Lit Nomi Sunrider - is she still popular these days or not?

Years ago during the mid 1990s. Nomi Sunrider was a big deal back then when it came to comics revealing what it was like thousands of years before New Hope.

So I was wondering if Nomi Sunrider is still popular these days or she pushed away for characters like Darth Bane, Quinlan Vos, Aayla and Starkiller?

 

Del Rey must think she isn't since they canceled her book.

 

Well, that's just because stuff TOR released overwrote everything the author had already written (basically a complete book, which had already been rewritten several times) so after several years they finally cancelled it. Could be resurrected in the future, though.

 

Nomi never really got the development she probably should have done.

 

I had no idea. Too bad.

 

I heard there was some controversy about the name Sunrider. Thats why we haven't heard about her in so long

 

Nomi Sunrider was sadly killed in a hit-and-run by a Jeep and replaced by her clone, Nomi Da-Boda.

 

Vima's lack of developement is even sadder. Fifteen years waiting for her adventures as a Jedi, and counting.

 

That was part of it.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sunrider_naming_controversy

 

Yup, that too Schwarz, that too.

 

Yeah, I still adore her, but she's definitely not the flavour of the decade at Del Rey or Dark Horse which is sad.

And I'd guess it's not too likely to change because she's now like a generation and a half before Revan which is such a huge tale both in universe and in terms of tie-in media that's it's somehow managed to dwarf Nomi, Ulic and Exar Kun.

Real shame Vima never got incorporated into the KOTOR stuff, though.

 

"Hmm, Vima Sunrider's supposed to have an amazing destiny and become this incredible Jedi? Golly, it's a pity that Revan and this unnamed female Jedi Exile of unexplored heritage and background who went on to kick Sith ass and re-establish the Jedi Order are dominating the era instead."

Oh well.

I'd have retconned Revan into Ulic and Nomi's love child (Rhen Var conception, "[Revan] remind(s) me of Nomi" - Jolee, "The Qel-Droma robe... Revan will wear them" - Duron)* and the Exile into his elder half-sister. (Maybe that'd have sucked... but I'd have liked it)

Though the real shame, of course, is that Vima was originally going to be in KotOR... but was then written out, with Bastila stepping into her role, instead. I sometimes feel that after it became clear they were no longer going to have any ties to the TotJ stories, they should have just jumped forward to 3000ish BBY and done the whole Revan saga there.

That way he wouldn't have stolen all the Qel-Droma/Sunrider thunder.

* This could still happen, of course. And it's the only thing in my mind that would justify his being another damn generic white dude with brown hair.

 

we definitely need more Vima and Nomi SUNRIDER

 

I never knew this. It'd have been so interesting to have Vima instead of Bastila as the KotOR protagonist and really connected that series of games and Tales of the Jedi.

 

In TOTJ, it was mentioned Vima Sunrider would become a great Jedi Knight. Still, we haven't seen her after Redemption...
In Redemption, her mother seemed to be the leader of the Jedi Order. I wonder where Vandar and Lamar came from...

 

No, I'd've liked it. Or at least the Revan (RHEN VAR, oh how classlessly Hollywood of you, Nomi) part. Especially with what happened to her in canon later (ARGH), I wouldn't have retonned the Exile into another relative, though.

And yeah, what DOES happen to Nomi and Vima after Redemption? The notion that they both just died someplace in the war seems anticlimactic. But neither of them are even participating in the KOTOR comic-era stuff when the Order is still intact.

My personal retcon is that Nomi was clearly part of the "wandering Jedi" school that her husband belonged to and that Tales of the Jedi seems to focus on. Rather than such a huge shift to centralisation over a relatively short period of time by the time we arrive at Zayne's era, particularly when you also consider the Draay's tradition of Jediness, it's pretty clear that the whole Order is far less centralised.

It always felt to me that after the whole Ulic thing, Nomi tried to be a leader, to install herself as one of the more centralised Vrook and Lamar style masters (can we even retcon that the reason we don't see all of them fighting Ulic and Exar Kun is that perennial problem of them panicking about whether or not it's all right to get involved until it's too late?), but it just never worked out for her, and she and Vima eventually went back to, you know...space or something, to be Jedi out in the galaxy on their own terms again. Probably still helped with the fighting where she was needed, etc., but went back to being a wandering knight instead of a Grandmaster in a temple...

We totally need a Vima story to tell us what she was up to, though.

 

A better question is why in less than a century the Jedi Order changed from what we see in TotJ (mostly a bunch of wise Masters scattered about, teaching students, with a few rare Convocations, and various Knights going about here and there saving worlds) to resembling the prequel-era Jedi Order. The simple answer is that when KotOR came out, the prequels were also being released so they just followed that lead... but I still really wish there could have been at least an extra century between TotJ and KotOR to help explain the changes. Its gotten even worse with TOR ripping off even more stuff from the prequels and OT.

