Star Wars

It occurs to me that this is another thing Stackpole went all Fix Fic on—Rogue Squadron encounters that guy in Wedge's Gamble and Corran points out that he's really High on His Own Supply, which makes him paranoid and short-sighted. Wedge manipulates him adroitly because of this—he really should have given Han a heads-up about it, but that's what happens when you put such a scene in a prequel.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Aug 1st 2022 at 12:09:32 PM

Truce had an interesting story, just for me the writing felt eh.

Finished Dark Apprentice a little while ago, just started Champions of the Force. On the whole, I'd say that Anderson does decent worldbuilding and he does humor well when he includes it, but I'm not entirely sure that I care for how he does Luke, mainly because it feels like it's less that he writes Luke, per se, as much as he writes kind of a generic idealized Jedi Master archetype.

Also, I feel like he goes a little heavy on the romance for romance's sake.

On the other hand, the sequence in the Kessel mines with the giant spider in the first book was pretty great.

I am disappointed to learn the Darth Plagueis audio book wasn't narrated by Ian Mc Diarmid.

After seeing this, I still want an entire audiobook of Ian just narrating all of Shakesperean Star Wars. Not just Sheev's parts, but everything.

"Luke says 'oh, agony,' as well he might."

Edited by KnownUnknown on Aug 15th 2022 at 7:58:24 AM

Yeah, that'd be great. Mind, the William Shakespeare's Star Wars audiobooks are already great productions, as they get the full-cast treatment to turn them into true audio plays. Marc Thompson's Han Solo doing iambic pentameter is something to hear.

I'd like to make a works page for them, but the idea of gathering the applicable Shakespearian tropes is daunting. I'd have to take the time to read them all through again; I've only actually read the OT but Ian Doescher has written all nine by now. And I'm not sure how to categorize them. They're Star Wars, but not Legends or new EU.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Aug 26th 2022 at 4:01:31 AM

How has William Shakespeare's Star Wars been a thing for nearly a decade without me hearing of it?

Edited by dcutter2 on Aug 26th 2022 at 9:10:31 AM

The Dark Side clouded your vision.

Considering this was allowed by Disney and Lucas (I imagine because it's parody or something), I'm kind of wondering how Jake Bartok's own Fantasy Star Wars thing would be handled in a book or something.

I'm almost at the end of The Fallen Star. It's been a wonderfully thrilling book, but it's also been kind off a downer. I'm thankful for the inclusion of Affie, Leox, and Geode and the levity they brought.

Anyone been reading The High Republic - Phase 2 yet?

Path of Deceit was certainly a way to start the phase.

Looking into the bigger picture, I am very certain that Oliviah Zeveron from the High Republic comic is the Mother's daughter, especially after the latter's character video mentioned her surname for the first time. But that has me asking questions.

Is Elecia waging war on the Jedi (and using what is in my opinion, one of the most terrifying creatures to come out of the post-reboot EU) because they took her daughter away? Or did Oliviah join the Jedi to run away from her religious fundamentalist mom, much like Zeen left the Elders of the Path (who are probably a continuation of the Path of the Open Hand) to tag along with Lula and company in The High Republic Adventures?

Another part of me is guessing that Yana is going to end up being the Token Good Teammate of the Ro family if Marda doesn't have a Heel–Face Turn in Path of Vengeance.

Essential Legends Collection wave 6 drops May 23.

• Republic Commando: Hard Contact
• Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void
• Yoda: Dark Rendezvous

Interesting choices here. Karen Traviss gets an entry; a glance over the series’ page notes that her worldbuilding does underpin canon entries like The Mandalorian, so maybe they want to tie that in. I’m happy to see Dark Rendezvous here after Shatterpoint made it in early; those two are far and away the best Clone Wars books.

Unlike the previous waves, though, there are no current plans to produce unabridged audiobooks for Hard Contact or Dark Rendezvous (Into the Void already has one), though “the future is uncertain.” This is really disappointing since getting these books recorded has been the best part of the whole Essential Legends Collection undertaking.

I listened to Into the Void not long ago and it’s really interesting, with its depiction of a proto-Jedi from a time when they were expected to use the dark side in moderation and balance—she can be quite ruthless for a Star Wars protagonist.

The art itself is pretty good, though I wish they hadn’t used that AOTC promotional image of Yoda as the basis. It was everywhere back in the day and I expect a bit more creativity from these covers.

The Mandalorian only barely uses Traviss's work. It builds a lot more off The Clone Wars interpretation, especially since Traviss is a fucking asshole who decided that throwing a temper tantrum was the best way to handle the fact that Lucasarts had a different history on how Mandalorians were.

Edited by theLibrarian on Nov 27th 2022 at 2:28:55 PM

The most noticeable difference being that Traviss thinks the Mandalorians' warriors traditions are awesome, while official canon depicts said traditions as having ruined Mandalore.

Not sure I agree? Canon can't quite seem to decide. Certainly Satine is the Doomed Moral Victor as a pacifist, but she was also totally unable to defend Mandalore against her own rebels, let alone the Empire. Mandalorian rebellion resulted in the Empire destroying their civilization, but usually we wouldn't view that as an indictment of the rebels.

Satine always came across to me as kind of a 'What if Relena Peacecraft never wised up?' type character. Her desire for pacifism is good, but she never realized that it can't be enforced, it must be agreed to.

Traviss's biggest problem was she portrayed Mandalorian culture as being better than every other. She compared them favorably to the Jedi, and this was at a point where every Mando canon had ever seen was a scumbag. She made them her personal Mary Suetopia, just like she did over in the Halo and Gears of War books she wrote.

