Lit A Chronological Journey Through the EU: Currently Disc. Interference

Wasn't there a (licensed) story about why attachment is forbidden told by Qui-Gon to a young Obi-Wan in Tales?

 

Yes. It was also a pretty stupid story.

 

Something about two brothers wanting the same woman so much they blew up a planet, no?

 

Yup. It didn't make a lick of sense and was kind of insulting to the intelligence of the reader.

 

Yes, but from what I remember it did sound like the silly story self-important old men would tell young recruits who had recently sworn themselves to a life of celibacy.

I mean, are some of the stories about St Anthony really any better?

 

Yeah, the name of that story is Mythology, I think. And boy the art in it is DREADFUL. In a deathmatch between Mythology and Parallels, I take Parallels any day of the week.

Parallels: Danner

5,000 BBY

*I’m not recapping anything, dammit. Go back and read the last one if you missed it.

*As the story starts Danner is fixing the roof of Taleena’s room. I bet he spills some perfume on himself.

*One of the interesting things here is the contrast set up in the very phrasing. I think the most moving one to me is when, early in this story, as Danner is thinking about his life on Perdition, he realizes that he feels “right.” This is in contrast to a line that explicitly stated that Kiran felt “wrong” in the last story. I really loved this.

*Thinking about Kiran: “If he did survive and did arrive . . .” Um, we’ll do the hand jive?

*Oh, boy, he just slipped and spilled the perfume on himself.

*So, I think this is the most interesting things about these stories. It’s not just the events that we see from three perspectives. It’s the very phrasing itself that bleeds over from story to story. It’s a way of sort of pointing out that these three characters are so close to each other that they see things nearly exactly alike. And, yet, tragically different.

*So, you get things like Danner echoing Kiran’s thought about Taleena: “Wouldn’t she be glad to see him?” And when Kiran shoves Danner away into the door, both Kiran and Danner notice the sound of the door rattling. Those kinds of things are the same from one story to the next. Some of the prose is exactly the same in this story as in the first one. And yet it doesn’t feel lazy; it feels kind of mythic.

*So, Danner, we find out through hearing his thoughts, is just as shocked as Kiran is to hear that Taleena has been unfaithful to Kiran while he’s been gone. So, he’s innocent, but he still feels that he needs to defend Taleena to keep Kiran from hurting her.

*At some point, really, Danner should have said something to that effect.

*So, obviously, this one has a downbeat ending. “The last thing he saw was a wave of sky-blue energy flashing before his eyes and the briefest glimpse of smoke as the flesh of his neck began to sizzle with the decapitating death blow. . . then there was darkness; then there was light and then, there was simply nothing at all, not even justice.”

*Frankly, I think that ‘not even justice’ should have been left off. It’s a bit too on the nose and the “simply nothing at all” is a really great, totally bleak ending line.

*This one was better than the first one. But that was partly because of the first one, I suppose. I mean, the way it played off the first one, particularly in the contrasts. Like I said earlier, I loved the contrast of Kiran feeling “wrong” and Danner feeling “right.” And I liked the details that carried over in the phrasing and such. I wasn’t expecting connections in that way, so I enjoyed that.

*CANONICAL STATUS: This work is fairly explicit in its introduction that the tale about to be told is a myth, used to illustrate the reasons behind the Jedi vow of non-attachment. It is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

** ½ out of **** stars.

Nathan Butler

*Next time, it’s obviously the conclusion! Parallels: Taleena! Taleena, you ignorant slut!

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Parallels: Taleena

5,000 BBY

*Okay, okay, in the earliest days of the Republic, dedicated to the study of the mystical energy field . . . right, right, can we fast forward through these intros? I’m not sure we needed the same intro every time.

*Same thing going on here as last time. A lot of direct phrases get carried over in the narration. Taleena muses on the fact that she took a lover in order to help her keep going after she heard that Kiran had died. She’s not sure what might happen if he returns alive, as she’s now heard that he may be.

*So, okay, we all know how this goes down. As she’s coming back from unconsciousness, she’s trying to say that Danner isn’t the one. But before she can do that, Kiran’s lopped off Danner’s hand and there’s no more time and she’s in such shock that she can’t say anything until Kiran has lopped off Danner’s head too.

