Lit How do you feel about Star Wars being over?

Catherine: Thank you for the listing! That helps immensely.

May I ask you to PM the chronological order of all of Gilad's major appearances too, please? (He's my favorite Imperial ever, even before Tarkin. )

Ugh, I hope I can return Survivor's Quest then. I am not a fan of Luke/Mara. I got this because I believed Thrawn was in it. Thanks for the clarification.

Instantdeath: Your thoughts are also much appreciated.

 

I am glad that the stopped progressing when it did because George Lucas appeared to be milking it enough as it is and I was worried he might ruin the whole Star Wars story.
As odd and depressing as it may feel, I'm just happy that it didn't end on a bad note. Besides, I still have much to learn about the Star Wars' galaxy, character, relationship, weaponry, and plot detail.

 

eventually there will be some sort of follow up.

Hasn't the mandalorian subplot in Legacy not been resolved? I forgot the name of that mandalorian guy.

are all of Zahns books really good? I liked Outbound flighty alot. It was incredible after the garbage that was Rogue Planet.

I attempted to read the EU in chronological order but i got burned out.

teh old republic is rising and putting new books in the beginning so i will have to go back again.

I overestimated my reading speed. It resulted in alot of library late fines.

 

I won't be happy until they finally declare a Third Galactic Republic and none of this Galactic Confederated Federation of Allied Triumvirates nonsense.

 

That's like watching 75% of ROTJ and concluding Luke is an idiot because he hasn't defeated Vader!

Don't understand why you're so against the idea when it was clearly the arc from the start but: Cade. Came. Good. He sorted himself out, he defeated Darth Krayt, he did his ancestor proud.

It took him a long time to get there, repeated proddings from Luke, a verbal whupping or two from his uncle, a reminder from his father - but, he did get there. Cade could have easily fallen completely, given up and indeed become a drug-addled drooling dark-sider. He chose not to be.

That's not to say Cade didn't infuriate readers, I can still recall the response to Legacy #35, at that point, most of us who read it did conclude: Yep, he's a selfish idiot and Bantha should have beaten the crap out of him! And yet, it is an accurate portrayal of a blasted and broken individual, something I think we rarely see in SW in terms of heroes. Equally rare is the notion of a slow but steady turnaround that builds to something major.

 

The question is here . . . why did they do it? Let´s face it, it wasn´t a creative decision to end Legacy (it wasn´t really ready) and it also wasn´t a financial one (it ran universes etter than everything they have right now). Sometimes I think it might have been too popular. It is a bit as if they wish for mediocricy. Good plots and creative ideas have virtually to sneak in through the backdoor. But the question remains: Why stop Legacy? I guess there was some reason, some line of thinking within LA that needed them to not define that period anymore than it already is.

Then again, there is that theory that everything being obviously better in telling a Star Wars tale than TCW (which is a lot) get´s killed off. I consider this to be a conspiracy-theory and nothing else . . . but it is entertaining and as it is so often with conspiracy theories . . . it explains so much . . .

 

Bah. Shenanigans, I say, shenanigans.

Sinre, you know as well as I do that Star Wars was already over ten seconds into ANH.

 

I think think most of us, at least deep down, crave stories down the timeline - it's the psychological force behind reading - we want to know what will happen. At the same time - that's where we risk our greatest disappointments because what if the future offered doesn't live up to our hopes? I think that's why people are so divided about NJO & followers - we crave new adventures - but each adventure also diminishes the happy ending of the last one, almost par automatic. Thus we psychologically have to start from scratch again for every story - and that can get very tiring.

Reading fill-in-the-blank stories doesn't challange us the same way - but it doesn't necessarily reward similarly either. The OT was very much a happy ending story - and most of us who love it, love it exactly for this quality, wrapped in a fun, modern package. With the introduction of the EU and latest of Legacy, our hopes that Luke or Anakin's brought some final balance to the galaxy, have been dismantled piece by piece. The good side of it, is, of course, that we get ever more stories. And I don't believe for a second that Legacy is the final word. Why would that be? It's just the end for time being. But LucasArts is an established business by now, and as long as there's readers, they will continue to break new ground. They can go back - and they're smart to do so - but there will soon build a pressure to continue as well.

