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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Lit SOS: Save Our Skywalker, Luke Skywalker (v4)

Discussion in 'Literature' started by JediMatteus, Sep 12, 2015.

  1. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    Yeah, it's true that this is not let's rag on TFA thread.

    But is it the Legends of Luke Skywlker is the best! No exceptions! thread?

    I know the book is not out yet, but I think everyone has their right to voice their concerns.
     
  2. Jedi Ben

    Jedi Ben Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Jul 19, 1999
    The only concerns I've seen are stuff outside of the book and things it can't really do anything about. i.e. All the stuff about which story counts and to which degree, I'd suspect you've the same problem with the upcoming From A Certain Point of View book too - which story will count? Which one won't? To what degree?

    My general view on that is: Why worry? (Besides Mu, it's a YA book so regardless of what gets said, you probably ain't interested anyway.)

    The reality is, since the Great Reboot, I care little about that aspect. My reason for optimism of the LoLS book is that we have a new author that'll probably bring a unique perspective to SW, combined with illustrations by JG Jones - that, for me, is one hell of a good combination.
     
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  3. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    Yes, Ken Liu is great. I enjoyed his short stories and novels.
     
  4. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    TFA was built a bit on Luke is a myth premise, which I don't like, so I am probably not going to like this book, especially since it seems like at least some of the tales are going to be a bit outlandish. The whole foggy window nonsense to explain the term "Legends" vs canon is pretty stupid, but LSatSoM sounds interesting once I get around to reading it after I finish the OT novelizations, SotME, and SotE. I am currently four chapters into SotME and liking it so far, though it is clearly a product of being a possible low budget sequel to ANH in the certain time between ANH and what would eventually become TESB.
     
  5. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 3, 2013
    I'm not sure people are understanding this. The "Legends" in the title isn't the same thing as "Legends," as in the old EU. It's "Legends" as in "in-universe stories." It does take place within Disney canon–these are just tall tales that may or may not be wholly accurate, but likely hold at least a kernel of truth.
     
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  6. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    I know it's not Legend EU publication.
    My point is if Disney cannot even make head and tails of their own series of canon (What story is true? and therefore canon), then why did they bother get rid of the EU canonicity?
     
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  7. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    The problem is, "Legends" as in-universe stories that are tall tales was their hand wave for abandoning the EU.
     
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  8. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 3, 2013

    They can make heads or tails. This was a deliberate choice, you know, for fun. And to amplify the mythology behind Luke Skywalker, particularly Rey's line "I thought he was a myth."

    Again, I'm not sure people are understanding this. Otherwise I don't think there'd be this much protest.
     
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  9. ChildOfWinds

    ChildOfWinds Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Apr 7, 2001
    Maybe we DON'T understand what they're trying to do with this book. From what I have been able to glean, the author wrote some adventures of Luke skywalker that may or may not be true/ that may have occurred in some form, but not nearly in the fantastic way it has been told. I guess my problem with this is that we already have all those previous books that are now "legends" stories, that we can read if we want to read some possible adventures that Luke might have had, and which can also make Luke look "mythic".

    So, what exactly is the point of this book? We have already waited literally years for a new book about Luke in this "new canon". The next film, which will likely free-up authors to write post RotJ books since the mystery of what Luke has been up to for 30 years, will be out in four months and will reveal the information that the filmmakers wanted to keep secret up to this point. So, instead of "jumping the gun" and releasing a book about Luke a couple of months before that film, why not wait until secrets are out and you can write a bonefide adventure of Luke that actually DID happen as told? We already have plenty of legends stories about Luke that aren't canon. So why put out this new book which is probably just "legends" too, with just a "kernel" of truth to the tales?

    Besides, this is a young reader book, so it pretty much sounds like a "choose your own adventure " story, except here, the reader can choose to believe what really happened and what didn't. So, I understand Zeta 's frustration. Frankly, nothing that I wanted to have happen for Luke or hoped would happen for him in this sequel trilogy and its backstory, have happened so far. This book seems to be yet another disappointment. Finally, we are getting a Luke book, but sadly, we are likely not really getting the true story.

    Worst of all, I very much fear that we are going to get a Luke that I won't even recognize or like in TLJ.
     
