Books Bloodline by Claudia Gray (book spoilers permitted)

The sense I had throughout the book was that, while he takes great care to hide it, Casterfo is walking wounded due to the trauma of watching Vader strangle his parents and being unable to do anything. Due to that he takes refuge in the idea that the Imperial system wasn't all bad, it was just Vader and the Emperor. I found that to be a quite plausible lie to take shelter in.

 

"The system that rewarded the people who killed my parents, and hundreds/thousands/millions of other vicious killers just like them, with unlimited wealth and power isn't actually a bad system" makes very little sense to me.

 

But he dosn't see it that way. Instead of seeing that the problem is inherent in the system, he thinks the problem was that the guys in charge were monsters. It almost reminds me of the idealized "Fel Empire" of Legends. Make the Emperor charismatic instead of a decrepit sorcerer and suddenly a dictatorship seems a lot more appealing.

Sure it's non nonsensical when you really scrutinize it . . . that's why it's an example of Casterforo being in denial and using mental gymnastics to justify his position, just like Cienna in Lost Stars.

Implausible and ridiculous as it may seem, "a dictatorship could work if the people in charge were benevolent" is something that people right now, in the real world, believe.

 

I think people like the idea of a benevolent "king/queen", like King Arthur, because we have so many fairy tales about them. But while a noble singular ruler could exist in real life, the system continues after that leader is gone, and you run the risk of having someone not-so-good in charge.

I also suspect the "single ruler"/dictator idea becomes more difficult to manage when more people are involved. A group of dozens, hundreds, even thousands works. You get into larger numbers -- planets of people -- and it's beyond one person's ability to deal with everyone's major problems, let alone the minor ones (hey Khaleesi your dragon burned my goats!), and you end up with a large bureaucracy under one dictator who can only effectively enforce anything with clear-cut rules and a police/military force to back it up. Which won't make everybody happy... in fact as we seem to be discovering with our current unprecedented global populations, it rarely makes most people happy.

 

This is still an excellent book, despite how vague it is on a lot of things (no public First Order or a Chancellor post) but at the time I chalked it up to them holding back on TLJ spoilers and its still a great story.

Now that we're post TLJ and still a long ways off from IX, I hope if/when Grey gets another book that she's allowed to go into more details about the sequel-era galaxy, since I doubt the sequels will ever bother with details much. There's that Princess Leia book, which I know ties in to TLJ a lot more closely, but I just have a hard time mustering interest in that period of Leia's life.

Casterfo was... odd, but he meant well, just unfortunately for him he didn't realize until the end of the book that all of his friends were wannabe fascists. I still kind of wish we could someday hear that one of the first Resistance missions was to spring him from prison before he was executed, but that's unlikely, not angsty enough for the sequel era.

I hope we get more background on how things changed from the Bloodline situation to what we see in the Poe Dameron comics (which already had a kind of cold war between the Republic/Resistance and the First Order). The Bloodline novel was probably one of the best looks at what the New Republic government was like, if there's ever a Newer Republic I hope Grey gets a novel to detail it.

 

I'm really hoping for this too, and I feel like it's pretty plausible. After all, I'm 100% sure that at SOME point, probably after IX, somebody is going to write the novel or whatever around Luke's Jedi, Kylo's fall and Luke's decision to go into exile. (How does Han know he's looking for the first Jedi temple?) and that has to be in this gap. And Snoke's backstory and rise will definitely end up being supplied in the outside material too, and it'll have to link in.

 

Han says "People who knew him best, think he went looking for the first Jedi Temple". The implication is that Han's heard from one of these people, rather than being one of these people.

My guess is that Lor San Tekka used to be part of Luke's circle of contacts, and that he was the one who Han heard about Luke from.

 

Look how many people, right now in 2018, even in the United States, salivate over every tiny detail of the personal lives of the British royal family. Look how many prestige TV dramas and Oscar bait films there are about them.

I'm not trying to claim that the royals are like Palpatine but we clearly live in a culture where ultra-elitism, including a family for whom slavery, imperialism, and genocide are intricately wound up in their personal history, is fetishized to an unhealthy extreme.

 

And he doesn't just talk about it, he also has stuff from them

"[...]On the walls of Casterfo’s office hung artifacts from the Empire.

A stormtrooper’s hemlet. The black control box of a TIE pilot’s atmospheric suit. Flags and banners of the Empire, the individual stormtrooper legions and one - faded, slightly torn, but still searing to Leia’s eyes - dedicated to Palpatine himself. "

 

Definitely think that's one interpretation that makes sense, although I think you could equally easily sub in the idea that Han is just trying to distance himself emotionally for the purpose of telling the story - or that he means Leia. (Which would also work with Luke saying 'Leia blamed Snoke, but it was me.' How would he know? Quite possibly through the Force, or maybe they met again after that.) I guess my point is just that it's a wide open area with lots of storytelling potential and different ways they could go.