*There’s a nice bit of Taleena echoing Danner’s experience of death. “In Kiran’s eyes, there was darkness; in Danner’s fading luminous form, there was light; and for her, in the emptiness in her heart at this very moment, there was simply nothing at all.” Remember: Darkness, Light, Nothing at all. I like that callback in particular.

*Oh, I was wrong. The guy Taleena’s actually been cheating on Kiran with? The Republic Security Agent who shoots Kiran in the face.

*So, the epilogue tells us that Taleena and this guy end up spending the rest of their lives together. I find that rather credulity straining. I mean, let’s face it, they’re probably not even that well suited to each other. It was an affair of a month or so probably, taken up because she wasn’t thinking clearly. Now, the relationship has ended in two deaths. Do you think these two are really gonna be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary anytime soon? I seriously doubt.

*Okay, “our tale is concluded.” Yup.

*Well, an interesting experience. Enjoyable enough. Not perfect but who says it needs to be? Good clean fun and something a little different. And you can listen to the whole thing for free in less than forty-five minutes. And support a genuine fan at the same time. It’s a win-win.

*CANONICAL STATUS: This work is fairly explicit in its introduction that the tale about to be told is a myth, used to illustrate the reasons behind the Jedi vow of non-attachment. It is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

** ½ out of **** stars.

Nathan Butler

*Well, that concludes our time spent in the year 5,000 (BBY). Next time, we’ll revisit our Sith on Kesh after about fifteen years has passed. Join me next time for Lost Tribe of the Sith: Paragon.

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Yeah, I'm fairly sure one, the other or both end up dead by the other's/both's hands.

 

Is this still happening? I continue to wait to debate about the Naddist Uprising and Great Sith War

 

It's still happening! And we're getting ever closer; we finally finished the 5,000 BBY section, so we'll be getting there soon. But first!

Lost Tribe of the Sith: Paragon



4,985 BBY

*So, here’s the third book in the Lost Tribe of the Sith Series. As we catch up to our Sith friends on Kesh, it is worth noting that they have been marooned on Kesh for fifteen years now. Naga Sadow’s defeat and retreat to Yavin 4 happened around that long ago now. Our Sith friends, of course, don’t have a clue about how The Great Hyperspace War turned out.

*This one starts with Seelah, Devore’s widow. In the intervening years, she’s taken up with Yaru, though she knows that Yaru is the cause of her widowhood in the first place. The Sith have become completely secure in their status as Skyborn, Gods and Goddesses that walk the earth.

*Seelah spends a little quality time with her assistant Tilden, strutting around naked in front of him. “It was Tilden’s job to worship her. . . Tilden lived to follow her everywhere. She rather enjoyed torturing him like this in the mornings. She was the sacrilege that started his day.”

*Move along, move along, obviously nothing twisted going on here, nothing strange and perverted to see, move along, move along.

*There’s a good line to drop on your girlfriend: “Sweetheart, you are the sacrilege that starts my day.”

*So, the central gist of this story, which is only thirty pages, is the contest between Ravilan, the Red Sith, and Seelah, to control the bloodlines of the Sith. This story is told almost entirely from Seelah’s perspective and it’s a truly gripping look into the mind of a complete . . . well, racist, I guess you could call it.

*So, in the fifteen years since the crash, while the humans have prospered, none of the Red Sith children have survived their infancy. Yaru believes this to be the same problem that killed off all the Massassi. Anyone with half a head will instantly realize that Seelah is carrying out a brutal and particularly wicked form of genetics.

*There’s a great bit where Ravilan doesn’t call Yaru “Grand Lord,” which is his official title. And Yaru broaches it to him, but in a perfect detail, Yaru both brings it up and softens it, by saying that Seelah wants Ravilan to use the title.

*So, this story really develops Seelah, which is great, since she was pretty well just a side character in the first two. One of the ways it does this is to give us some information about her childhood.

