Lit Books Cynically Reliving the X-Wing Series

And even after X-Wing Alliance, from what I can tell- the novels continued to portray torpedoes as awesomely good vs shields.

I think the TCW series may have done so as well.

 

No, I'm not. I personally hate funerals. The institutionalization of the somber reflection on the nature of the life and death a funeral provides, to the point where businesses are built around it, forces people to turn it into an event and interrupts what should be an intensely personal matter: reflecting on the impact of a life.

We discussed this back in the NJO thread when I mentioned that character death for the sake of drama almost never works in fiction. Other posters rightfully pointed out that my point was disproven in the very first Star Wars movie ever made. Yet, Death is Cheap, exists as a TVTrope for a reason. The difference, I think, is a disrespect for the permanency of death, of the idea that death isn't a Dragon Ball Z-style revolving door where, if you just want it a lot or fight hard enough, no one ever dies except the bad guys. Star Wars has a decent record on film involving the deaths of notable characters that aren't or won't be reversed (at least I hope not), starting with Obi-Wan and Yoda in the OT and the deaths of Shmi, Mace and the other Jedi in the PT. The dead remain dead and their legacy lives on, affecting the story and the characters left behind. The problem has always been adapting that to the EU.

The temptation to use death as a way to create drama is intense one as an author, I know, I've written a few things in my time. For the EU, though, the problem is that unless you create your own characters, all of the main characters you write for can't die, whether because they're from the movies and have capital ship-strength character shields or because of canon concerns that say otherwise, which means that the "meaningful" deaths we get are nearly all of the satellite characters, movie characters who no one cares about anyway or original characters who exist solely to serve the role of the sacrificial lamb.

Stackpole has this issue at times. Characters like Riv Shel come and go through the first four books, sometimes replaced by more memorable ones like Asyr, but mostly by other mauve shirts with names, an outline of a personality and elite skills but little else. Allston isn't completely exempt from this, but he manages to make his characters each unique enough to not simply be mauve shirts. Grinder, Falyn Sandskimmer, Castin Donn, Ton Phanan, they're all unique characters with their own foibles, personality quirks, mental issues and talents outside of the cockpit. We get to know and see each one of them before they ultimately meet their end.

However, among those, Ton is still unique.

Allston avoids making Ton a mauve shirt by keeping him a memorable, valued member of the squadron who isn't immediately replaced by a generic fill-in. He has the squadron remain at limited strength, with Lara filling his spot as team medic but no one filling the hole his absence leaves in its wake. But most important, I think, is the relationship, the deep personal friendship between him and Face. Keep in mind, we don't get a single POV scene from Ton's perspective in WS or Iron Fist. That's why he seems under-utilized. We see Ton through the lens of his fellow pilots: Kell, Tyria, Lara, Wedge, and Face. We get to know him at the same pace the other characters get to know him, seeing his sarcasm and seeming narcissism gradually become less joking and more biting, his slow transformation from the squadron's comic relief to a bitter and depressed man who hides his pain behind a cheerful face for the sake of his friends.

And then, just as he's beginning to confront those things, just as Face manages to get past his defenses and urge him to value himself and his contributions to the future, he dies.

Death in Star Wars is a tricky beast to try and attack. Allston did it in a way that worked admirably, if not phenomenally, by skirting around canon issues and giving an original character with no past and no future plotted out for him enough heart and soul to make us care about him, then taking him from us. Deaths like Anakin's and Ganner's are the same way, drawing us in with the promise of a compelling character with an arc we want to see resolved, then ending it in a way that, whether shocking or predictable, does not occur for cheap drama. Ton's is different because, by all rights, we shouldn't care whether he dies. Pilots die by the hundreds in the EU, especially in the NJO and beyond.

That's why Ton is such a memorable character with such a memorable demise. He's not just a pilot, he's a character all his own poised on the edge of turning the corner, of working through his issues with Face's help and getting a new lease on life, and then it's stripped away from him. We root for him, we want him to succeed, we want to see him pull through his depression and learn to love life again. And we can't, and never will.

 

I'm going to cynic this up.

Ton's death is contrived, stilted, melodramatic crap that didn't move me one bit. I felt more for Sandskimmer, which isn't much.

Yeah, that was horrendous.

Allston is not very good at writing space battles. That includes Enemy Lines.

I wish I had joined in this thread when it started, but I was doing something else at the time.

Not going to participate much without actually re-reading the books.

 

I felt like being cynical and making a thread titled "Anakin Solo is overrated" last night. That's a bit more off-topic tho.

 

Go ahead and make the thread, you won't be alone in that opinion and we need something to bury certain...other threads.

 

Cynical Ben is presently being investigated by Imperial Trading Standards on suspicion of a lack of demonstrated cynicism in threads titled by him, the penalties for this offence, when proven, are, like all Imperial punishment for trangression.... severe.

Alternatively Cynical Ben could seek asylum with the Gungans, where he would merely be....



....pu-nished.

