Lit Angry review of EU

Somebody is reviewing the whole thing, apparently, front to back. May take years. They only have one up so far:

http://theunion4ever.com/nerd-bucket/star-wars-expanded-universe/

 

If I had a nickel for every time someone started doing that, I could buy the entire EU.

 

It's an idea that's very tempting. A lot of people have had it. This person will discover, as everyone else has, that it's easier said than done. Though I am going to get back to mine. I promise.

 

They said they're leaving on videogames, children's books, and RPGs so that outta shave about 6 years off of it.

 

Well then there is no point! One can not simply skip Masters of Teräs Käsi, The Glove of Darth Vader and the Jedi Academy Training Manual and still claim to cover the whole EU!

 

Do this based on release date, and then I'll really be intrigued. We'll be waiting forever for Rogue to get to the Ewoks Annual and http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Return_of_the_Great_One!][/url]Return of the Great One!

 

I started this about 6, maybe 7, years ago, and I'm just about to start Ascension. Yep, these things take time

 

You can watch the cut scene "movies" of video games put up on Youtube in order to get the game stories.

I can see not doing the kiddie books, but some of the YA stuff is quite good.

I meant to do a EU read-through this summer but my own writing and a trauma rotation on third left me with little reading time. Now that I'm just working clinic duty I think I might seriously give an EU read through a shot just for the heck of it. Then again, I keep saying I'll do a reread of Wheel of Time now that it's done but lack of time and the awareness of the lead weights of literary doom that are books 4-9 have slightly put me off that.

 

Not 4-10? Wow.

I'm not sure I could manage a chronological read-through of the EU myself. Time issues aside, I feel like it would kind of end on a down note.

 

The EU, right here, and good cause for why it had to go:

When the classic trilogy concluded and Star Wars’ popularity faced a slow, inevitable decline, the EU kept it alive with an unending succession of warlords, witches, talking Velociraptors, and telepathic transdimensional slabs of golden meat yet to be vanquished after Return of the Jedi’s credits rolled.
When the prequel trilogy came out and disappointed everyone, the EU turned their cast of nonentities into bland, inconsistently developed characters and made their convoluted plots even more incomprehensible.
And when the prequels ended and the saga was at last complete, the EU was waiting, torch in hand, ready to ease our loss by mimicking everything lame about the prequels over and over and over again.

 

Hey!

Waru is not meat, he is jelly. This apocrypha-reading is already bordering on apostasy.

You know, after years on this forum, it is quite hard to tell between mocking something by joking about it and just joking about it.

 

Weirdly, talking velociraptors and transdimensional aliens sound a lot more interesting to me than the all-encompassing need for new stories that "feel like the OT," which seems to be the buzz phrase that is defining the Disney Era thus far. Sure, the execution wasn't always there, but still in my years as an EU reader I've found that my favorite stories were the ones that weren't afraid to go into stranger, goofier, or sometimes more serious territory than what we got with the original films.

 

Now you can actually read the LEU in full chronological order without having to return to earlier parts in the timeline with new releases.

 

It's sad seeing pretty much 25+ years of near-perfectly fitted material being wiped out in an instant, but a lot of the LEU was crap anyways.

 

Sure, but the point about trying to repeat the prequels, which were objectively awful, with OT characters is a good one and a big reason why the EU burning, taking down good stories like I, Jedi; Thrawn Trilogy; X-Wing and Dark Forces I and II (Jedi Outcast can **** right off) with it in the process, is necessary. Creative destruction people! Do you economics?

It's more sad that fans are so butthurt about it. Honestly.

 

The thing I find uncomfortable is that the new universe seems so tiny and empty. Going from 25 years of continuity in books short stories, video games and comics, that contains countless people planets characters and histories to essentially nothing is pretty jarring.

It will fill out eventually, but for now its a weird feeling, knowing essentially zero about the galaxy I've been loving and reading about forever.

 

It's

It's weird going to movie characters on Wookieepedia and seeing just their movie roles under the canon tab. Nothing else.

 

Welcome to 1991, kid.

 

You know, I initially dismissed this as just pointless grousing, but now that I stop and think there actually is a worthwhile point here: the "old" EU did have a strong tendency to allow itself to follow after the films rather than really try to stand on its own. Of course, it's easy to understand that when attempts to try and do something that could really stand as equal to the films (i.e. the NJO, or even Dark Empire) met with such mixed reactions, but it does make me think that's one thing that the new continuity offers: the possibility that increased communication between the moviemakers and EU writers could make for more risk-taking on the part of the latter, because they actually know now what they can do.

Expecting this to actually happen requires at least some degree of optimism, of course, but the potential is at least promising.

 

1986 would probably be closer, considering there's no WEG, Lucasarts or Thrawn Trilogy equivalents.

It's probably a little too early to tell, let's see what they do with the timeframe between the ROTJ and Ep7.

 

Sure, 86, whatever. I was just going for when a new EU was properly, formally launched.

But I do wonder if perspective of "EU fans who had to deal with canon being shredded by TPM" vs "fans who came along after" is something that accounts for responses to the Legends/Canon decision?

 

I was going for when there was nothing going on other than cartoons and promises of future movies.

Let's get the NEU with a few more works under its belt before citing as a "proper" launch.

Apart from being irritated by WOTC's initial focus on the TPM era, I recall being rather enthusiastic about how much the EU was cohering at the time.
Most of the anger in EU fandom that I recall was over Chewie's death in Vector Prime.

 

Well think of it this way - how much of Thrawn Trilogy is undermined by TPM?

So, following on from that, if you are basically confronted with this notion that canon isn't immutable because LFL has the right and authority to change that... you're less concerned when they do?

 

Nothing of importance?

On the contrary, I was very concerned by the absurd nature of the hamfisted editing of a movie so Greedo misses Han at point-blank range.

But it was certainly his right to change it. He was wasn't prejudiced by canon levels, even G-canon wasn't immutable.