Lit Anakin Solo is overrated

I'd go with the former, obviously. But "minor" discrepancies aren't really the issue. The Bantam books are, by and large, utterly episodic; while admittedly a third Solo child wouldn't be ignored either way, I still have to respect someone in that era who actually makes significant changes to his storyline based on what other people did.

(Also, this is off-topic. I only brought it up in the first place because Anakin is one of the things I often mention when making that argument).

 

With most of that, I can agree to a point. The problem is, Anakin was built up to have such potential. He was finding natures of the Force that even Jacen missed. Before he reaches his potential, though, he's killed. This automatically dismisses two previous prophecies involving him, and it's quite well-known that the EU went down the crapper soon after his death. Whether this is coincidence, I don't know, but the story just went, and left the authors scrambling to come up with a story. They didn't even stick with the ideas they found, the Jedi abandoned the Unifying Force idea after the Swarm War (which I've never particularly followed, so I consider this a bit of a move up). In character, Anakin would never have made the choices that Jacen later did, so those stories that people love to hate would either not play out that way, or not happen at all. To conclude, Anakin had great potential, and he was destined to be great. We were robbed of that, and this is where the so-called "deification" of the character comes in.

 

Jacen wouldn't have made those choices either.

 

Anakin's fate has no impact on the direction the post NJO took. Post NJO turned out the way it did because creative control was handed over to Troy Denning, not because of Anakin's death. Post NJO had plenty of good stories left in it, even without Anakin, and I found the post Star by Star half of NJO to actually be the stronger half of the series, due to the effect his character's death had on Jacen, Jaina's and Tahiri's character arcs. The one thing I did hate about Anakin's death was he was killed before he had the chance to do something really awesome, as the silly kids only strike team was hardly an epic enough final mission for such a heroic character.

 

I really think the only negative feelings toward Anakin that are a result of the actual text is the way he was written by Denning. I like the phrase "silly kids only strike team."

 

I like that it's true. Ganner was literally the oldest member of that team. It's like Troy Denning didn't know that Kyle Katarn or Kirana Ti or Streen even existed. I'm still not sure he does.

 

Kyle Katarn had the voxyn flu that day.

Guess how he got the voxyn flu.

 

Denning had to write Anakin as Charles Bronson in order to kill him off.

 

I had to look up the name, but reading the Wikipedia page didn't help me in comparing him to Anakin's character in SbS. Can you elaborate please?

 

i liked the character. he was powerful, and heroic. I was more shocked and saddened by his death than even Chewie's, because was the future of the order. Someone who would have been the leader, and eventually would have been more powerful than even Luke and Jacen. That all said, i do think he is overrated. He was not real interesting, did not have that big flaw, or personality querk that made him unique. He was a Luke clone but with a taste of Ganner, and not the values of Luke.

 

regardless of the validity of the idea, it did have an in-universe explanation. Something like "only young jedi could be on the strike team because the older ones who are more well known will make the Vong suspect a trap".

 

I don't think any of the authors remembered Kyle existed. Wasn't his first appearance in the NJO a cameo in The Unifying Force?

 

Denning knew he existed. He killed Kyle in the opening of SBS and the editors made him remove it.

 

Its a good thing they stopped him than. Imagine the fan backlash if he had been allowed to kill off Anakin and Kyle in the same book!

 

Kyle didn't have the following in 2001 that he has now. Chuck Norris facts didn't exist, and neither did Jedi Outcast, just to put it into perspective.

 

Forget the fan backlash, the in-universe backlash would've been strong enough to throw the Vong back to their galaxy and the Jedi back to the days of the Je'daii!

 

Come to think of it, I didn't even start following the EU until I played Jedi Outcast. All my friends at the time were big Dark Forces fans and so I always just assumed everyone liked him.

 

True. None of us were aware that when Kyle Katarn sneezes, Death Stars explode.

 

It occurs to me that "even Denning couldn't gratuitously kill him", if suitably reworded, might make a good entry for a "Kyle Katarn facts" list.

 

What the ****? I know I shouldn't even be surprised, but somehow I am. Is there *anybody* he doesn't measure for a body bag?

Love it.