  10. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    At this point I just don't want to see Luke establishing his academy and there would be some very interesting young men and women, and I get attached. I would see shadows of Tahiri, Kyp, and Corran. Then boom! They are all dead or turn evil.
    damn it, they should have set episode 7 in 300 ABY, and Luke at the end is a mad C'Baoth!Luke clone.
     
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  11. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 3, 2013
    Again, to show Luke is a mythological figure. The Legends books we have aren't in-universe stories. These are.

    Look, the whole point of any book is for entertainment. That's why they did this. For fun. It's enjoyable. They will, I'm sure, release a book about Luke's actual adventures at some point after TLJ or Episode 9. Until then, we can be content to have this to tide us over.



    Except...it's nothing like a "choose your own adventure" book. Nothing at all.




    Nah. Not worried about that at all. He may be a very different person, but that's different from being unrecognizable. Of course he'd be a different person and all he's been through and 30 years passing. I'm not even the same person I was when I started college 3 years ago–heck, I'm not even the same person I was at the beginning of this summer. You really expect Luke to be the same after 30 years? I don't. But that doesn't mean he's unrecognizable. Even though I've changed throughout my life, I'm still recognizable as me. Just a changed me. Same for Luke. Same for anyone. The Luke at the end of ANH was different from the one at the beginning of ANH. The Luke at the beginning of ESB was different than the one at the end of ANH. The one at the end of ESB, different than the beginning of ESB. And so on, and so on. People change. That's normal. We'll just see how much he's changed, but I'm confident most of his fans will be content by the end of TLJ.
     
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  12. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    We are still a bit mad that everything we knew about Luke... is a lie.
    Some people say Luke is a mafioso in LOTF, He fails as a GM for the Jedi in FOTJ. Problem is we know every step of the way that made Luke thus. And hey, some people may like Mafioso!Luke and failed GM!Luke. Anyway, we know how 9 ABY Luke became 45 ABY Luke. we were with the SkySolo family every step of the way. Now, courtesy of Disney, this is all a lie.
    Now we have a new Luke book, and it's going to be lies, damn lies, and statistics.

    Having said all the above, though. Ken Liu is a very good author, and New Luke will be in good hands.

    To paraphrase a Star Trek phrase.

    When they take out New Luke to pasture, I hope he'll end up better than the old Luke.
     
  13. Charlemagne19

    Charlemagne19 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2000
    Child of Winds, the fact the writer wants to write some INFINITIES Luke Skywalker tales should not be judged by the fact there haven't been many canon Luke tales outside of the comics.
     
  14. JediKnight75

    JediKnight75 Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2011
    I wouldn't call anything in Legends a lie because it is a complete, unified story. I think calling it no longer canon is actually a mistake. I'd rather say, they're no longer telling that Star Wars story and have begun a new one. This doesn't make much of a difference in reality, but I do feel like it respects both as their own stories. Just as Legends isn't canon to the new story, the new story isn't canon to Legends. In a Legends discussion we could label Snoke and the FO as non canon similar to how the Thrawn Campaign is non canon to the ST.

    The Luke book isn't lies. There was an interview that talked about there being truth in these stories. It's possible they're all completely true, albiet exaggerations of what happened. It's also possible some aren't true at all. At least for me, this is an interesting situation. The themes of myths and truth was present in TFA, and even the OT. This makes what they're doing especially fascinating. In regards to the legends about Luke, Han said it was all true. This could mean every detail is true, or the essential elements are true but the details aren't. Or it could mean despite their being completely false stories about Luke, they are true in their general elements. Furthermore, back in the OT, Obi-Wan constructs a myth about Anakin. It is essentially a lie. However Obi-Wan explains it to Luke in order to show it to be true, "from a certain point of view." In all honesty he does make a good case for their being truth in his lie. Even though it is essentially still a lie and Obi-Wan's explanation doesn't touch on the entire situation. I think both of these elements from the movies will be represented in this book. Through learning about how the galaxy perceives Luke, we will learn about him. As readers we can decide how much or little we believe to represent the truth. Regardless, we will see essential facts about Luke. The debate about the historicity of events will be more or less irrelevant to the story itself. Still, over time some aspect of this book may be confirmed.

    In a way it's similar to a historical document. Often when we approach history we are dealing with a lot of details that are biased and exaggerated, and we often work with legends. We don't treat any of this a untrue, rather we approach it all critically to come up with an arguement. Even in less credible documents, there's a lot that's useful. In some of my most interesting classes, we've had great discussions on myths and reality. This book touches a lot on that.
     
