Lit Sam Witwer "Karen Traviss, She Didn't Get Everything Right"

Actually, with civilian glasses there can also be good guys. it depends on which side said civilian is on. The military of the side of the civilians is always the good guys, unless of course the 'civilians' are actually collaborators working for the enemy.
e.g. In WW2, the Japanese civilians think the Japanese are the good guys, while the American civilians think the US are the good guys.

The problem is in recent SW EU, they introduced relative morality so we civilians do not even know which side we are on.

The problem with Traviss is that she always introduce these Jedi padawans and make them betray the Jedi Order.
I mean, c'mon, I haven't read the book 501st, but from the wookieepedia article it sounds like those bands of Jedi would have escaped Coruscant and survived head Etain Tur-Mukan not gotten in the way.
And she got killed for her stupidity.

 

To be fair the guardians of truth and Justice did not exactly seem to care to much about the oppression of slavery either so for for the Jedi that's not exactly a huge stretch.

As for not being the good guys they are not exactly the clever guys either.Look at what Information they had when they first found the Clones.
They know that the Clones were built supposedly by the request of the Jedi Council which they know (after much deliberation) they did not request. They know the Jedi Master who supposedly made the request on behalf of the council has been dead for the same amount of time which was also the time that the Sith popped up.They know that someone erased the Planet where the Clones are being created from there archives, so they would not be aware of them. They know that there had been two Assassination attempts against the Senator opposed to the Military creation act, which would allow this conveniently ready made Army to be used. Yet inspite of all this, that they do know, Yoda will go get the Clones and start a galactic civil war!

 

I prefer to think of it as the logical progression of a war that's run by disorganised hippies

 

Weed this is, good for the brain it is. Try some, you must, green your skin turn, like me!

 

I always bought the mental trigger idea given how that clone commander went from all chummy with Obi-Wan to "blow him away" in one second. According to the novel Order 66, though, I think it meant that the Mandos were ordered to get married and hang around the big Mando house.

 

Yeah, while I've actually never minded the brainwashing explanation, as I think it has its own creepy cool factor to it, I agree with you that if they were to do an Order 66 episode in TCW, brainwashing will be more tricky to pull off the "drama" if Rex just turns into a robot all of a sudden because someone pressed the "reset" button in his brain, compared to if they showed him struggling with the decision.

It worked fine in ROTS for different reasons, because we weren't close to any of them, they were always these faceless stormtroopers to the audience, and we knew all along it was just a matter of "when", so keeping the audience at a distance made it work. But since TCW has gone for a different kind of story that's more character driven, they might find they need to be a bit different.

 

Even when he's saying JUNO! again and again and again? Hard to avoid that.

 

I remember an episode of TCW(brain worms arc) where some of the infected clones were trying to kill Ahsoka and Barriss, and one of the clones said "we know how to take care of Jedi ". I'm surprised the series overlooked that so far, but it stood out like a sore thumb to me.

 

Despite being a bit of a Traviss fan and enjoying most of her work, I wish her reaction to this had been to really explore the Jedi having that big moral debate and using it as a reason for some of the Clones to be less quick to kill their commanders, rather than a few Jedi leaving the Order.

 

I hated that line when it first aired. You couldn't be more on the nose unless you had Anakin force choking someone while the Imperial march played.
Oh wait, that was in the same episode...

 

I officially declare that joke to be concluded.

 

One band of 3 Jedi. Who had already killed several civilians at that point.

 

Basically according to Traviss it was you need to fall in line and embrace a culture but not a religion. Even in her LotF, Jaina wasn't worth a grain of salt until she trained with Boba freaking Fett, then it was all good. Jaina was a good Jedi since she had Mando training. Such a shoe horned plot just so she could have a Fett love fest and even bring Justik and Venku into the fold...

Speaking of children of PT Jedi, when ever happened to Quinlan Vos or his son? I feel like Vos's son would have found Luke's order by now assuming he survived the purge

 

That name no longer has any meaning for me!

Seriously. The word makes no sense any more. Curse you.

 

Forgive my lack of clarity and allow me to elucidate with my characteristic pedantry. I am speaking of themes and theorems. I am given to understand that insofar as the dualistic absolutism of myth is concerned, Jedi are used as representative of an nonnegotiable precept of good. This is the light side of the Force. The light side is good, and this is the theorem of Star Wars. It is not a theory, which are disprovable, but a theorem, which is presupposition and downright tautological. Thematically, Traviss did well to recognize the absence of moral debate as being contrary to this theorem. However, rather than investigate a failure of the Jedi to manifest the light side, she gradually adopted as her theme the Jedi being synonymous with the light side, and thus subsequently rejected of the light side being the absolute precept of good. Witness her encouragement for characters living without the Force. If I may shamelessly borrow a joke by Terry Pratchett, then Traviss is an unbeliever in a world where the gods routinely break atheists' windows.

 

It's not like Traviss's characters were the only ones. Kreia also advocates that "Light is not Good".

 

I actually really liked her LOTF books (Well, Revelation was OK) and I think Traviss is really underrated. Sacrifice is a fantastic book and I'll admit I prefer much over books like Vector Prime.

 

Importantly, Kreia loses and is ultimately portrayed as wrong, but since you mention it, a sentence I deleted in my post was: Frankly, Traviss is what Kreia wants to be when she grows up.

 

Bloodlines was terrible, let's have Boba Fett pop up and hang out with Han. I just disliked her cast of characters. It dealt as much with Boba Fett's family, which I don't care about. Though I will give it to Ghes Orade. He was cool. If one new mando should pop up in the ST it should be him. Sacrafice was ok, it wasn't great. And her last one was basically the last Republic Commando novel.

 

Palpatine's been known to argue that there's nothing inherently moral, or immoral, about the light and the dark side- and that imposing human concepts such as morality on the Force is a mistake.

In The Wrath of Darth Maul, p40:
"And rather than embrace the full spectrum of the Force, the Jedi ignored the infinite shades of gray that stretched between light and darkness. They declared the light side of the Force was good and the dark was evil. To them there could be no in-between, no middle ground." Sidious let out an exasperated sigh. "It's one thing to examine an energy field that permeates the galaxy. But to give such a field characteristics of good and evil? One might as well say 'That cloud wants to protect is from solar radiation, but that other cloud wants to strike us dead with lightning'"


Vergere said similar things (about the Force being "one") in Traitor.

 

Their arguments are pretty logical.
I don't know what's going on exactly with the dark side, but everyone who uses it wants the galaxy to obey them. hm...

 

I think that is the taint of the darkside. Much like wheel of time, the dark side of the force is tainted the more you use it the more you want to control others.