Books CRUCIBLE by Troy Denning: The Official Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

Just received my copy today. Will start reading it over the weekend. Hope they keep Troy Denning writing though, probably the best they have. It's amusing listing to the haters though, seems to be books that a lot of other people love are horribly boring dross (like Mercy Kill).

 

Mercy Kill, one of the best books since the likes of Shadows of Mindor, maybe even The Unifying Force, an all-around fun book with action, intrigue, and humor, not to mention completing the story arcs of many of the members of Wraith Squadron, is "boring dross." That's amusing.

 

Mercy Kill was way better than any Denning book since Star By Star by a mile.

 

Troy Denning sounds like a nice guy in his interviews, but when he compares Legacy of the Force to Game of Thrones, I'm really not sure what to think about his estimation of his own storytelling. I suppose they have the commonality of ruthless character death, but how they reach those points is entirely different.

 

I don't understand why people need to be so negative. I understand not liking a book, but some people get way to extreme...

 

LOTF has nothing on Game of Thrones.

 

I feel like Denning fundamentally misunderstands the way Jedi should be written.

In Crucible,

Spoiler

Leia vows to hunt down the Qrephs and Mirta Gev and make them, "pay dearly," so much so that when Luke comments on it, she realizes "she must have been allowing her rage to seep into the Force." When Luke recognizes Vestara, his "stomach knotted in cold fury," and he "longed to make her pay for her treachery." Leia says, "You were close enough to identify her, and she's still walking?" They spend a lot of time angry and looking forward to revenge, but in the climax of the story, they're both portrayed as golden, luminous beings in the Force.

Besides that sort of thing just being wrong and strange, there's also a blatant double standard. Leia tries to kill Tahiri in Inferno? No big deal, Tahiri eventually became a Sith apprentice for half an hour, so she totally had it coming! Ben assassinates Tur Gejjen and kills Commander Twizzl in a failed attempt to kill Jacen? Congratulations on becoming a Jedi Knight!

There are never any repercussions for the Skywalkers or Solos or acknowledgement when they're written as the Diet Coke of Sith, seemingly simply because they are Skywalkers and Solos and thus are Our Heroes and are never in the wrong.

 

Well, the difference is how they reach character deaths. I'm sure that GRRM would not have character deaths in his stories at all, but he inhabits each character and takes them to where they will go, so to speak. Characters die because they behave in certain ways that result in the situations in which they die. Legacy of the Force is the exact opposite, as it seems to revel in killing off characters, since several of the deaths are completely meaningless to the plot, and yet despite this are a product of characters behaving out of character purely as a means to facilitate the character death.

Perhaps Denning is trying to emulate GRRM in the sense that for certain deaths in the ASOIAF series, GRRM did seem to be inclined to go in that direction to go against expectations. Denning certainly seems to be trying to counter expectations, but in doing so he's running roughshod over certain thematic and character elements that are integral to Star Wars, resulting in this hostility displayed toward his writing.

 

LotF compared to ASoiaF?

 

To be fair, Ben was young and made mistakes, and he back-pedaled bigtime after his attempt to kill Jacen. But I have to agree with you, Denning definitely writes Jedi in a way that's contrary to what should be. Allston does way better, as do Stover and Luceno. Leia attacking Tahiri was definitely wrong, and so help me if she kills Mirta somewhere along the line I think I'll facepalm, for reals. And I never facepalm.

"Adventure Brutal revenge. Heh. Excitement Cold-blooded murder. A Jedi craves not these things!"

 

What baffles me about Denning's writing is that when I read or listen to interviews with him, he doesn't sound like someone who doesn't get it, but it's like him speaking candidly in an interview and his writing are totally detached. But his writing, and the stories we've gotten since the NJO, seem to be completely colorblind toward the dividing line between hero and villain. The protagonists are the protagonists because they're Jedi, and the antagonists are the antagonists because they're Sith.

From an ethical perspective, the Jedi fairly frequently engage in questionable acts, and even seem to subscribe to an "ends justify the means" mentality, which is baffling since this was the attitude that was forced onto Jacen to facilitate his becoming a Sith Lord: it seems the only reason that he was an antagonist was because he chose to call himself a Sith.

I honestly would not be surprised if the fact that Luke has been characterized as, to put it bluntly, a huge jerk since the end of the Legacy of the Force series is a conscious choice made to reflect the fact that he lost his wife, and I've seen his characterization in Invincible and Fate of the Jedi defended with that argument. If this is the consequence of Luke losing his wife, that he loses his core traits of idealism and optimism and they are burned out of him, and this is considered to be organic character development flowing out of that event, then the writers certainly should have considered this before writing it instead of going forward with that event and then wrecking Luke's character. It's really just as egregious as what was done with Jacen, except that Jacen doesn't even have a cause for his derailment except to facilitate a poor man's prequel trilogy, and causality defying causes were subsequently retconned into the story along with Denning's revisionist history of the New Jedi Order series.

 

ASOIAF/GOT was way more engaging and original than LOTF ever was. The characters, character arcs, deaths were all so much better.

 

I agree, those authors you mentioned write Jedi much better than Denning or anyone else does.

 

Luke was particularly–almost ridiculously–vengeful in Invincible. I didn't mind his character in FOTJ though because he had a large crisis on his hands, he had a sense of humor again, especially around Ben, and I didn't mind when he got violent with the Sith when they invaded Coruscant. "Surrender or die. Choose now. The Jedi Order." Yes.

 

Your estimation of that book is grossly overblown.

 

No, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We have different tastes; many have similar tastes to mine, that's all. It is a good book, you just don't see it because you don't like the content.

 

And I say it's a bad book, you just don't see it because you like the content.

 

Exactly. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

No, there wasn't. I've never read a single story with Vestara and I still find this upsetting. If she's irredeemable there is literally no reason for her character to exist, especially with the future of the post-Crucible EU not looking so hot. Maybe they realized that since they weren't going to redeem Jacen they should have had someone actually try to redeem him, and this is just more narrative backpedaling so they can make a point they failed to make the last time.

 

Like I said, drop it.

 

Drop what?

 

A menacing true Sith?

 

It's books like Crucible, DNT etc. that make you almost welcome the Disney apocalypse.

 

I thought she WAS going to be redeemed because Jacen wasn't, wouldn't the fall and death of their cousin/nephew/son/brother, be more of a loss them some girl we just meet?

Also Stars Wars is a story of redemption, seriously watch the original Trilogy. How do you not get that?