  15. Charlemagne19

    Charlemagne19 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2000
    I shall use this statement from DC Comics to explain my belief about Legends vs. canon

    "This is an imaginary story, but aren't they all?"
     
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  16. LelalMekha

    LelalMekha Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2012
    Oh, not again... You know very well why this argument doesn't work.
     
  17. Charlemagne19

    Charlemagne19 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2000
    Given I'm one of the people who finds the entire of canon to be ridiculous for fictional worlds....no?
     
  18. JediMara77

    JediMara77 Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 5, 2004
    I'm excited for The Legends of Luke Skywalker by Ken Liu. Yay, a Luke book!

    (This thread is ridiculous, you guys.)
     
  19. Charlemagne19

    Charlemagne19 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2000
    How I learned to stop worrying about canon and love the bomb

    I think this argument probably needs a bit more than one sentence but one which is entirely sincere. For this, I will use a number of other series which I absolutely adore but which have multiple mutually contradictory timelines. In this case, I'm going to bring up a supernatural soap opera which recently returned to canon called TWIN PEAKS. Perhaps you've heard of it. There's a girl in a small town is murdered, an FBI agent comes to investigate, discovers a lot of quirky characters, and later it's revealed the town has a bunch of surrealistic supernatural stuff going on behind the scenes.

    I am a huge Twin Peaks fan.

    Coffee and cherry pie all the way.

    Twin Peaks' timeline is a MESS.

    DELIBERATELY SO.

    The first season of Twin Peaks and roughly half the second season were written in tandem with David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Dune) and Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues). The two guys worked well together but had very different ideas about what the series was supposed to be about. Mark Frost wanted to do a very supernatural realism show with lots of links to stuff like Theosophy, the Illuminati, secret histories, Project: Blue Book, and so on. David Lynch just likes things to be inexplicable and life to have a lot of incomprehensible elements to it.

    Then there's the executives.

    Basically, about halfway through the second season, ABC insisted on David Lynch and Mark Frost compromising their vision for the show. They wanted the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder, which wasn't supposed to be resolved until the end of the show, solved. This seriously derailed a lot of plotlines. In what was also a weird decision, Kyle Mclaughlin insisted on an end to the plans of Lynch/Frost to have his character, Agent Cooper, become romantically involved with the show's second most popular character Audrey. This was because Audrey was eighteen in the show and he was playing an FBI agent but he was playing an FBI agent in his twenties so it was really questionable.

    Bear with me, I'm almost to my point.

    David Lynch also went to do a movie during this time. I forget which. However, this resulted in a lot of new plotlines being added to his baby with Mark Frost also pelted with a lot of time issues to make up for the derailing of others. Really cheesy storylines occurred, the show bled ratings, and by the time David Lunch returned--the shoe was to be cancelled. Both Cooper and Audrey also got new love interests imposed on them by the networks with Heather Graham and Billy Zane playing them--a fact which feels like two actors were wasted on characters no one would ever like.

    So what is "canon" in the above television show?

    Well, obviously, you could say, "What was shown on the TV show was canon."

    Except, Mark Frost disagrees because he wrote THE SECRET HISTORY OF TWIN PEAKS which was his vision of how the show should be. This included re-writing whole sections of the show, excising the network added characters, and diving deeply into the weirdest elements of the mythology which he was restricted to doing. There was also a number of books written about the show which were canon as far as the network was concerned but not Lynch and Frost. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AGENT COOPER is great but it's not something either of them consider canon. I'm
    not even getting into The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer novel by Jennifer Lynch (David's daughter) vs. Fire Walk With Me the movie which is BASED on The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer.

    Then they made THE RETURN on Showtime which disregards some elements of the show while incorporating others. They include elements of The Secret History of Twin Peaks but disregard others. For example, Agent Tammy Preston is a major character on the show and was the compiler of book but they mention the excised characters from continuity by the book. For a Star Wars comparison, it's like if Mara Jade showed up in a Star Wars novel which talks about how the idea of an alien Grand Admiral is ridiculous.