*And when I talk about Miller’s wit and eye for detail, well, let me just quote this bit about Seelah’s past:

“At thirteen, Seelah was already a talented healer, drawing both on the Force and the medical knowledge of her forebears. Devotion had already borne fruit.

‘We are advancing in this movement,’ her father had said. ‘You have done well, and it has been rewarded. Glory in the honor, Seelah – it is the greatest that can befall such as us.’

She had been charged with the care of Lord Kressh’s feet.”

*I mean, that is simultaneously hysterically funny and incredibly pained.

*Great lines about romance: “Korsin’s seduction of Seelah had not taken long at all, once she’d convinced him he’d be met with something other than a dagger.”

*Tell. Me. About. It.

*More great prose:

“Korsin was looking at himself – or, rather, at a pretty bad replica. Crafters from Tahv had just delivered a four-meter-tall not-very-likeness of their savior, sculpted from an enormous slab of glass.

‘It’s . . . a first pass,’ Korsin said, sensing her arrival.

‘Clearly.’ Seelah thought it would befoul the killing fields of Ashas Ree.”

*God, I have not read Star Wars this funny since Starfighters of Adumar. Welcome back, humor. You have been missed.

*Sweetheart, you would befoul the killing fields of Ashas Ree.

*More: “And now, Seelah saw, the Keshiri were showing their respect with bug-eyed slabs of glass. They’d better learn to get our faces right before they ‘respect’ me, Seelah thought.”

*So, at the end of chapter two, we get the introduction of a horrific plot twist. A horrendous plague begins sweeping through the Keshiri. Ravilan visits the city of Tetsubal and finds everyone there dead.

*There’s a great flashback to Seelah’s service with Ludo Kressh that sums up the theme of this section of the story. Kressh beats Seelah in a drunken rage and tells her why: “My son looks like me – and so does the future of the Sith. But only as long as we’re here. Out there . . . out there, the future looks like you.”

*This obviously gives Kressh much more motivation for the way he acts in Golden Age of the Sith. He foresees that Sadow’s plans will end, one way or the other, in the dilution of the Sith’s pure blood. It strikes me that this should be made explicit in my fantasy film version of The Great Hyperspace War. It would make Kressh more of a real character instead of just a stock character.

*I said before this story was gripping. I hate to say it again, but there’s no other word for this story, for any story entirely taken up with racial purity. I think we all know why that is.

*So, Ravilan tries to argue that the plague in Tetsubal is a warning from the Dark Side. It’s time for the Sith to give up the charade of the Skyborn and retreat, leaving the Keshiri alone. Seelah argues vociferously against this.

*So, then there’s this great scene that sort of echoes the first couple of chapters of Job where riders just keep showing up with news of the plague hitting another town, just one right after the other.

*This story is less than thirty pages, but you want to go body count, this is about the most epic story in the timeline.

*So, as chapter three ends, Seelah informs Yaru that she’s discovered the cause of the plague; Ravilan has poisoned a water table with a poison that affects only Keshiri. He’s done this to push his political agenda.

*Then chapter four begins with an astonishing image of Seelah walking the walls of the magnificent temple the Sith and Keshiri have built, walking along a row of fifty-seven staked heads. Yaru’s vengeance has been swift; the Red Sith are now extinct. The future, as Ludo Kressh always knew, looks human.

*Our climax is a chilling, horrible scene. Of Seelah and her son, Jariad, now in his teens, confronting a captive Ravilan.

*Ravilan admits to her that he poisoned Tetsubal but not the other towns. Seelah says that she knows; once Ravilan hit Tetsubal, she figured out what he’d done and decided to up the ante.

*There’s a wonderful moment here when the captive, defeated Ravilan has a moment of genuine humor; this is, he says, the first time Seelah has ever liked one of his ideas.

*But this is brutal stuff. Ravilan finally understands that Seelah has been orchestrating the wholesale murder of Red Sith children for the past fifteen years.

*“Younglings – infants! What . . . what kind of mother are you?” “The mother of a people.”

*So, Jeriad executes Ravilan and Seelah tells him he has changed the world. Jariad remarks that it’s Yaru he wants to kill. Seelah cautions patience; patience has worked for her to this point.

