Lit A Cynical Walk Through the NJO

I guess we can say Harrar walked in and found Nom in his position and said, "Oh, dude! Hey, need some help? Here, let me get my coufee..."

Destiny's Way is enjoyable to me because the New Republic finally turns things around. It's a bit like the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, to me. Things are finally reversing and the good guys have a shot at taking down the enemy now. I guess you'd call the Battle of Bilbringi the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, then, and the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar the attack on the Black Gate. Anyways, despite the anticlimactic ending to Jaina Solo vs. Tsavong Lah, I did think the battle itself was overall well-written.

 

Anyone who hates the Ackbar stuff isn't human.

 

I think WJW didn't read Traitor when he wrote DW. But its ok I guess. I dunno I liked the BSG vibe I got from it and Ylesia.

 

BSG vibe in what way?

 

I dunno Jacen is like Helo on the Ralroost or something I guess its anachronistic but I think I'm experiencing time nonlinearly.

 

That and, if there was to be future SW stories, the Vong had to be de-buffed and the NR-Jedi had to be permitted to win something substantive, thus:

Political idiocies - ended
Jedi faffing about over morality to the point of paralysis - ended
Vong strength level is actually determined and isn't yo-yo-ing all over the place

Before DW: Galaxy is screwed, NR is incompetent, Vong get to win.
After DW: May take one hell of a pile of corpses and might have to kill every Vong, but galaxy is no longer screwed, although a lot of it may go down in flames.

In short, DW was DR saying: Yeah, OK, it's got messy but we've got dis guy to fix it, 'kay?

Even so, after DW, no one was ever expecting TUF. DW set up a potentially very dark finale indeed.

 

does anyone know why the new novels like, Heair to the Jedi, are not coming out in kindle format??

 

They're not doing the delay-for-x-months-in-the-hope-you'll-buy-the-hardback trick?

 

Just read the book in store and get the paperback.

 

Wait no good guys ever succeeded before DW?

Huh

 

Well last I checked A New Dawn is available for pre order on kindle. Haven't checked for the other upcoming books but I'm sure they'll be added soon.

 

Are they rebooting the NJO in the new continuity starting with A New Dawn or something

 

That actually would be great as unlikely as it is.

 

A rebooted NJO series would be awesome. We need a series that follows the ST Jedi and friends around.

 

Yeah I was kind of wondering why everyone's talking about this in this particular thread.

 

As for the prior topic, Destiny's Way...

It has Jacen and Vergere together coming out of Traitor which is okay. I mean I don't think WJW actually read Traitor or its manuscript before he wrote DW so he got some stuff wrong and really created the tension between Luke and Vergere (which Luceno propagated) that probably played into the Vergere Compendium or whatever -- I mean it's like when Luke says or thinks about how he destroyed the Sun Crusher in Children of the Jedi and we all know that Luke didn't do that, well Vergere admits to torturing Jacen in Destiny's Way even though she never did that either but the less intellectually honest among us will grasp onto that piece of bad continuity to suit their purposes. He also has Vergere spaz out over Ben which is really weird and out of character for someone that's supposed to be calm, cool, and collected all the time as a proponent of self-mastery (in this very same book, no less). Which is funny because her arguments really do have merit but are kind of undercut by her behavior in the scene and then amusingly they're pretty much proven right in the dumpster fire and SW Legacy. The nepotism runs strong in the Skywalker family.

The Ralroost setting and all the Jedi together doing their mind-meld stuff that they kind of just forgot about in the dumpster fire even though I think Denning really spearheaded it with his super awesome Wild Knights (Kyp needs some Barabel Jedi), in my more recent re-reading, gave me a BSG vibe since they're all on an aircraft carrier type ship with a sense of camaraderie or something I dunno.

I guess I'll throw the question back at you _Catherine_ what is bad about Destiny's Way besides Nom Anor's return to the status quo? I think the best rationalization I can provide for that, btw, is that the Solo project was a big secret that no one knew about and Nom didn't even want to do the rehearsal sacrifice of Ganner because he didn't want anyone to know that Jacen was "on their side" yet. And the only other people that knew were Hool and Tsavong Lah, and Hool was quickly executed for his failure to get the World Brain to yield to him, and maybe Lah wanted to keep the Solo project secret from Shimrra too, and he couldn't just arbitrarily execute Nom Anor without cause. Plus Lah took Vergere on as his advisor in Rebirth and she totally punked him so that kind of looks bad so it's better to keep it a secret.

