Lit After the NJO ended, where did you expect the EU to go?

Thus proving the point that the whole thing became rather messy and seemed to be changing and made up as it went along, with books cancelled and villains discovering new motivations. I don't doubt the YV were changed and made redeemable after the reader reaction to the earlier books.

But I'm not going to wait around 7 books, much less 13 books, in the hopes that it "makes sense." Like I said, I bailed after Balance Point, and I consider Del Rey extremely lucky to have gotten any money out of me past Vector Prime.

However, as is per my usual, I seemed to have derailed the thread. Back to: "What did you expect to see in the EU after the NJO ended?"

 

I just don't see it as the Yuuzhan Vong were originally intended to be irredeemable monsters -- I think that the reader's first impression of them was intended to suggest it, but that the whole point of Jacen's hero's journey is to gradually reach the point where he transcends opposites and these seemingly irreconcilable cultures find a peaceful resolution.

It's the same scenario with Jacen's character arc in general -- most people found him unlikable, but as he develops through the course of the series he becomes more likable. The feat of resolving the Yuuzhan Vong War without genocide is supposed to seem impossible at first to make it all the more impressive when it happens.

 

Am I the only that expected to see someone from Domain Kwaad or Domain Rapuung work with Tahiri in the post NJO?

 

I expected some Yuuzhan Vong to become ancillaries of the new Jedi order, with a potential storyline being a resolution to the Bothan declaration of ar'krai against the Yuuzhan Vong.

 

That would be nice to see wrapped up. Wonder if they would have done something like that in Legacy if they had more time?

 

That's AWESOME. What a cool story that would be.

Too bad it is nowhere on the page in the first six books.

You have the hindsight of having read the whole series, and that's great. Plus, again, compared to FotJ and LotF, the NJO is a masterpiece of storytelling. By comparison.

But, and I am not an unsophisticated reader and I'm pretty damn good at picking up themes and subtext if I say so myself, that just simply wasn't there in the first six books. The Vong were a cartoon evil villain out to inflict video game violence on the heroes. They lacked nuance and subtlety.

There is a way to introduce Big Bads so that they aren't cartoons. Monologuing, twirling black capes, delighting in a pain fetish, and fingering figurative mustaches while discussing how you infect people with incurable diseases is not it. (By the way, if the coomb spores kill everyone who breathes them except for Mara, and they've almost killed her as well, and the whole purpose of the Nom Anor/Leia/Jaina/Mara scene - other than to show that Leia is a highly ineffectual negotiator and diplomat - is to establish that the lizard can still detect coomb spores on Mara's breath: then why hasn't Mara infected everyone she ever breathed or sneezed on?! Why isn't Luke dealing with the disease?! Oh, plot logic, if I could only turn you off in my head, what a happier place my brain would be.)

I don't doubt the YV were changed as fan opinion came in (and sales dropped off).

Nor did Del Rey correctly set up Jacen to be the hero, IMO. That also came much later. I don't recall Jacen making much of an impression on me. On the other hand, none of the characters made much of an impression on me, other than to note how badly OOC most of the OT and Bantam era cast were portrayed. All I remember from the message boards at that time was how annoying most people found Jacen to be. Of course, this is pre-SBS, so at the time readers seemed to be imprinted on Anakin. Oh well.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion...

 

I would think that if they were altering the story due to reader feedback, then Jacen would not have concluded the series as the protagonist.

 

They had to. They killed Anakin.

ETA: By which I mean Anakin was conceived as the hero of the NJO, then the directive supposedly came down to kill off Anakin for having the wrong name (again, name change people, not that hard), and they had to switch horses and put in Jacen instead.

And apparently no one ever considered making Jaina the hero. At least, I've never ever seen that idea referenced at all.

 

They killed Anakin two years into the series, more than enough time for Jacen's unpopularity to be established. They could have made the switch before then but they didn't, because I think fans overestimate how much the series was changed beyond events occurring in different books due to books being cancelled/replaced. I don't think fan input influenced the overall plot of the series at all.

 

Oh, I do. In fact, I know certain key plot elements were put into place based on conversations authors had or saw here on TF.N.