*And then a final scene where Adari Vaal and a cadre of Keshiri patriots meet to discuss the resistance against the Sith.

*Adari notes that she was the one who loosed the plague of the Sith on her people. And it will be she who ends it.

*I think this story is really the best of the four that I’ve read from this series. It’s got that magnificent hook of genocide, ethnic cleansing and racial purity. And in Seelah, the great villainess of the series has finally arrived. Her final scene with Ravilan here is beyond chilling.

*If you’re like me, this one closes with you on the edge of your seat for the final chapter. Yaru Korsin is in a bad place; two different women want him dead. Brothers, that is a bad place to be.

*CANONICAL STATUS: The histories of the Sith on Kesh are surprisingly accurate. This text is, of the entire group, probably the most accurate, being, as near as we can tell, totally precise in its truthfulness. This work is RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

**** out of **** stars.

John Jackson Miller

*Next time, we’ll finish up with Lost Tribe of the Sith by looking at the final installment of this quartet: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Savior! You don’t want to miss this. Trust me!

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This one made me want to read Lost Tribe...if I've read TOTJ, will i follow it well enough?

 

Easily.

 

Lost Tribe of the Sith: Savior



4,975 BBY

*So, this is the final book in this particular arc of the Lost Tribe of the Sith series.

*I was initially, I should say, pretty ticked when the announcement first came out that there were going to be more stories in this series, because I thought this was the perfect ending to the story. But, for once, it seems the people in charge got that. The rest of the stories in this series take place way down the timeline, so that makes Savior effectively the end of this particular story.

*Anyway, as this begins, Korsin is leading the Keshiri in a special anniversary celebration. It has been twenty-five years to the day since the Omen crashed back in Precipice. Thus, ten years have passed since Seelah orchestrated the ethnic cleansing we saw last time in Paragon.

*This ceremony also signals the descent of the Sith from their mountain home. From now on, they will live among the Keshiri.

*Korsin’s introductory section ends with a moment of peaceful reflection. “He had saved his people. Today was a good day.” Unbeknownst to him, both of the women flanking him at that moment, Seelah and Adari, are plotting his imminent death.

*We are introduced to Jariad again, now the head of an assault team of Sith lightsaber experts. Also to Nida, the one offspring of Yaru’s marriage to Seelah, who leads a team of Uvak riders.

*Seelah returns us to our theme of time, of time coming to its fullness. “Twenty-five years. She’d saved all her hate. The end was coming.”

*More wit about the ‘honor’ heaped upon the Sith: “Joining her in the garden, he found she was staring at a relief sculpture being carved into a triangular pediment on the building above. ‘What – what is that?’ she asked. Korsin squinted. ‘If I’m not mistaken, that’s a depiction of my own birth.’ He took a drink. ‘I’m not sure how the sun and the stars are involved.’”

*So, Seelah lures Yaru and a small group of his retinue up to the now deserted temple on the mountaintop. Jariad and his team are waiting there. And it seems that Seelah’s vengeance will be complete.

*It is testament to Miller’s wonderful characterization that at this point in the story, I found myself absolutely involved in Yaru, just really invested in his survival.

*Meanwhile, the Keshiri put Adari’s plan into motion. The plan is to steal all the Uvak and fly them out over the sea; basically, Adari plans to lead the riderless Uvak over the sea until they all tire and die. Adari will die as well, of course, but without the Uvak, the Sith will have no transportation, will be separated and isolated and easily dealt with by the far numerically superior Keshiri.

*I admit, I found this quite moving. This plan will both free the Keshiri and also cripple them. It is a ridding of themselves of the Sith by ridding them both of their greatest treasure, the Uvak.

*So, both plans hit at once. Yaru’s group is stranded at the temple with Jariad and Seelah and their assassins as their Uvak fly away.

*These final two chapters here are quite brilliant, a tense and suspenseful unspooling of this situation. Great action sequences on the mountain.

*But the titular character arrives, just when time seems to have run out for Yaru: Nida, the daughter that Seelah shunned and ignored, slowly formed into Yaru’s trump.