I remember hearing that originally Bastilla was going to be Vima, but they changed it due to copyright problems or something (even in TOR Da-Boda is used instead of Sunrider). It probably turned out better to have Bastilla as her own person, but still, most stories and authors don't even really bother to use the close proximity between TotJ and KotOR. Only stuff like the KotOR comic and the Campaign Guide (both by John Jackson Miller, well partially in the RPG guide's case) really took advantage of showing the Republic and Jedi reeling from so many wars in just a century or so (the Great Sith War, the Mandalorian Wars, the Jedi Civil War, the Dark Wars and many other smaller conflicts). I think the KotOR RPG guide mentioned or at least hinted that the Republic reorganized a lot between TotJ and KotOR to explain the big changes, but it still seems really silly that with 4,000 years available to them, they just had to go for 39xx or something like that instead of 3900 before Yavin or something like that.

There was still enough interest to have a book planned for her, but sadly it was cancelled, although hard to tell if it was just part of a lot of the Old Republic EU skipping from KotOR era (or at least that century) to TOR era, a few centuries later. It would have been nice have seen more of what Nomi and Vima did but considering what happened to a lot of the other major figures of that era (swept up in Revan's crusade, corrupted to the darkside, or just killed by Sith or overenthusiastic bounty hunters), it might be better to leave their fates just vague. Sometimes they dig up a character again and I end up wishing they had just left them alone in literary limbo. *glances at a lot of the recent post-NJO novels*

Or maybe they can say they just ended up joining Zayne's non-Jedi adventures. Since Zayne isn't officially a Jedi, he can avoid all those random purges that's going to follow in the next few decades.

 

Still, she could have done worse... she could have named her son Mino or Imon or something.

 

I could never figure out what was going on with her hairline.

 

Yeah, I think all the wars do explain some of the sudden move towards centralisation, but even in Zayne's time, I got the impression that the Jedi Council didn't really have as broad oversight as it did post Bane. I guess maybe it makes more sense to me if I view it as a shift that had actually been occurring slowly for a millennium, possibly since the Great Hyperspace War, and there was simply an exponential increase in progress throughout that time, culminating in the wars of circa 4k ABY providing a final nail in the coffin of the wandering Jedi.

Perhaps the Convocations weren't gatherings of all the wandering Jedi, but simply all who called themselves Jedi, where all the branch and minority traditions met with their increasingly-numerous centralised brethren. But pre-all-those-wars there was probably a lot more respect for individual wisdom than political pressure to amalgamate to provide more robust oversight.

Speaking of, I can't remember offhand what the official line is on the organisation of the Order between KOTORII and TOR. Frustratingly I imagine that there'll be the usual official focus on keeping it as something that resembles the PT, but I always figured that the failure of such centralisation would lead to something similar to Luke's NJO in response to the OJO, if not an outright reversion to the TOTJ nomadic lifestyle...

Yeah I think originally she was supposed to be nonhuman but later images just have her with normal hair and she does seem human so I just view it as some sort of odd space hairstyle that was all the rage in her part of the galaxy, and she stopped shaving herself a...receding hairline with patches, when she ended up stuck in the middle of distressing post-husband death adventures and...lost her razors.

 

She's half zabrak on her mother's side.

IIRC, the official line is that the immediate Post-Exilic Jedi Order (PEJO, spread it!) was very NJO-ish in form (allowing families and the like) but that they had a few massive crises with people falling to the dark side and had the usual reactionary response to it. Which is pretty much exactly how the shift between the TotJ and KotOR era Jedi Orders was explained. (Great Sith War? Guess our teachings were too lax, time to get more strict and centralised!)

Though one difference is that (somewhat creepily) the TOR-Jedi "realised the enormous benefits" of breeding Force sensitive children and deliberately fostered the continuation of "Force dynasties" like the Shans.

But, yeah, at this point I've just accepted that the Jedi Order naturally fluctuates between "families and romantic relationships are cool, let's be more chill" and "no they're not, let's be draconian" every few hundred years. Same holds true for the extent of their centralisation, I guess.

 

I'd like to read a book about her. More Star Wars? You bet

 

i too would like to know nomi and vima's fate.

 

It really is unfornuate how Redemption was the last story we got featuring either of them.

 

Is the Zabrak thing canon or just an idea that fits well? Cus it does, especially with the whole new Dathomiri thing...

As to the PEJO (PEJO), realising that whole Force dynasty thing makes sense, actually. Not that it's not creepy, I mean, just that it makes sense given that's where we're at immediately pre-Bane, with the Army of Light and the Jedi acting more like feudal lords in many respects. I wish we got more about that era too, rather than immediately after it.