM

I mean technically she wasn't killed in canon because she died of a broken heart

Damn, Padme actually standing against Darth Vader with the proto-Rebellion and dying that way would've been way better.

She was supposed to at least get the ball rolling on the Rebellion with Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and some other Senators, but all those scenes got cut out of ROTS.

Pretty obvious even then how the Prequel Era needed more a tv show than movies, isn't it?

The Sequel trilogy needs a similar thing, unfortunately.

The trouble with the sequels is there's precious little space for a show. TFA and TLJ happen over a week or two tops. There's a year long gap until TROS but that isn't that long. Sure you could have something set before it like Rebels but I'm not sure it would work as effectively.

Edited by Kostya on Jan 14th 2021 at 9:58:31 AM

That might be the spot that needs it most, though. Explain what exactly the Galaxy was up to, demonstrate all the resistance efforts and New Republic holdouts (Lando had to get that fleet at the end from somewhere), and maybe explain where the Last Order really came from.

The Mandalorian is already setting up the First Order pretty well even though it's not the focus of the show.

I think, we, as Star Wars fans, just got very used to the way Star Wars content used to come out pre-Disney. Films, by their very nature, only contain the bare minimum amount of information necessary to get the story across, but we got used to having 50 bajillion books and comics to explain everything down to the cellular level. Going back to only having films now feels like we're not being told enough, but the ST hasn't had 20/40 years to get it's minutiae filled in. I expect in 10 years or so, there will be just as much material as the PT has.

Perhaps. Though I'd argue that the PT did a far better job establishing the state of the galaxy during their time period than the ST did. To me the big disconnect is how you go from the ending of ROTJ which shows the Empire on the ropes and a burgeoning New Republic to TFA where they're ineffective and wiped out at the earliest possible chance. In the PT we saw how the Republic fell and got consolidated into the Empire.

Yeah. We don't even know why the New Republic is bad until one of the post-TFA books showed us that they were deadlocked between two factions. At least in the Prequels we got the inside look at a Senate session that showed that the Senate was very vulnerable to getting bogged down in procedure and that the megacorporations all had voting blocs for some reason.

I don't think the films couldn't have depicted a more nuanced take on the story just because they were films. The films were ultimately the way they were by choice, not by limitation. If they had a tv show instead under George, it's likely the story would have ended up the same.

Films have a very limited time budget, so you always have to consider how much time you can aford to spend on world-building and setting things up.

A series by comparison can be a much slower burn.

"There's a year long gap until TROS but that isn't that long."

2020 taught me you can fit A LOT in a year.

Yep. We got a 7-season cartoon to fit inside a three-year conflict after all.

While true I do think The Clone Wars stretched believability a bit with that element.

People tend to vastly overestimate how much time real estate it takes to set up things like characterization or world. One of the primary things people learn when training to write scripts is how to do that concisely.

As a result, plenty of films set up well nuanced character development and worldbuilding while not having issue telling their story, and do it in a compact amount of time, because the ability to do that is based on writing ability, and is of course not something people who make films are just completely unable to do.

Look at a primary example in regards to the prequels, especially ROTS: Padme. Whole idea of Padme being involved in the proto-Rebellion is something that was in development stages, and something that would have made her characterization a lot better, but wasn't in the finished product. However, Padme got plenty of scenes in the finished ROTS, yet her characterization in that movie is still heavily criticized. This is because Lucas chose to use all that screen-time to characterize her as an object of Anakin's manpain rather than a character in her own right - a marked difference from her characterizations in the previous films. He had a great deal of opportunity to write the story differently, but did not.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:20:28 AM

I guess I must be the only one here who's more interested in how things turn out after the movies rather than in between them.

Like, obviously, there's a lot of story to tell between ROTS and TFA, that's a thirty year gap, but in regards to the ST itself I'd rather them move on to the future rather than get bogged down in explaining all the minutiae between that trilogy. They already told that story, I am not interested in them immediately retelling it in exhausting detail.

Then again I am currently enjoying From A Certain Point of View, so what do I know?