 

I agree. Unlike Grinder, Falynn, and Castin, Ton's death was built up to. Grinder and Falynn especially had very abrupt deaths that weren't focused on at all. They were in X-Wings, and then they blew up. Grinder was sad for me, but only because I was a huge fan of him after the whole pranking scene. Falynn, I honestly only liked because she helped Myn deal with his issues; other than that she was kind of insufferable. She thought she was the best, she insisted on trying to prove it, and she was just flat-out annoying while doing it. Still felt bad when she died, but not as much as Grinder's or Ton's or Jesmin Ackbar's.

Castin, meanwhile, had a little bigger buildup than Grinder's or Falynn's, and I think everyone was expecting it from the moment he stowed away, but the emotionality of Castin's death was more due to Dia having to (maybe) kill him, than actually feeling bad for Castin. I mean, you felt bad that all of them died because they were the good guys...but out of all of them only Ton's had extreme emotional resonance.

 

Hmm, did anyone, first time around, see Phanen's death coming?

That's a large part of why I like it so much, it isn't marketed or telegraphed, it's a straight up sucker punch to the gut followed by a kick to the nuts that leaves you metaphorically reeling.

 

I did because I accidentally saw the previously-posted pic of him and Face together on Wookieepedia. So yeah. But if I hadn't seen that picture it would've been a total shock; there was no hinting in the book. It seemed like it was possible he'd make it.

But nope.

 

It is done.

 

Realistic by what standards? I mean, none of these things are real, and even in the movies Star Wars has always been more starfighter focused. And, again, - World War 2 themed, and given that World War 2 saw the end of the battleship and rise of the carrier...

 

That's something I would have liked to see a lot more of in Star Wars, the importance of the carrier. About the only place they're really shown that I know of is in the Black Fleet Crisis. I guess it's an unfortunate side effect of giving hyperdrives to the main Rebel fighters.

 

Well, I think the fact that most Star Wars ships are general purpose rather than specialized combat/fighter carrier/troop transport ships is also a factor in that.

 

It just seemed to be a step away from reality. The X wings are basically bombers that can dogfight, too. Granted, I am no genius in real life fighter tactics, though.

 

I was caught by surprise at Ton's death. Didn't read the book (or remember reading it) until Summer 2007 even though I had it for years. Bounced around a lot in that series and elsewhere and it wasn't until then that I did a massive read through and got every book that I had up to that point. Also helped that I didn't know the internet that well back then.

 

And if starfighter weapons were that weak, why would you bother with them? Why would almost every capital ship carry at least a couple of squadrons if they were only effective against other fighters or little transports? There must be a reason fighters are used so heavily, and it can't just be because they're good at killing one another.

Plus, I should point out that two A-wings, dedicated superiority fighters, took out the Executor's shield dome (which was just a little bit bigger than they were) in a single pass. And the N-1 pilots in TPM expected that they'd be able to destroy their target. So I can't agree that the movies paint the fighters as being universally useless against larger ships.

 

In Episode I, I attributed the fighters' problems mostly to the N-1 vs Droid Control Ship lineup rather than some overall fighter vs. battleship rule. The Trade Federation has the most modern and powerful army in the galaxy at the time of the battle. Whereas the N-1s are pretty, artsy-looking ships from a mostly peaceful era, whose designers (not to mention the pilots) probably never dreamed they'd ever have to face anything that powerful.

As you said, they seemed to do fine in ROTJ and it's doubtful that they'd be kept around and used so heavily if they were all that weak.

 

There were a few real-life fighters which carried nuclear air-to-air missiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie

A proton torpedo can be thought of as a souped-up, guided form of this - small enough to be carried on an interceptor, yet powerful.

 

I never understood what proton torpedoes were supposed to be. The Incredible Cross-Sections I read way, way back listed them as nuclear weapons (which would make sense given that they were used on the first Death Star - those reactors are big and thick), but the books show them being used casually as air-to-air (space-to-space?) missiles with no negative results for anyone but the fighter being targeted and maybe a couple of others if they're close enough. Suppose it wouldn't be the first time the EU didn't agree with itself. Ah well.

 

Because people don't drop at random from radiation poising whilst flying shielded and armored ships or what are you trying to get at?

 

No, because when nuclear weapons blow up, they tend to take out a lot more than just one lil' fighter. Use one in a real-life dogfight like the Rogues apparently do and you'll vaporize everyone on both sides, and anything else within a couple miles. It just doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd use in those kinds of fights.

Unless nukes work differently enough in space that it does make sense?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon

Proton Torpedos are also designed to channel the explosive power into a single point to maximize damage to that, which is one of the reasons they are popular as anti-cap ship weapons. Whilst there are other versions of the weapon for bombardment/ mass damage.

 

AFAICR, only the Tirpitz was put down by anything in the 'giant bomber' class (Lancasters with Tallboy bombs), and that only because she was moored in harbour. The rest of the time, the 'giant bombers' seem to have been utterly ineffective - except when depth-charging surfaced submarines at low level.

 

That works.

It says that most of the normal ones are still bigger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki ones, but apparently they do get a lot smaller than that, with the earliest W54s being able to hit "a two block area." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54 Guess it does fit, then.