 

Because you're looking at the Imperial system as it actually was, at the reality of it. Casterfo isn't doing that, he's idealising it in the same way the New Republic did the Old Republic. It's a kind of dark mirror, where the Rebels fought to restore the Republic without the corruption that killed it, so does Casterfo idealise the Imperial system.

But he isn't in a good way, he isn't thinking as clearly as he likes to claim.

This isn't unique to SW, you'll find lots of people claiming that 'proper' capitalism or communism hasn't existed because they're idealising the system. In reality, you can point to USSR communism as a horrendous system, but still some will think it could have worked for not A, B, C factors.

Yeah, which can be seen as further evidence of his dysfunction. Even now, 70-80 years on from WW2, in some places you can collect Nazi memoribilia, but there's still a lingering stigma around it in some countries. It's not that you can't do so, but don't expect to be applauded.

 

Read it. It's fantastic.

 

I didn't get that read on it at all, it felt more like Han talking about himself in the third person because he's become so out of the loop he no longer considers himself that same person.

 

Ha!

 

I'm mentally putting this in the galaxy's equivalent of the Sixties. It's been long enough from the war that people are speculating on it through the fog of nostalgia as well as "what if." Around this time and well after, there was a decent number of Nazi apologetic despite the fact many of them were Brits or Europeans. The idea of the Nazis as super-efficient, certain Nazis didn't REALLY know what was happening to all those people in Poland, and a kind of awe at the look at them without the horror on the ground.

It's not REALLY authoritarianism that's bad, you just have to find the right dictator.

 

[double post]

 

This story needs to be told ASAP!!!!!!

 

I finally finished Bloodline this morning. Life stuff got in the way of finishing it earlier but I got to savor every sentence. Phenomenal book. Leia is my second favorite character and Claudia Gray writes her so well. That ending had me grinning ear to ear. Now I'm off to start Claudia Gray' s other novel about our beloved princess, Leia, Princess of Alderaan.

 

I’ve been thinking about this book recently because of what we learned in recent months about Lucas’s original plans for the sequel trilogy, which was more heavily focused on Senate politics. I read that this book was partly based on or used backstory material from Michael Arndt’s early drafts for Episode 7.

Since Arndt was working on the script while Lucas was still around, and there are thematic similarities between the plot in this book and what we know about the Lucas sequels, I’m wondering how much was adapted from those early drafts. Is there more info on the connection between the novel and the drafts?

Of course, Gray is an amazing author, and I’m not suggesting she did not come up with most of what’s in the book. But it’s intriguing to wonder about the germ of many of these ideas. For example, could the characters of Greer and Joph have been built from the roles of the original Solo children in the early drafts?

 

I can't remember where I read this, but I was under the impression for TLJ Rian Johnson had come up with some rough world building ideas (the Centrists vs the Populists) that didn't make it into the film. But he let Claudia Gray in on these ideas for her work on this book. This may also be why Claudia Grey's Leia: Princess of Alderaan features a young Admiral Holdo who is a bit out there. (Holdo's character was revised from initial drafts as she came across as "too spacey".)

 

Interesting. I know at least the napkin idea was something that came from Johnson. Not sure what he planned to do with it, though. And the backstory we got does sound similar to what we’d heard in rumors way back when Episode 7 was just coming out. Though like you said, the rumors were about backstory that might be revealed in Episode 8.

I know that Casterfo was based on a character who would’ve originally appeared in Episode 7 in early drafts. Honestly a part of me wonders if Snoke would’ve been brought into Senate politics in some early iterations, as there were rumors that he was corrupting former Imperial Senators.

And @Sinrebirth, yes! ... And no. I do still think of the OG children as Jacen and Jaina, but I meant whoever Lucas planned to be the main protagonists for his trilogy. I’ve heard several names thrown out, but none seem like they would’ve been definitive. Part of me wishes there were a Jacen/Jaina story that could be headcanon-ed as a story in Lucas’s sequels... but most of the enemies they fought in their prime (YV, Killiks, each other) are the sort that would not really fit in that story. Well, maybe LotF... but Idk about it.

 

It is interesting that a lot of the Lucas backstory for the Sequels is honestly getting recycled in other things. Like Bloodline, and like Mandoverse it seems.

 

If this is something from GL i can see more of this coming into play in other stories that moves forward in the timeline to bloodline, maybe we could get some of this in rangers of the new republic.