 

Oh, is this the near-death situation we're talking about? It's been a while, I thought maybe Catherine meant that Vergere left Nom Anor in a physically dangerous situation. Oh, yeah, I took it that everyone involved in the Jacen Solo situation were completely and utterly humiliated, even Lah, so they all decided to save face and pretend it never really happened rather than execute Nom but then Shimrra's like, "Well you had part in it too, Tsavong." They all decided some cover-up would be better than all of them going down for it.

 

Vergere just left him tied up under the senate building or whatever. The jeopardy is that Tsavong Lah threatened to sacrifice Nom Anor as a nameless thing if the Solo project failed. But I would guess that since it failed so spectacularly -- and due to Vergere whom Tsavong Lah trusted as his advisor -- that Nom Anor really isn't to blame. Vergere taunts Nom Anor by asking him whether it is more important who is truly to blame for the failure or who Tsavong Lah will blame for it, but this was when she was trying to coax him into taking her with him on his seekrit coralcraft. The fact that Jacen and Vergere both escaped together to go back to the New Republic would presumably make it pretty obvious to Tsavong Lah that she was to blame.

Maybe Tsavong Lah would still blame Nom Anor or otherwise have him killed out of spite, but Shimrra comes to town so I would just guess his authority is somewhat muted by this and he can't do it without cause.

 

So, who was pretending to be Pellaeon in Destiny's Way?

You can probably add "anything written by Timothy Zahn" under things not read by WJW.

 

I dunno sometimes I think Zahn doesn't read what he wrote either. Like someone else ghostwrote TTT or he hit his head or something and got confused and thought Thrawn wasn't an evil dude.

Although I guess I find it amusing how Thrawn is using prostrate Noghri as footstools and whatnot (and that's basically his whole undoing in that story when Rukh shouts sic semper tyrannis) and then he's all progressive in Choices of One with the reptile alien things being welcomed into his awesome, egalitarian empire of the hand.

I mean it's always a sign of good continuity and writing when a villain's fatal flaw doesn't even exist anymore and is actually the opposite in later writing, right? And he's not actually a villain he's just misunderstood

 

Yeah, but regardless of whether or not he was evil, his lips still twitched.

 

And he always spoke sardonically.

 

point

 

That's how I see DW, it's not necessarily the actions that are way out of character, just the descriptions and speech are just so far off that they feel like different people.

Doesn't WJW have Pellaeon tending garden in DW? It's like he was intentionally setting up an impostor Pellaeon in that scene, like it was actually some Vong in an ooglith masquer. No really, it was so painfully out of character that I actually considered this.

Same goes with Vergere, it's like she's an entirely different person. IIRC Jacen wasn't right, either, ESPECIALLY after Traitor.

Who are these people? More like, who's pretending to be them, because they're doing a bad job of it.

Robimus you probably know Pellaeon better than anyone. Assuming you've read the NJO and specifically Destiny's Way, what did you think of Pellaeon as written by WJW?


And to get cynical, I'm not a huge fan of Ackbar's back, it feels overly sentimental, too mushy. "And the cheering went on for hours". Whatever. It's just too....too "meta". I just don't buy it.

 

I haven't read it since it came out but it didn't leave me with a very good impression. Like it's not one of the worst Star Wars books ever or anything but I feel like people give it more credit than it deserves because they like the plot and overlook the actual writing, which I don't think was all that stellar. There were a few other bits of spotty continuity like the Nom Anor thing (Nom Anor's back to work before Shimrra ever arrives in the galay so I don't think Shimrra was the one who put the kibosh on Tsavong Lah's erasing Nom Anor from history right down to his name, which IIRC is what he promised to do), like WJW not knowing Keyan Farlander was a Jedi or that Winter was married to Tycho. Mostly it was the characterizations that felt off to me, especially Vergere, Jacen, Pellaeon, and kind of Tsavong Lah but I think Stover kind of messed up his characterization too so whatever. I remember not liking Mara in this book but I don't remember why, and I wasn't a fan of Luke using blackmail to set up a puppet government (is that what happened?). I hated Jacen's green Force lightning, and the handoff of power from Tsavong Lah to Shimrra felt really clumsy, like WJW didn't realize Lah had been the central villain of the series until now and just treated him like some stooge for the whole book. I did like the very end where Onimi is revealed to be the real puppetmaster, but besides that and the Ackbar stuff I was pretty "meh" on the book overall.

Have you heard of the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances though?