Lit A Cynical Walk Through the NJO

Wow. You are are stopping at Dark Tide? Wow. Agents of Chaos, Edge of Victory, Star By Star, Enemy Lines, Traitor, The Unifying Force await.

 

i thought the Vong were brilliant villians.

Mara used the force to heal her body and user her body to push it back. Now what Luke did later on is suprising, but one way or another all life is the force. How about when Anakin used a lambent crystal to make a lightsaber? I think you calling it trash is ridiculous. It is the finest fiction Star Wars has to offer, period.

Considering the political landscape and the condition of the New Republic at the beginning of the YV-invasion (alluded to in sources like the HoT, CTD and NJO-sourcebook) I don't see how Borks could have done any better once he realised the size of the threat (which should have been at the time of DarkTide).​

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Borsk was egregious in the fact that he told Leia she was making all it up. That it was a power ploy. Borsk could have dealt with this sooner had he taken it seriously earlier.​

 

whoa what decade am i in

 

Star Wars is so dumb because it has fake stuff in it that's dumb.

 

I liked the NJO better when it was about Anakin defeating the Sith.

 

Yeah why does Star Wars introduce conflict into the stories by making the villains competent and/or mitigating the advantages the heroes might have? I hate how they don't just roll over the Yuuzhan Dorks.

The story should have been able Anakin singlehandedly slaughtering every dork on Yavin 4 in Conquest and then the Dorks grow a DEATH STAR ANALOG and Anakin flies Luke's renovated X-Wing with Artoo and shoots a proton torpedo up its sphinchter which triggers a chain reaction better left unsaid that blows it up.

And then Luke and Anakin face down Shimrra and the slayers by themselves and just kick their asses like its nothing.

 

I see the fandu.. I mean some people managed to misinterpret my problem. What a surprise.
No, my problem is not that it's not another Jedi vs Sith story. I generally hate those as well (especially the utter BC Legacy comcis). It's not that the Vongs are "effective" villains either. My problem is that they DON'T ******* BELONG INTO THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE! They have nothing to do there! They have literally came from outside the setting, they totally ingore the rules of the setting and their "culture" if you can call BDSM-fetishism "culture" has no place in the setting! They might as well be a Predators crossover! They have nothing to do with Star Wars!

 

See, you thought I treated you all so very badly.....

I'm trying to encourage McEwok to post a few paras from a little offline exchange we've had because I think it'd take the thread into some interesting discussion territory.

 

Yeah I hate it when they break the rules of the setting that were laid out in those West End Games books. I hear you brother.

 

Because every time there is trouble in the Outer Rim (and keep in mind, that the first assault by the YV was soundly defeated) the Chief of State should request emergency-powers and mobilize the entire NR to deal with the problem. Until the end of DarkTide Borsk had no reason to expect the problem to be bigger than the Yevetha/Sii-Ruuk or a last desperate offensive by the Imperial Remnant.

 

Is not the lose of contact with, what was it, four planets(?) enough for at least go to a higher alert and send out scout ships that can report that yes there is something out there?

 

Thing is, you could argue that 4 planets going dark out of trillions is insignificant, but if you go that way the Vong invasion is practically insignificant relative to likely galactic population - this is the sort of thing Mechalich is far better at than I.

NJO certainly could have gone in that direction but it would have detracted from the character focus it also wanted.

Re: Vong not belonging in SW

It's not a new line, about 15 years old actually, hmm.. my registration date... that's gotta be a coincidence. Nor is it all that far fetched either, people saw the Vong as meshing together cenobites, Predators and aliens, basically far nastier creations from adult stories which were being inserted into a what was then deemed an all-ages franchise. It's akin to Pixar doing Toy Story 4, with a rampaging army of masked chainsaw Leatherfaces, with characters suddenly bleeding all over the place. You could say it's a fresh new gritty beginning or you could say it's an unfounded break with what made the series great. Points of view will differ greatly on this.

 

Where do Darth Maul and Darth Sidious fit in on that scale?

