Books A/V DARK DISCIPLE (Ventress/Vos novel) (spoilers)

Because Lucas stated at the time that he wanted to make it clear that he was never, ever coming back? Ever?

"They" brought Maul back because "they" was "George Lucas", and I doubt he was even aware the story existed.

 

First rule of Lucas Club...

...you do not believe any Lucas statements....

I would guess he saw that Maul pic, but I'll concede he may not have.

Not sure exactly what your argument even is here.

 

The comic was released same time as ROTS and had many of the same people working on it.
I am 90% sure he saw it.

 

Lucas saw everything that was written about the Mandalorians and only took away a bad joke name. Unless there's something where Lucas actually said so, I sincerely doubt he drew inspiration from the comic. YMMV.

 

Pablo, Dave, and co. have been very open answering fan questions at the conventions about how much Lucas knows of the EU. I want to say it was... Dave... a few years ago at C6 who said Lucas likes to read some of the comics, rifle through the source books, and keeps tabs on the games. But he admitted Lucas was more into the visuals than anything else. If it's visual (comic, game, etc), it's more likely to catch his attention.

Visionaries he almost certainly saw, since it was by his own concept artists. He's friends with those guys.

 

Which is also why he wanted Darth Talon to be Darth Maul's friend in the canceled game... despite the... age difference.

 

Well, yeah - my prior post came from a question that I asked Filoni at Celebration.

I don't object to the possibility, although I think it unlikely. I object to this statement - "That short what if story is the reason they brought Maul back. Or at least had some kind of influence." - a definitive statement that has nothing to back it up.
And if the story was by one of his own concept artists, wouldn't the possibility that Lucas mentioning to them that he was thinking about bringing Darth Maul back just as likely?

 

Found this thread and recently finished DD... quite a but late to the party, but:

I really enjoyed the book and would definitely read again. It was like watching TCW and I wish we could see them as actual episodes.... I miss that show! My only real gripe is how Vos seemingly walked away (TWICE) from all his darkside-ness with only a small slap on the wrist, if even. I know he was still being watched at the end and he wasn't (yet) allowed to conduct missions but still.... he caused a lot of damage and death while under Dooku (including fellow Jedi) and yet.... yeah. Also, when they were on the asteroid I thought it was pretty darn obvious that Quinlan planted those bombs. Don't know if it was supposed to be, but if it wasn't... The ending on Dathomir was beautiful though, I was sad about Ventress but it seemed a fitting end that she be reunited with her sisters.

Before reading this, I had no prior attachment to either Ventress or Vos other than TCW series so I can understand people who knew of them from the now-Legends EU who took issue with this book. I have read a few chunks of pages from this thread and honestly all the talk about the Legends Ventress and Vos has made me want to go and read up on them, not caring that it won't be the "true" canon. Quinlan, in particular, really interests me. I took note of what to look for, soooo maybe I'll change my opinion when I get around to reading those, maybe not.

As of now, I'd give the book a solid 8/10.

 

Pre-Dark Side Infiltration Quinlan, in the oldcanon, came across as a bit more jerkish to me actually - when I read the first couple of chapters of Dark Disciple my first thought was "This guy is nicer".

 

The basic problem I see between Lucas and the EU is that Lucas is very visual and wasn't interested in creating a flawless universe since it's all make believe anyway; the EU, in the meantime, was very interested in unifying everything into one story "that happened exactly that way" and didn't provide a picture of Cal Omas for years.

With Talon and Maul, the story was told as if Lucas was having a senior moment, and since he's the guy to blame the story sticks. And who knows, maybe it happened exactly that way. But I'm extremely sure that him wanting Maul and Talon in the same videogame wasn't because he was too dumb to understand the age difference; it was because he liked the visual idea of those two in the same videogame, and he didn't care a bit how that would fit with all the other stuff, possibly because it was just a videogame anyway. And with Star Wars, once you have a visual that you absolutely want to have, there's a gazillion ways of explaining it after the fact. Maul or Talon not actually being Maul or Talon but someone looking very similar (which EU would definitely retcon into a descendant thing or a homage thing, especially since Legacy only got the tattoo idea from that one previous Sith); Maul having been cloned or frozen or something; Talon flowwalking or timetravelling or something.

It's not as if TFU's "Vader's Secret Apprentice blows **** up with the Force and becomes the pre-Luke messiah for the Palpatine-created rebellion" concept came about organically because the story just demanded that this happened; it came about because you can sell a videogame on the premise. And I think the question whether a Darth Maul videogame featuring Darth Maulina would have made money (aka would have found its audience) is a no-brainer.

 

The interesting thing is, The Old Republic ended up using a similar Darth Talon design for their character Darth Atroxa: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Atroxa . So they could have easily made up such a character to hang out with Maul at the time if they wanted to.

 

I was gonna say "How the hell does she even have a name, she was only around for 15 seconds!"

And then I remembered this is Star Wars. I'm disappointed she doesn't have multiple paragraph's worth of backstory now. Not even being sarcastic. They bothered to name great-great-grandTalon, they might as well make her cool now.

