Lit A Cynical Walk Through the NJO

Since Ganner's last stand is basically the prototype to The Force Unleashed (which I think is a topic worth exploring), I'd been trying to think if any of the music from either TFU game would have fit the Battle of the World-Well, but I'm not really sure there is anything that fits except perhaps Redemption.

I always felt the track conveyed a sense of resolve achieved through self-realization.

OTOH, something which struck me about Ganner is that he's sort of the Jedi successor to Han Solo in the sense of the swagger that he carries, or perhaps more overtly displayed in Dash, with a similar humbling. He's really talented and he knows it, but it masks a fragile ego that can't handle failure. So the Mandalorian Blockade, especially the beginning with the smuggler's theme Bravado and the end with the triumphant orchestra match the scene pretty well.

 

That works...although I had something a little more grandiose playing in my head during Ganner's last stand (it might've been Battle of the Heroes from ROTS, or Duel of the Fates, I can't remember at this point). On the other hand...

The last track that played on there with the orchestra? Perfect. That is beyond perfect for the scene. I think next time I read it I'll do it with this in mind.

 

So originally Stackpole was slated to write a trilogy to follow Vector Prime, with a third entry titled Dark Tide: Siege. Some story elements were folded into Ruin, but others were dropped. One such subplot was that Jacen would have been apprenticed to Corran Horn.

I wish that happened and we learned that Corran Horn was a Sith Lord.

 

Dark Tide: Siege and the Knightfall Trilogy-Release IT!

 

Interesting. Would not make sense though. Corran and Jacen

 

Heck yes!

 

I'd like to see Jedi Storm which was completed before being cancelled, and the outlines for Jedi Fire and Jedi Blood. Siege likely only exists in outline form as well.

I wish they'd just release the series bible. If Rinzler did a The Making of the New Jedi Order book which documented the progression of the series from incept to the publication of The Unifying Force that would be really cool, charting what was planned and when it was planned and how it was changed and why it was changed. We've gotten bits and pieces over the years in books like The Essential Reader's Companion and interviews with the various authors, mostly Luceno and Stackpole. It would be pretty swell to see all this information coalesced into a single source.

The changes to the initial plan started early on since apparently the original order for the first half of the series was intended to be:
Vector Prime > Onslaught > Siege > Ruin > Agents of Chaos > Balance Point > Jedi Storm > Jedi Fire > Jedi Blood > Star by Star

That's quite a substantial difference from what was published. What I also find interesting is that Luceno was originally hired in the role for the NJO series that I've always felt he should have held for the Expanded Universe as a whole, as a consultant and continuity advisor. Someone that overlooks the big picture and guides the disparate storytelling toward a more cohesive whole.

 

I'm curious if any of you have read Katana_Geldar 's essay, "Jacen and the Two Vergeres." I can't find the original link on TFN, but I was able to find a copy on the The Wook . I think a crucial point is made in that the misinterpretation of Vergere begins immediately after Traitor, in Destiny's Way.

She also echoes the same comments DigitalMessiah has made on Luceno writing Luke in TUF as essentially quoting Vergere's own philosophy back at Jacen to rebut his view on the Force. Which of course, just adds more misunderstanding to what Jacen and Vergere were all about. We give Denning a lot of crap for how he screwed up Vergere and Jacen (and to a certain extent, he deserves far more for his central role in ruining these two characters) but not properly grasping Vergere's teachings is about as much a tradition among EU authors as space battles and lightsaber duels are.

 

I've read it. To some extent, WJW and Luceno mixed things up with Vergere, I quoted WJW a few pages back in which he misrepresents the plot to Traitor and the character of Vergere just talking about her. My disagreement with the essay is that it fixates on Vergere as though she's bestowing a moral lesson on Jacen, but she's not. His ethics are his own affair, as she says. And I say this as someone who, partly due to the essay, spent the longest time caught up in this nebulous idea of what Traitor is trying to say ethically. So I think for someone who is exploring the novel and trying to find meaning in it, that's actually potentially distracting from the deeper meaning.

Traitor doesn't tell us "what you do matters, not the motive behind it." Vergere simply uses the Socratic method to question Jacen on his belief that his motive was impure on the seed ship, and that regardless of the consequences his impure motives tainted his action. But I think to draw a larger conclusion from that is unnecessarily reductive -- the reality is, on the seedship there was no other action that could have been taken to result in a more optimal outcome. Jacen Solo chose and acted, and out of that he saved more lives than he would have if he did nothing. That's the overall point, tailored to the specific scenario. In fact, Denning used that overly reductive idea of consequentialism or "action is more important than intent" for Caedus, or more specifically "outcome is most important."

To say more I suppose we'd have to get into deeper specifics with regard to how WJW and Luceno (and Denning) misrepresented Vergere. I mean, we could discuss ethics, but I really believe that to fixate on that aspect of Traitor (if you could say there is a moral lesson in it) is following the footsteps of the authors that subsequently misrepresented it.

 

Great post DM. I always enjoy reading your thoughts on the NJO, Jacen and Vergere. As with you, Traitor is my favorite book in the EU. It might be my favorite of all time. It's an incredibly deep, enriching experience, and it changed my life as a teenager.

The book is a towering example of how to do Star Wars right. And yet- since it was such a deep and (if you think about it) projective book- I wonder if it sowed the seeds of the EU's nadir. I mean, think about it- many of us fans still debate exactly what Vergere meant- both by her words and actions, and what she meant to Jacen. We've essentially come to the conclusion that no author has been able to adequately capture what Traitor is trying to say, or what Vergere's philosophy is or what Jacen's view on the Force is. Or to quote the book:

It is this book that directly led to Denning's reductive vision of Jacen's potential and future; to the horrors of DNT, LOTF and FOTJ; to many people's complete disillusionment with the EU and, for me, SW in general. I think there is something ironic (maybe sad is the better term) in the fact that the best book in the EU also inadvertently led to its downfall.