Personally, it's the big three era that interests me, and I will no doubt continue to read long after the reasonable quantity of stories you actually can push into the life span of human characters has overdone its limits. When it comes to SW, I'll always demand the impossible.

 

The2ndQuest: My contradictions/inconsistencies comment wasn't directed at Zahn. It was directed at all the retcons that litter SW in general in an attempt to 'fix' obvious contradictions and such. I still prefer that books be written in timeline order but at least now it makes sense why Outbound Flight is the most recent published but the earliest in the timeline.

There is a Chiss on the cover of Survivor's Quest. Who is it, please? The only Chiss char I know of so far is Thrawn.

 

Formbi. Or Chaf'orm'bintrano, if you prefer.

 

A brief break for a few years is a good thing. Give the Brain Trust enough time to think of something good instead of randomly charging down the line.

 

Arawn_Fenn: Thanks for that. I am quite fascinated by Chiss names. They look unpronounceable but *very* cool when completely written out. I hope to learn about them as I read Thrawn's arc. I love names in general, too.

 

This is going to be a touch long and, in all likelihood very rambling, so please try and bear with me.

Star Wars isn't over, though I see where Sinrebirth is coming from with the limited, literal definition. Where I think the problem lies is that we're here, posting on a Literature forum, so for us -- I think it's stuck in limbo, neither quite dead nor alive yet. Even if you look in just the last week or so, there are articles on the New York Times (link here) about how sociologically-ingrained Star Wars is to our culture at this point. So STAR WARS is still very much quite alive and not over.

However, and there's really no way around this, the books seem to be floundering in tone. And I mean this with no disrespect to either the Del Rey staff (whom I hold in very high regard with at least attempting to do right by both the fans and the franchise) nor the writers (who have consistently produced much higher quality material in recent years, even if I disagree mightily with some of the content) -- but it seems like with the current strategy, they are stuck in a no-win situation (and not a fun, Kobeyashi Maru-type thing either).

Going back an era or two, you had the original trilogy with the Han Solo Adventures, the Lando Calrissian Adventures, Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Marvel Comics -- with Marvel being the only thing to continue after the films (yes, technically some of the Lando books came out after ROTJ in 1983). Then came the WEG to Bantam-era, which had a very definite feel to it since two things happened:

1) WEG defined exactly how a space opera worked (it's capital G good vs. capital E evil, talk about atrocities don't show them except in abstract, etc.), and
2) Bantam (and the authors) worked extraordinarily close with WEG to use the same overall rules for the universe, the tone, the canon, etc. all managed by LFL.

Now we are in the Del Rey-era which began with the New Jedi Order (for the time being I'm going to focus on timeline-accelerating items; I'll cover Clone Wars, etc. a bit later). The New Jedi Order attempted to address the complaints of the "stagnant" feel by "removing the protective bubble" and make the universe darker, edgier and more dangerous. Chewie was killed, Vergere appeared (after Rogue Planet) and we've moved forward. Here is where we come to what I believe is the crux of the problem:

Because reaction to the New Jedi Order as a whole was mixed online, but praise for The Unifying Force was near-universal it would make a certain amount of logic if the plan was to try and bridge later books and/or series between the two groups of fans (because the New Jedi Order, for all that I found wrong with it, brought in a TON of new, fresh blood/fans to the book side of the media tie-in franchise by all accounts). This is where I think they went off the rails.

One of the ideas that the New Jedi Order experimented with was the nature of the Force and how own's actions mattered therein. It didn't help that Jacen was a complete douchebag in Vector Prime and Balance Point, culminating in the ultimate in selfish, anti-Jedi sequence (legitimately, however, a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Jacen: him vs. Tsavong Lah) -- deciding that his beliefs were no longer valid because someone close to him was in danger (his mother). But for all intents and purposes you had the Spock (Jacen), the McCoy (Jaina) and the Kirk (Anakin). This all culminated after they did three things: killed Anakin, turned Jaina "dark" in one of the worst seequences of the New Jedi Order and had Vergere instruct Jacen in Traitor. The "Vergere version of the Force" was sort of the main dividing line in the New Jedi Order; on one side, the people like Caine who were suddenly validated and thought this the perfectly logical extrapolation since it matched the nuanced worldview of "shades of grey" in the universe and a complete anathema to

 

I thought it already did?