*Nida has managed to ferret out Adari’s plans, by seducing Adari’s son, and she has stopped the plot in Tahv, leaving the Sith with a lot of Uvak after all. And she arrives at the mountaintop, just in time to foil Seelah’s plan. She kills Jariad; Yaru dies, but he dies knowing that his daughter has been victorious; The Sith will survive and they will be his Sith.

*They never mention Nida’s middle and last names, Ex and Machina.

*So, Adari leads her people out over the sea anyway. Since the Uvak from Tahv didn’t come, Adari knows her plan has failed. But they have nothing to go back to now. As their story ends, they come on a small rocky island in the middle of the sea. This place will be their life now.

*And then the final scene, which is the perfect kiss off: Seelah has been crippled, paralyzed from the waist down. And, Nida informs her, she will be left in the temple, all alone. Food will be flown in and dropped in the courtyard, but no one will ever come to find her there.

*The rest of Seelah’s life . . . she will crawl.

*I mean, this is brilliant. I mean, Seelah’s been such a great villainess starting particularly with Paragon. I mean, her character was so finely drawn and so despicable . . . this feels absolutely correct. It is the perfect ending.

*Well, this series, as I understand it, is sort of backstory for some details in the Fate of the Jedi series, which I haven’t been reading or even following really.

*And it is a sort of timeline clutter type story, a sort of not particularly necessary addition to the timeline.

*But, even if I generally don’t like these kinds of additions and even if I haven’t been reading Fate of the Jedi . . . I still really, really enjoyed this series.

*I’ve been telling you from day one of this series that Miller is really great at characterization. I mean, what we have here is essentially a really good 120 page novella. But despite the fact that this story is dribbled out in thirty pages drops and that none of the characters are at all familiar, Miller succeeds in creating several incredibly real and engaging characters: Yaru, Devore, Seelah, Adari, Ravilan.

*It’s that, really, that makes the series work. Miller has added some wonderful, real characters to the pantheon.

*Anyway, after I talked a while back about weaving Precipice and Skyborn into the movie version of The Fall of the Sith Empire, I should probably address these last two. I’d like to see Paragon and Savior turned into, essentially, hour long short films.

*CANONICAL STATUS: The historical records of the Sith on Kesh are of superlative accuracy. This text should be seen as an exact accounting of the events it details. This work is RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

*** ½ out of **** stars.

John Jackson Miller

*Well, gee whiz, it’s been ten posts again already, which means it’s time for us to return to the 111 Star Wars Stories You Can’t Live Without! Namely, we’ll hit up Tales of the Jedi: The Fall of the Sith Empire; already done the long form review, so it’ll just be the short paragraph review next time.

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111 Star Wars Stories You Can’t Live Without

2. Tales of the Jedi: The Fall of the Sith Empire (1998) – Kevin J. Anderson



Naga Sadow’s Rube Goldberg plan is about to go into effect in the sequel to The Golden Age of the Sith. Ludo Kressh lives up to his name by being the most ridiculous villain in the history of comic books (yes, worse than you, Calendar Man; this is a day you will long remember! Well, wait . . .). Naga Sadow blows up everything he can get his hands on, including a star and Ludo Kressh three times. Gav and Jori Daragon lose all semblance of acting like rational human beings. And, oh, yes, a floating brain in a big jar dies; is this a leitmotif? Because, seriously, the death of the brain would be a good leitmotif for these books. Wait, how did Gav fall to the Dark Side again? Accidentally, was it?

On the plus side, the art is still incredible. The battle for Coruscant is incredibly vibrant and all the minor non-human characters have great character just in the way they’re drawn.

MOMENT YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: A legitimately awesome one this time, instead of an awful one. Aarba the Hutt’s death is so awesome as to make me actually want to consider Planet of Twilight’s absurd assertion about Hutt Jedi. Bring it! “AAARUHHH . . . CRUSH YOU . . .” Hell, yeah!

Next time, back to the main project as we take another large leap in time, jumping a bit over 900 years closer to the Battle of Yavin. Join me next time for A Tale from the Dark Side as we gear up for a new era!

Star Wars Reviews!