,

Satine's problem is that she's almost suicidally pacifist. And she isn't the first example of Clone Wars making the point that sometimes you have to fight - an earlier season had an alien village whose elder was fully content to just let the Separatists wipe them out in a weapons test because he refused to fight. The Jedi present decided to defend the village and ultimately the other villagers had enough of the elder's bullshit and joined the fight.

Satine's kind of pacifism works on a personal level - the moment you try to make this call for everyone else, it's gonna become a problem. Also, you can say no to war as much as you want, but war isn't necessarily gonna agree with your decision to stay out of it.

She and Death Watch are basically two sides of the same coin, as far as Mandalore is concerned and both their ways led to failure.

It's worth noting that Rebels did show us Mandalorians who fell in neither of those camps - the Protectors.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 28th 2022 at 3:40:15 PM

Rebels goes in on the Mandos’ warrior culture being horribly self-defeating. They need a centralized government or at least some kind of organization, but they keep getting rolled over because they can’t stop fighting each other, and won’t stop fighting each other because tradition says they have to. They can’t survive unless something forces them to work together.

The Mandalorian laters depicts basically every Mandalorian group we see as a bunch of dogmatic hypocrites.

Filoni’s take on the Mandos seems to be “these guys are cool, but stupid,” and his work is full of lampooning of the Proud Warrior Race concept.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 1st 2022 at 1:16:54 AM

Except we see in great detail the cool and the stupid (their fragmentation and defeat and massacre) keeps occurring off screen. Now admittedly, once you've written in 'functionally immune to the enemy's main weaponry' that does make it pretty tricky to show on screen a defeat which doesn't seem ridiculous...which is a good reason not to do that. There's a bit of it Rebels, but not very much, especially as that show ends on a theoretically optimistic note of them uniting. We discover later that all failed and ended in their genocide, but that's not actually shown anywhere.

Edited by ECD on Dec 1st 2022 at 1:36:32 AM

I mean, we see parts of it when the Armorer talks about it. I imagine that since we'll actually be going to Mandalore in Season 3 that we'll learn a great deal more about it.

The Armorer also might not be a totally reliable narrator, since she's the leader of a sect of Mandos even Deathwatch thought were too hardcore.

The Children of the Watch were considered hardcore in their devotion to the ancient ways i.e. not removing their helmets in front of outsiders.

We never see The Children of The Watch commit terrorism and murder like Deathwatch did. Although maybe we'll see their darker side in Season 3.

Just got through listening to The Battle of Jedha.

I am now convinced that the San Tekka family name is cursed. Every San Tekka we've seen in Phase II has been killed so far, and considering the larger Star Wars continuity, the only San Tekkas I can recall not suffering a horrible fate so far are Marlowe and Vellis from Light of the Jedi.

Finished plowing my way through the Jedi Academy trilogy a while ago, and I have to say that I wasn't impressed.

Generally speaking, the writing was pretty dry. I get what kind of tone Anderson was trying to go for, but the attempt at sounding grand and momentous came across as rather artificial. Kyp also wasn't an especially compelling character, quite frankly, and I can't say I feel too invested in the rest of the new characters even after going through the trilogy.

I also didn't care for how Anderson was rather clearly dialing back on Leia's connection with the Force. Something I really appreciated in both the the Thrawn trilogy and Dark Empire was the emphasis on the fact that Leia is very much a powerful Force-sensitive, and Anderson going "no, let's not do that" wasn't something I liked. Apparently the rest of Legends afterwards mostly followed this lead, which is a shame.

Oh, and I really don't like how Anderson wrote Mara Jade. Getting downgraded to a tertiary character role is... not fun, but I can get that Anderson might have been more interested in focusing on canon characters and his own introductions (and might have worked if I had cared more about the new guys), but also getting reduced to Lando's weird sorta-but-not-really love interest was just bad. The text was also way too into describing her figure, frankly.

("her curves looked like hazardous paths through a complicated planetary system" — eesh. Like, never mind the horniness, that's just a stupid simile.)

The narrative also felt much too focused on romance for romance's sake, even where it didn't make much sense. Luke's character also felt less like Luke Skywalker and more like A Wise Jedi Master.

That all being said, there were some things I liked. I know that the blob racing bit is fairly divisive, but I liked it. It was a nice bit of levity in a fairly dry book, and I found that the writing was actually pretty clever in there. I also really liked the sequence with the spider in the Kessel mines, that was some excellent suspense writing in there and the gradual reveals and feeling of being trapped with something huge and dangerous came across really well (I will also say that, needlessly stupid villain aside, Jedi Search is my favorite of the three). I also liked how Anderson tended to focus less on the usual Earthlike or single-biome worlds and more on borderline habitable, sometimes physically unstable planetoids like Kessel, Eol Sha and Anoth. They're the kind of thing you'd actually expect to run into a lot in space, and I liked the weirder, wilder galaxy they suggest. The stoic, pragmatic Vors were also an interesting society.

In short, good worldbuilding and some good spots here and there, but dragged down by dry writing and poor character work. If nothing else, I hear that I, Jedi's supposed to cover much of the same events and I hear better things about its quality.

Up next, The Truce at Bakura.

You’re gonna appreciate what I, Jedi does with her, and that storyline, and also how the Hand of Thrawn duology calls back to it.

I myself finally finished The Courtship of Princess Leia not long ago and after (finally!) reading the last Dresden Files book I’ll get to Tatooine Ghost, then maybe put Star Wars down for a bit before rereading the Thrawn Trilogy.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Jan 16th 2023 at 10:14:13 AM