Or barbecue Vader and beheaded Dooku? Or the Lars's skeletons?

Iunno Toy Story isn't what I think about.

 

I don't know that I'd go that far. I'd say it's more like if, in The Avengers, the Chitauri had been throwing around spores instead of grenades and fighting with venom-spitting sticks instead of laser-shooting sticks, with maybe Iron Man actually dying at the end. It's really not that much darker than the OT in the long run. The darkest thing about it is that Chewie and Anakin die. But Obi-Wan died in the OT, and Han ended ESB frozen in carbonite. Despite this, both ANH and ESB ended on notes of hope, and I think the NJO typically did a good job of showing that there was hope, even in the midst of all the bad that's going on. Sort of like Lord of the Rings.

 

The Empire Strikes Back is a dark film.

You hear Han's dramatic screams as he's tortured off screen, and hell you see Luke tortured on screen in Jedi.

 

and at least four non-U.S.A. cities being destroyed...

 

Okay, fair enough.

 

You're overlooking some things there though:

SW' violence tends to be fleeting and mostly suggestive, we're talking seconds of film - Vader being deep-fried was, for me, gratuitous overkill, it wasn't needed. Compare that to creating an image from detailed description about a gory wound from prose and there's a much greater focus on the blood and gore due to the medium difference. In a film you could do that very quickly, prose works differently.

Add to that that people's expectations of SW in 1999 remained that of the swashbuckling OT and you can see why some people found it disruptively jarring. What was a minor aspect of SW in their perception was suddenly centre stage and in the face.

Put it this way, a 100% faithful adaptation of say Dark Tide or Star by Star or Traitor would render ROTS' gore as nothing and likely receive a 15 or 18 certificate. Now I have stories that render NJO as nothing but they have that flexibility because they don't have SW on the title. Pushing the envelope in that respect is always a very risky business because everyone has a different definition of what they consider SW to be and not to be. You only have to scan Amazon reviews to see that at work.

And what's scarier in both of those instances? Seeing it full on or letting your own mental imagery terrify you far more effectively? Even Sid's frying of Luke is quite restrained in terms of what you see of Luke - NJO on full gore (Denning/Stover) setting would place you in Luke's head as he feels every nerve fried. (Stover might just about pull it off though.) In this respect: Less is more.

 

I see your point. But even the SW movie novelizations were more violent by far than the movies themselves (see one of Han's shots smearing stormtrooper brain matter on the hangar wall on Tatooine, for example). I think in general novels are far gorier than the movies they represent, so I was never too jarred by it (though I can understand why some would be). To me, Traitor was not too bad about violence in comparison–the DT duology had Vong being decapitated halfway up their face, and SBS had that Jedi girl getting her head sheared in half by a razor bug and the Barabel Jedi and Numa Rar getting covered in throat acid and their faces melting. In a movie adaption, the girl would probably have been slashed across the throat by the razor bug instead, and the acid would've just disfigured their faces slightly. And any Vong decapitations would've been complete decapitations, rather than half-the-face.

 

For a kid, Luke getting tortured is intense and scary.

Edit: yeah the X-Wing books are just as "bad" as the NJO in terms of graphic violence and gore.

 

Yes, it is, but you could make that scene far, far nastier but they decided against it. Again, less = more.

Also, floating around this whole discussion, is the notion that NJO's (or any other explicitly violent story) violence seems less to you because you've been de-sensitised to violence by repeated exposure to it in films, books and video games.

I mean AND has some real vicious scenes, but its style is quite restrained, it tells you just enough for you to scare yourself witless and then stops.

 

You can make any scene far nastier, but they didn't. They could have made it less nasty too, but they didn't. So what?

I already smell a fallacy with the whole Vader barbecue thing, but frankly idgaf and this is a waste of my time.

 

But I'm quite certain the NJO version would be so, it's got to be grim 'n' gritty, remember?

 

So was the ROTJ novel. So what?


You can't have your POV character scream off screen in a novel.