 

I love Naga's face in that mural-style cover. Looks like a Minoan gremlin or something.

 

Aarba is one of the best damned Hutt characters simply for not being totally evil. And that's pathetic.

 

What a lovely surprise Lost Tribe of the Sith turned out to be. It's a story set in an era I don't particularly like, serving as a prequel to a series I have no interest in, featuring characters and locations I have no reason to be interested in, but in a short space JJM manages to draw me into this really compelling story. I only read it because it was free, so why not, and was completely taken aback by how much I enjoyed it. As you said, it's kind of timeline clutter and not really needed, but that's kind of what's so great about it and the EU. At it's best the EU is able to use the setting of the Star Wars universe to tell new interesting stories. One of the main reasons I had zero interest in FOTJ is because the era it takes place in is completely devoid of stories like this. After the NJO there was a desperate lack of smaller stories like this that populated the galaxy with new characters to care about.

 

A Tale from the Dark Side



4,000 BBY

*Okeedokee, this is an interesting story in some ways and I’ll talk about them in a second.

*But first, let me point out that this story moves us into our next real era of stories; at this point we’re going to be staying right around this period of the timeline for a while, much as we did a thousand years ago when we hit 5,000 BBY. But we’ve also taken a time jump of nearly 1,000 years. 975 years, to be exact.

*So, let’s check in on what those thousand years or so have wrought on our planet. Last time we checked, the melting polar ice caps of the last great ice age our planet experienced had caused a rise in sea water that resulted in the real historical event that many historians believe inspired the flood narratives of ancient culture.

*So, 2,000 BCE. I feel like we’re finally kind of getting within spitting distance of modern times. As you get back into the millions of years, or even the hundreds of thousands, really, I feel like I don’t have the ability to really comprehend what we’re talking about or put it in any kind of context. But 4,000 years ago? I feel like I can kinda get that in context. Mainly, I guess, this is because of my familiarity with the Bible. It’s very easy for me to, for instance, put the 5,000 years ago figure in context of the story of Noah.

*So, last time, we talked about how agriculture and domestication of animals was already in full swing. By this time, the idea of large cities isn’t a strange one. Human settlements are getting bigger and bigger; houses have gotten more complex and sturdy. The use of irrigation canals has enabled agricultural activities to expand which has in turn allowed settlements to grow in size. It’s also enabled settlements to become more permanent and less nomadic.

*Written language has developed. We have several clay tablets from this period doing everything from telling stories to lodging complaints about unethical business practices. Governments have been established; images from the period show people bringing legal cases before kings. The Epic of Gilgamesh, considered by most scholars to be the oldest written story, dates from around this period.

*As a writer, this is an incredibly important period for me. That transition from oral to written documents changes storytelling forever, allowing for greater complexity and length. Literature as we know it . . .well, it hasn’t begun or even come close, but the first domino in the long, long path to things like . . . well, like this story we’re talking about today, has just fallen.

*Okay, on to the story. Or well, some prelude about the story.

*So, this story first appeared in a book we’ll be looking at more here shortly. It’s called Tales of the Jedi Companion and was an RPG source book. We’ll be looking at it shortly because it did have some stories in it. This short story appeared in Chapter Five of the book and took up just a couple of pages.

*A little later, it got reprinted on Hyperspace as its own standalone story. It is, to my knowledge, the only story material from this book that ever got reprinted anywhere.

*Anyway, as you may have guessed from my desperate stalling, there isn’t really much of anything to the story.

*So, there’s this Jedi, Vara Nreem, who rouses the Sith spirits in an ancient Sith temple in order to learn from them. She gets more than she bargained for however and gets sucked into ‘torment for eternity.’

*Only it takes three pages in the book.

*It’s about good enough for Hyperspace, if you get my drift.

*Well, I just sincerely don’t know why this even exists.

*CANONICAL STATUS: This story is certainly a fable used to teach Jedi students to shun the ways of the Sith. No other evidence points to the existence of the Jedi, Vara Nreem, or to the Sith temple she visits in the story. This work is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

0 out of **** stars.