But the big plot point were set in the bible written by Luceno and others before the series began. That included killing off Anakin - who originally was supposed to be Jacen. But they made the decision to build up Anakin to be the hero from the start anyway solely to kill him off (as I see it, it was purely a chance for another Take That! to fans who whined about bubbles). And to make Anakin heroic, they put him in opposition to Jacen - and Jacen suffered by comparison.

Kathy Tyers tries to make Jacen likable in Balance Point, but it's a bit of too little, too late.

 

The death of Jacen, the Warrior, was instrumental to the plot because as the young leader of the Jedi, the Ur-Sith viewed him as the subject of a prophecy that would result in their defeat and targeted him -- but the prophecy actually applied to Anakin, the Philosopher. When Lucas didn't like the idea of a prophesied Anakin as the hero of the NJO, Anakin and Jacen had their characterizations swapped and the prophecy was scrapped, but the character death remained -- presumably because the general skeleton of the series was already written and there was nothing for Anakin to do after that point in the series.

As for changes, sure, there were small changes like Ben, but Ben is utterly irrelevant to the series plot except that his birth cures Mara's illness, which would likely have been resolved in a different way, like by Vergere in Destiny's Way, had Kathy Tyers not desired to give Luke and Mara a child. The overall plot was locked into place before Vector Prime was written.

 

Agreed. As I said in my post about the NJO bible

But how the plot played out in each book, and the "likability" of characters, for lack of a better word, was up to each individual author. For example, the Vong biotech was solely Salvatore's idea, as was giving Mara a disease. Not that either have much of a bearing on the overall plot, but they are examples of latitude given to individual authors. I know allowing the heroes to have at least some victories ahead of time was argued for, because readers were drifting away from the unrelenting crapsack universe. And I'm sure that played into making the Vong less cartoony and video game-ish.

I'd like to think there was as much attention to philosophy and thematic resonance as you suggest, and maybe there was in Luceno's original outline or Stradley's original vision, but it just ain't on the pages in many of the books. Heck, even Dark Horse didn't seem to like the NJO much at the time, and an invasion storyline was their idea.

 

Dark Horse didn't like it because Del Rey more or less took their idea and changed it without really letting Dark Horse in on it.

Given the disparity between the original Del Rey storyline of NJO in which Anakin romances a Sith and Jacen and Jaina turn to the dark side and Jacen is killed by Anakin, I highly doubt the DH invasion storyline had much to do with that, or what ultimately became the NJO.

The philosophical and thematic ideas are presented as early as chapter 3 of Vector Prime because they're intimately tied into Jacen's arc and hero's journey. There's a reason why Jacen is the Philosopher and Anakin is the Warrior, why those two archetypes are in the story and why they're in conflict with each other.

 

Yes and no. The real difference between the Lost Tribe as written by JJM and the Lost Tribe as written by everyone else is that JJM's stories were solely about them, and were set early in their history, so they had to use Sith protagonists, had to flesh the society out, were about fleshing the society out. JJM, in addition to being a good writer, was writing in a context where the Lost Tribe were integral as a society to the story, and the story was entirely about exploiting their storytelling potential. In FOTJ, the Lost Tribe were just there to be antagonists. They weren't really integral to the story as much as Vestara and Gavar were integral to the story and then the rest were just kind of there to provide random antagonists. The context wasn't there to do as much with them. Now, as written by JJM, the Lost Tribe still would have been better -- there would have been more depth of characterization, more interest in their functioning -- but it couldn't really fundamentally alter their place in the story without rewrites so heavy we're entering the realm of pure speculation. You can see the same phenomenon within FOTJ -- Golden was the only author really interested in the Lost Tribe, and as a result the only one to really write about them as a society rather than as disposable cannon fodder, and that was a big improvement.

 

I think the term is WHAT?

 

Sounds like LOFT and FOTJ combined with Anakin being replaced by Ben for romancing Sith and Jaina for killing Jacen. Hey...invasion, Jacen turns dark, Ben romances a Sith...I wonder if Denning has DH's invasion storyline in his back pocket every time he writes...?