    So, how does one reconcile all of this nonsense? Well, the answer is you don't. I love the totality of Twin Peaks and all of its crazy contradictions. The story of Luke Skywalker as told by George Lucas is a fundamentally different story than the story of Luke Skywalker told by Bantam and that is different from the tale of Disney. There's no "true" story because they're all different stories about the same character. It's like saying Sherlock Holmes is Conan Doyle's character so you can't enjoy Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes, SHERLOCK, or ELEMENTARY. Star Wars has entered the realm of public mythology and there's going to many tales of Luke Skywalker just like there will be different stories of of his adventures.

    As Rey said, "I thought he was a myth."

    He is, he's also a man.
     
  20. LelalMekha

    LelalMekha Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2012
    I appreciate all of them (well, some of them), but as separate universes. However, I expect material from a single universe to be internally consistent.
     
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  21. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 3, 2013
    Y'all.

    "Johnson says. “We know that he is not a coward. He’s not just hiding because he’s scared. But we also know that he must know his friends are in danger. He must know the galaxy needs him. And he’s sitting on this island in the middle of nowhere. There had to be an answer. It had to be something where Luke Skywalker believes he’s doing the right thing – and the process of figuring out what that is and unpacking it is the journey for Rey.”

    "But deep down, the farmboy turned warrior turned exile would also like to meet the hero known as Luke Skywalker again."

    * * *

    "[Luke] made a huge mistake in thinking that his nephew was the chosen one, so he invested everything he had in Kylo."

    This makes me so happy. It sounds exactly right. Luke's not a coward, he does have a plan, he is still trying to do the right thing...

    But the line about "the farmboy turned warrior turned exile would also like to meet the hero known as Luke Skywalker again" literally gets me right in the feels. This is exactly what I wanted after seeing TFA. It means Luke wants the old Luke back. Love this. Literally just reading this made me so emotional, so I can't imagine what I'm going to be like when I watch it.

    This sounds so good y'all. So. Good.
     
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  22. jamminjedi23

    jamminjedi23 Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 19, 2015
    In my opinion I think Luke is just trying to come up with a better plan this time and he needs to seclude himself in his studies in order to do that. He knows that what has been tried recently hasn't worked so he is going back to the ancient Jedi to see how they did things.
     
  23. DARTH_MU

    DARTH_MU Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2005
    Honesty at this point I think the only reason Luke needed to be on Ach-To is to stop Snokelike creatures from escaping.

    Consider this possibility

    Snoke is Canon celestial Abeloth like creature. Problem is, there's a lot of them. The old Jedi built their first temple in order to stop the evil celestials from escaping.
    Now unknown to Luke, where he started his Jedi academy, on Yavin? Snoke was trapped by some Jedi magic there. (Luke was lazy because there was already a set of temples like in legend Yavin). Ben Solo unwittingly unleashed Snoke in the canon!Temple of Woolamander.
    So Snoke corrupts Ben who destroy the Jedi academy. Luke had to go to Ach-To to stop even more Snokelike evil things from escaping. That's why he can't leave the planet, ever.

    tl; dr. Snoke is evil Ikrit. Luke can't leave Ach-To because there is even more evil Ikrit on Ach-To that a Jedi can stop.
     
  24. Charlemagne19

    Charlemagne19 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2000
    I'm guessing its the significantly more mundane, Luke has gone to Ach-Cho to find the secret of the Force so he knows how to defeat Snoke/redeem Ben. He blames the fact Ben fell on himself and his own ignorance rather than Ben's choices.

    Or, to quote Obi-Wan, "I thought I could train him as well as Yoda. I was wrong."

    Missing that Yoda trained Dooku every bit as poorly.

    Which makes the line ironic.
     
  25. ChildOfWinds

    ChildOfWinds Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Apr 7, 2001
    But it certainly would have been nice if they wouldn't have had Luke fail like others before him did. Even worse, they didn't allow Luke to be successful at anything. All of his accomplishments are gone and he leaves no personal or professional legacy. As if that wasn't enough, they have completely changed Luke's characterization and his personality. I truly don't recognize the Luke I knew and loved from the ot at all!

    There is nothing the same about him if you go by the EW article. Nothing at all. It seems from the article that they have torptally deconstructed Luke in order to serve Rey 's story. I don't feel it was necessary to ruin Luke in order to give Rey a good story.

    This poor thread seems to have been abandoned. :(
     
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