 

I'm browsing through the novel again, and one thing that strikes me is how ridiculous it is that the Dark Side gives someone so much physical/healing power that really pushes the borders of plausibility. In TCW, Darth Maul is said to have survived being cut in two through the sheer power of the Dark Side, and not through any kind of medical attention explanation that might have seemed less unbelievable. In this novel, after countless "interrogations" by Dooku where Vos is said to be left starving and in extremely poor physical health, Vos is suddenly able to hold his own in a lightsaber match against Ventress when she comes to rescue him. Realistically, Ventress would probably knock Vos out in half a minute given his physical state, no matter how mad he was about learning she killed Tholme.

Also, it seems Disney canon is continuing the EU take on turning people to the dark side. Like Malak did to Bastila in Knights of the Old Republic, it's apparently enough to use Sith lightning repeatedly on a noble Jedi to turn them into dark side fanatics who will fight to the end for the Sith. One wonders why the Sith don't do this more often. If Palpatine had just done that to Luke, according to the EU and Disney, Luke would have been a Sith in no time at all. Dooku should probably have done this to Obi-Wan and Anakin on Geonosis too.

 

Hey all, I'm on my first time through TCW and I'm almost ready to read Dark Disciple. I'm just wondering - I know Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir and the current Kanan arc take place concurrently with DD. Is there a handy breakdown for exactly where, if I wanted to read it all chronologically?

 

Read about half of Dark Disciple to

Spoiler

Vos is captured

.

Then Read SOD, and afterwards go back to DD.

I don't know about the Kanan arc though.

 

I can't remember exactly where SoD fits, but Kanan can be read independently of DD. You can start Kanan after you watch ROTS, or even after the first few Rebels episodes, it works just as well.

 

John Ostrander had some thoughts on this book in his latest Grab Bag:

Dan Wallace saw a similar discrepancy after Hunt for Ziro aired, saying "[SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial][SIZE=12px][FONT=Arial]His personality has varied depending on the source: in the comics he's brooding and stoic, while in the animated series he's an overenthusiastic bull in a china shop."[/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE]

 

I do feel sorry for John and Jan not getting any credit at all for the Dark Disciple novel. It would have been nice if Ms. Golden had taken a quick glance at previous works regarding Quinlan (even if only a 5 minute glance through Wookieepedia) and thanked her predecessors in the Acknowledgements section of the book. And, yes, she knew there was preceding work because she stated in the Acknowledgements: "To Pablo Hidalgo and Leland Chee, thanks for helping me keep things true and accurate in this new incarnation of an old friend."

In the old EU days, Michael Stackpole contacted Kevin J. Anderson to coordinate with his work, Zahn and Stackpole worked together, etc. For now, those days seem to be gone.

 

Pretty sure Golden was referring to Ventress and not Vos with that. As for authors coordinating, I've never understood why some authors seem to think that the characters they've created within the Star Wars franchise are theirs to do with as they please. Star Wars belonged to Lucas and now Disney. Coordination between two authors works is a job for the story group, not the authors themselves. Thought the story group seems to have some difficulty with that, but it's their task all the same.

 

I really like Ostrander. Not only because he's a creative genius, but also because he's not afraid to make clear that he is very disgruntled about the discarding of the EU. Yes, it actually "reassures" me to see that, because I had come to think nobody cared enough to be annoyed.

 

I think Ostrander would have understood if only Star Wars: Legacy had to be discarded, since Darth Krayt would have gotten in the way of the new movies. However, Disney novels like 'Dark Disciple' made just to rewrite the old Clone Wars stuff wasn't really needed.

Ironically, the Dark Horse Clone Wars comics run, collected in Trade Paperbacks 1-9, escaped mostly unscathed from all 6 seasons of The Clone Wars cartoon, with the major contradictions being 'Star Wars: Obsession' (which was Blackman's work, not Ostrander's), Barriss' fall to the Dark Side (just wipe out Clone Wars TPB's 7 and 8, but the first 6 TPB's still fit), and Valorum getting killed in Clone Wars TPB Volume 5 (I already had a fan retcon where Valorum escaped the shuttle explosion via parachute--which wasn't out of character for him to be prepared for, considering how paranoid and afraid of assassination he was at the time--to survive to meet Yoda in Clone Wars season 6. Obviously Palpatine realized killing Valorum would be too blatant even for him, and put Valorum under practical house arrest in Coruscant for Valorum's own "protection".)

But the Dark Disciple novel just wiped out all but Clone Wars TPB's vols. 1 and 2 to still fit, and even those are iffy. And it's not clear what this accomplished for Disney. Yes, there were book sales, but I think a new film or animation featuring Ventress (who Disney killed off in the novel), would have brought in even more money.

 

No authors or artists should feel bad about the EU, it still exists, and most of those stories and characters could have happened / existed in the SW timeline. The biggest compliment to any of them, is that their creations are being used in various projects outside of their own work - that's the real acknowledgement.

 

It's one thing to have the creation acknowledged, but another to have the new work change the creation beyond author recognition. The only example I can think of from the top of my head is the Jim Phelps character from the Mission Impossible television show. When Tom Cruise and the crew of the MI film brought the Jim Phelps character into his first Mission Impossible film, his character was adjusted a bit, to put it mildly. There were some involved in the creation of the show's take on Phelps who, I remember reading, had some problems with this when the movie came out.

 

Really if I created Quinlan Vos and read Dark Disciple, I wouldn't want my name in it.



They did the same for Jim Starlin- The creator of Thanos in The Avengers not that it matters much.

 

This featurette from The Clone Wars Season 3 is on youtube, and the last few minutes discuss in detail the process of bringing Quin into the series. Pretty interesting stuff.