 

A source for this would be most welcome.

 

But it seems you earlier admitted that the archetypes were established to add resonance to the prophecy.

So once the prophecy element was eliminated, the reason for the archetypes also vanishes. Therefore, Anakin's death is pretty well useless from a story viewpoint except as a Take That! to fans who whined there wasn't enough character death. So as it evolved, the conflict was only there to build up Anakin and tear down Jacen so as to make Anakin more heroic and thus make his death more of a (ultimately meaningless) shock.

Del Rey knew Jacen was the ultimate hero of the series from the get go, yes, I agree. (Although why not Jaina, I'll never know. I guess a female can't be the hero unless she kills her twin brother.) But they badly mismanaged Jacen's character arc, to the point that killing off Anakin turned off yet another segment of the EU reading population who haven't come back. They should have built up Jacen from the start, not his brother.

Again, characterization is in the hands of the individual authors.

As for Dark Horse, they still had to work with Del Rey on a regular basis, and at the end of the day the intellectual property belongs to Lucasfilm and not to either of them. Dark Horse is professional enough to know that. Which is why the disdain for the NJO really surprised me (as much as it delights me). A story has to be REALLY stinky for one of your partners to disparage it publicly.

 

Jacen was not likable in Balance Point. Far from it. That was the height of his stupidity. Okay the end sure, but the rest of the book? No.

 

The Essential Reader's Companion.

 

Jaina not being the central protagonist likely goes back to marketing and the editorial department's perception that Star Wars is perused first and foremost by boys/young men, and therefore the target audience should be boys/young men.

Also Jaina is as dull as cardboard and as entertaining as paint drying.

Danke schön.

 

Gamiel Revanfan1 HWK-290

The Essential Reader's Companion gives background information on a lot of the stories. This particular tidbit was actually featured on the TFN news and Del Rey facebook page back before it came out and appears in the book:

"I'm working on editing the New Jedi Order chapter of Pablo Hidalgo's Essential Reader's Companion (due October 2) and I thought you might be interested in this little behind the scenes note on some early plot ideas for the series:

"The story arc was to very closely hew to the myth structure of the Hero’s Journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell, a huge influence on the creation of the Star Wars cinematic story. With that as its basic framework, the plot underwent much evolution and exploration. Its earliest descriptions had Luke Skywalker sending the three Solo children on an epic quest, upon which they encounter a new female character from the invading species sent to infiltrate the galaxy. This unnamed female corrupts Anakin, nearly turning him to the dark side, but she falls in love with him and Anakin instead redeems her. In a fit of intense sibling rivalry, Jacen and Jaina turn on Anakin, and in the resulting conflict, Jacen dies."

Oh what a different EU we would be in now if that story had played out. (ES)"

The prophecy was eliminated but the structural framework and philosophical components were always present and weren't eliminated. I don't think Anakin was killed for spite; I think they didn't want to revise the latter half of plot skeleton because they felt it was too tall an order to figure out something for the Warrior to do. But the Philosopher archetype was tied directly to the philosophical underpinnings of the story -- the prophecy was a subplot that happened to justify the death of the Warrior. The subplot was dropped but those archetypes are very much important to the series as it is now, and I'd argue that this is the central conflict of the series set in the backdrop of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion -- in macrocosm between Luke and Kyp and microcosm between Jacen and Anakin.

I'm not sure where you are seeing disdain from Dark Horse for the NJO -- they did ultimately do the Invasion comic series. The only instances I've seen in which they expressed bad feelings about the series it was explained that they simply felt they were pushed out by Del Rey and they weren't all too interested in being involved in the story if they didn't have input on it -- especially since Del Rey co-opted their Nom Anor character and the invasion storyline was something they were originally cultivating.

 

Again, it just sounds like Denning decided "we used the invasion part of that story, let's use the rest" with no thought to how the characters developed through the invasion story.

 

The post-NJO is rather curiously similar to discarded ideas from the NJO, whether it be a group of exiled Sith, a Sith romance, Jacen falling to the dark side and dying, etc.

 

So you see my point.