George R. Strayton

*Okay, this unnecessary little prelude out of the way, we’ll jump into the lives of this era’s main characters next time as we take a look at Tales of the Jedi: Ulic Qel-Droma & the Beast Wars of Onderon!

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This story always just seemed like a sort of "beware the dark side" thing, foreshadowing the mistakes of Ulic Qel-Droma and Exar Kun. Which was sort of like foreshadowing Vader with Grievous. Redundant, unnecessary, silly.

 

Tales of the Jedi: Ulic Qel-Droma & the Beast Wars of Onderon



4,000 BBY

*The characters we’ll be following for a while now: Cay and Ulic Qel-Droma, brothers and Jedi. Jedi Master Arca. Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta.

*They are dispatched to settle the *trumpet fanfare* Beast Wars of Onderon. It’s stupid, so I’m not going into it. If you’ve read anything about two feuding cultures, you’ve got the basics.

*Blah blah, daughter of the “civilized” culture kidnapped by raiders from the “primitive” culture. Admittedly, the action sequence wherein the Beast Riders attack is excellently done. Feels very fluid.

*If you guessed that the kidnapping was a fake, arranged so that the daughter could marry the man she truly loved, a member of the “primitive” culture, give yourself a gold star. It’s like Romeo and Juliet. If it had been written by an idiot.

*The planet has been secretly under the sway of a Dark Jedi named Freedon Nadd (most unlikely name since Pussy Galore) and his followers, which includes the planet’s queen, for millennia. Of course, the more rustic culture is aware of this and has been rebelling against the city dwellers for just this reason.

*This is a basic literary trope wherein the rustics are more enlightened than the more modern individuals. Basically, in light of Star Wars, the entire Jedi phenomenon can be read in this light. They adhere to ancient customs, use old weapons and are in touch with something modern science cannot touch.

*Okay, the queen is overthrown in perhaps the most anti-climactic showdown ever. Yes, even more anticlimactic than The Dark Knight Rises. Though at least when Queen Amanoa is revealed to be the surprise villain, she doesn’t monologue for ten minutes about it in the middle of the lightsaber battle.

*Well, yeah, this era is going to be rough, you guys.

*CANONICAL STATUS: This attempt to give a backstory to some of the significant participants in the Sith War is a complete misfire; it is considered by most scholars to be completely fabricated. This work is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

0 out of **** stars.

Tom Veitch

*Next time . . . oh, boy . . . it’s the audio adaptation of this story! Tune in next time to see if audio drama Tales of the Jedi can improve this dreadful story at all.

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Orman Tagge though I think it was maybe a bit further on into the Sith War that you were really interested in. Still, we're getting there.

 

I find stories silly where characters have no agency, re: A Tale from the Dark Side.

I love Freedon Nadd. I had a sock at the SWTOR forum named "FreedonsNadds."

I enjoyed the Tales of the Jedi audio dramas. It's a shame they never concluded the story.

 

BZZT! Sorry, the correct answer was "Clock King".

 

Glad to see you're thinking of me! My interest really begins with the Freedon Nadd uprising...so soon, but I still have things to say here.

First, some housekeeping: was KJA involved in TOTJ yet?

I like the idea of the plot twist of the rustics being enlightened being analogous to the Jedi. It seems like the kind of thing you would only see in early EU stuff.

I'll agree with DigitalMessiah that Freedon Nadd is pretty darn cool. Not even that stupid of a name, in my opinion, but he gets much more insidious later on, so there isn't much to say about him yet. Have a cool picture of him:

Spoiler

Also agree that the whole origins of the Beast Wars are dumb.

Any thoughts on the general art style/"feel" of TOTJ?

 

There's some decent art. I think my problems are mostly with the writing in Beast Wars and some of the other ToTJ stuff. Everything is just a bit too overwrought, or possibly waaaayyyy too overwrought, in the dialogue and one of my least favorite things in these early EU comics is the narration, which is typically unnecessary and way too expositional and usually really, really cheesy. It isn't really the same as the art in the story, but, for example, I absolutely love the cover I posted above.

 

How can you speak that way of dialogue of this magnitude: "ULIC! THEY CUT OFF MY AARRRMM!!"