 

Having been "European Ambassador" of the board's Kyle fanclub back then (and this was all firmly tongue in cheek) I'll agree that it was different, but Kyle's fans were all very invested due to Jedi Knight having been such a huge thing back then (with Mysteries of the Sith's Mara Jade really making for an unbelievably solid EU experience). I guess the Katarn facts didn't come up just because someone said out of the blue that Kyle was as ridiculous as Chuck Norris; it wasn't just the absurdity/silliness but also the love for the character.

Basically, Kyle Katarn today isn't who he was back then. Today it's Kyle facts and some b-list character in the books, and even Kyle facts had their golden days years ago. Would anyone bemoan a Kyle death scene more than any other element in a Denning novel today? Back then he was the most memorable video game character who couldn't cross over into the books (the SBS death would actually have been his first appearance beyond the games and the game tie-in material, i.e. the little known novellas) because there's always someone who doesn't like the idea of using book characters in comics or game characters in books.

Actually, I think the "outrage" over his death wouldn't have been anything special compared to the general demise of EU characters; the peace brigade victims in the second year come to mind (Lusa, for example, for the YJK crowd, or Ikrit for those few JJK adepts that surely must have existed), or Elegos for the Stackpole books. It actually would have given more respect for the character, though, since a video game-only character (because nobody read the novellas) was seen - by a considerable amount of EU book/comic fans - just like movie purists see the EU.

The irony is that his eventual inclusion in TUF lead to him finally becoming a regular stand-around in those books that weren't all that interesting anymore - I literally stopped reading after Inferno, and Fury was when he was elevated into the supporting/appearing-at-all cast. Too little, too late.

 

Kyp Durron was another character that Denning wanted to kill. If you go back 10-12 years with posts he made here and TFN interviews, he is surprisingly frank about the fact that he did not like Kyp Durron as a character and would have killed him off if the editors allowed him to do so. The attitude is completely unsurprising in retrospect.

Grey1 I don't remember if I posted here under a different name before 2004, but I was fairly active at a lot of other SW forums back then because Internet forums were still a thing, and my recollection of fan reception to Kyle is that it was very similar to Starkiller now, if not slightly less cynical or jaded. There were probably a bit more fans, and the dislike was a bit less vocal, but there were the same "Gary Stu" accusations and comparisons to Luke's accomplishments insofar as that he defeated seven Dark Jedi with less training than Luke and saved the galaxy. It makes me wonder how people would receive the character if JK was released now.

 

Starkiller isn't a bad comparison, especially since it's the same media threshold. Characters like Kyle, Starkiller and Revan begin their life having a hard time in places like this because they are from the videogame world, not from the book world. Granted, it's never been that different for the comic books.

So yeah, Kyle had his fans, but the book circuit can be surprisingly elitist. The video games kind of show parallel universes - Kyle is basically an alternative version of Luke's story; we get a lot of guys blowing up the Death Star. Same for KOTOR. Now where I think Kyle and Starkiller are different is that Kyle stays firmly in his own universe; Mara visiting him is kind of a strange situation, but it works; only with Jedi Outcast onwards do they integrate Kyle into Luke's EU world, and of course they define him as someone who's not a threat to Luke's superiority. Starkiller, on the other hand, sits firmly in the middle of the "main universe" and happily steps into areas where he's changing the game. Kyle never changed the game; in his games, he's either living in a niche or under Luke's lead.

So my point would be that while there were (possibly a lot of) people who didn't like Kyle, this was due to him coming from the wrong format; being overpowered wasn't part of his character but part of the game mechanics, and to be honest I think a lot of the book-centric EU fans never get around stuff like vague identities, multiple endings or game mechanics like weapons and body counts.

If anything, Kyle released today wouldn't strike people as really memorable. Starkiller himself isn't memorable - the only thing that keeps him in our minds in here is his conflict with the established book world. For a comparable unimportant guy who's a good little Jedi not looking for conflict with precious EU continuity, look at the Scourge Jedi guy. What was his name again? Never mind.

 

Something tells me he would've killed off everyone except Han Solo and Saba Sebatyne by now if he could've. The two of them would've then lived out the rest of their lives together, never leaving the Jedi Temple, the only two living beings left in the galaxy.