 

The book is deliberately ambiguous. It's about Jacen, in the face of ambiguity, having to choose and act. Ostensibly, there's no answer key in the back of the book (although technically there is).

This absence of a straightforward message allowed it to be twisted. But I think the post-NJO would have been garbage even if it didn't make an effort to distort Traitor.

 

Fate of the Jedi was still garbage despite not really messing with anything except LOTF.

 

Well yeah, but if post-NJO hadn't messed with Traitor then it might've gone a whole different direction. A good direction.

 

Most post-NJO stuff was.

 

If a prerequisite of not distorting Traitor is that Denning isn't involved, then perhaps.

But Denning is apparently incompatible with the status quo at the end of The Unifying Force. I'm operating off the assumption that his proposal "Jacen becomes a Sith lord" for the next story arc gets rejected but he's still the one writing the follow-up proposal.

 

Fair enough. But assuming Denning wasn't the one writing the follow-up proposal. Then it wouldn't be totally awful, right? Hypothetically.

 

I think the entire organizational mindset at Del Rey following the New Jedi Order was primed for failure. They wanted to repeat the NJO without the effort. The three author trilogy of trilogies model was awful.

 

We can really only see it that way in hindsight. At the time, it seemed to many (including myself and many others on these boards) that Del Rey was directly addressing some of the criticisms of the NJO: many people complained about the length of the NJO (almost 20 books!) and how the varying authors gave, well, varying portrayals of the characters. LOTF, then, cut down both the size of the series and the size of the author pool. As a means of checking and balancing one another from getting too crazy, the authors are placed on a rotating model. There is no reason that this should have necessarily failed- at least not more than the NJO with its dozen or so authors and 18 books.

The problems arise in the overarching plot set up by Denning in DNT and also in that they didn't really vet their authors' compatibility. You have one guy who tends to put a more positive, lighthearted spin on his books, and another who likes to write dark, gory novels. One is a strong Mando partisan, with an equally strong disdain for the Jedi. Another is the exact opposite. And their books are supposed to mesh? TPTB were looking to find a group so quickly- too quickly- that they didn't stop to see if their authors' styles, views and characterizations were congruous. In fact, they even alluded to this being a problem when they released that video of Aaron and Troy having that lightsaber fight over whether LOTF should have a happy or dark ending.

Imagine if the post NJO series was set up with a different plot and, say, Tim Zahn, Mike Stackpole and Jim Luceno. We know the first two work very well together, and Luceno can clean up anyone's mess. Might we be singing a different tune?

 

If Luceno was involved it might work because I can see him actually putting in the effort to get everything to gel between the authors. But I think having authors like Stackpole, Stover, and Zahn involved in such a project is unrealistic for different reasons for each author. Stackpole is done with Star Wars unless Del Rey loses the license or someone else is in charge at Del Rey. Stover probably can't do three books in three years. Zahn seems content to do his own thing. Even Luceno seems content to do his own thing than involve himself in a large scale project again.

I think part of the problem with the model is that it's really restrictive. There just don't seem to be that many authors that are willing to do it and Stover, Luceno, and Zahn probably could have been involved if they wanted to be, but they chose to do other stories in other eras without the restrictive model.

But I mean yeah I think if everything goes right it could definitely work, but there's a lot that could and did go wrong, and the problems really started to manifest as soon as the NJO concluded.

Everyone involved in the NJO seemed really exhausted when it was completed and it was sort of art through adversity, and it was such a tough ride that people like Luceno simply didn't want to deal with the hassle. It was lightning in a bottle. And those that stuck around and tried again tried to do it with less effort.

I think it was a fluke. That's not to say we couldn't see similar projects but they likely wouldn't be five year or even three year events. There seemed to be a whole lot of coordination involved with the NJO, and despite it there were still a lot of problems behind the scenes (and manifest in the story), and reducing the size of the endeavor doesn't seem to have corresponded with less effort, because we saw what happened with less effort. And I think the amount of effort that was put into the NJO was really zealous because Del Rey had just acquired the license and was really trying to establish itself and establish a good first impression.

 

LFL is never going to let something like NJO happen again, unless the movies and TV shows stop being made. They won't let a epic involving the Big Three (or the Ep7 equivalent) happen, and Del Rey won't publish an epic only involving characters they made.

 

Only thing we can hope for is something like it made during the Old Republic years.

 

I could see them doing some sort of multimedia project like Shadows of the Empire that has a large book component. But I mostly would see this happening if they branch back out in the timeline, something like KOTOR or Legacy in terms of time period.

Something that's come up a lot in the past decade of discussions I've had about the EU elsewhere was this desire to see them attempt to establish a new era strictly through novels. Basically like what SW Legacy was, but further out. I thought that's what Legacy of the Force was supposed to be back when they set it in the Sith era before they decided to take the quick and easy path and ensure a certain level of profits through the inclusion of Luke Skywalker.

I remember that even back in 2003 or even before the NJO concluded, it seemed to me like a no brainer that there wasn't really a lot of potential for huge storylines after the NJO was over because you risked oversaturation and that it just seemed to make sense to do something like SW Legacy.

 

A revised KOTOR mixed with NJO is best bet. I highly doubt that they would allow books and comics to go beyond the movies ala Legacy. Would be awesome but doubt it.