 

Well, lurking for long all those threats and I had that idea a while ago. But I am not so sure. I think we fans, me for sure, sometimes forget that they are a business first and I think since Lucas was a bit hurt by reactions to his movies . . . as he explains again and again lately . . . this business changed.

LucasArts got big projects. The things that cost 50 million dollars+ - like The Clone Wars, The Force Unleashed, The Old Republic, The PT . . . major projects, that they cannot allow to fail. Then they got small stuff. Comics, articles, books. No major income, licensed out to . . . well . . . anybody able to pay hte licensing and assuring them he won´t ruin things for them.

So I think it is naive and simply not realistic to believe that a lot of authors suddenly think "Oh I wanna do TOR novel, how kewl!" or something like that. They aren´t sitting at this table and ask themselves "What is the best story?"

The very rules they work by, the ones about Merchandise and how to treat it, forbid that. Maybe every few month to test new waters, rise their reputation among fans or such thing. Most of the time they sit there and look what will work well as a tie-in with their big projects. The big project guys will hand down suggestions, have vetos and certainly never give authors authroity to change anything about their products. They got the say.

What does this lead to? Well Star Wars turns away from a storytelling saga as we understood the EU once, but turns towards a merchandising line of products. Yuuzhan Vong never got a movie, did they? Not even a mention in TCW. Legacy got stopped. Even TFU. But look . . . how many "never-read-by-anyone" Clone Wars comics are there by now?

They try to hype their big projects at any cost, which is because those have a greater range of profit and greater risks than any of those "small comics" we all love to read so much.

 

Why would they be mentioned in TCW? The most you could possibly hope for would be a reference to Vergere's message in Rogue Planet, but I don't see why that would come up. The Citadel arc subtly implying that Anakin and Tarkin may have had a previous encounter is probably all the Rogue Planet tie-in we're ever going to get in TCW.

 

I think the biggest problem is that LOTF was horrid, and FOTJ, while not as bad, has the same schizophrenic continuity issues (and the obsessive tendency to bring up continuity for no reason at all that plagues the EU) that "one series, several authors" will always do. We would get on Karen Traviss about this, but it seems they all do it.

 

Misleading thread title. How do we know Legacy is the end? Where is this information taken from? I would imagine the Dark Horse guys wouldn't mind returning to continue Cade's stories, and if not, someone else may well.

Not to mention that the time-line has already moved ahead of 'Apocalypse', ie. 'Mercy Kill', with the books. And the other books we've had recently, such as 'Riptide', seem to be pulling us closer to the Legacy story-lines and characters, so it's only a matter of time before they go beyond.

 

The films are Lucasfilm. TCW is Lucasfilm Animation. The books are LucasBooks. LucasArts makes video games. I understand that there are a lot of different departments, but it's not that hard to figure out which one you're talking about.

 

Really, though, they're all the same.

Does it matter if the small details are off? They are all divisions of Lucasfilm, LTD. Potentially LucasBooks may be the only one two levels deep (can't tell if it's a function of Lucas Licensing or the parent company.

It doesn't negate his point, if the one he's trying to make is that the focus of the parent company and/or Lucas will be on the ones with seemingly much, much larger budgets and advertising expenses. Even if you or I disagree with that point, there's not much point trying to differentiate starfighters off the mothership...

 

It's a good point, and I personally don't disagree. However, some semblance of a medium-term strategy might be beneficial to all projects, big and small - as canon purists on here often point out. Keep your universe coherent and it will last longer. But we have a headstrong director, over retirement age and now bearing a personal grudge, so we can safely forget about that.

 

The whole thing blows.
I don't mind Legacy as long as it gets retconned into a mirror universe or something. Because as things stands right now, we have nothing good to look forward too. The entire century of 44 - 144 is pointless. No matter what they do, boom massacre at Ossus, destroying everything. The future is set in stone. People needs something to hope for. They need a future. Right now, there is no future. ABsolutely nothing in that century matters.

They should have let Legacy end with a Skywalker or Solo baby to carry on the tradition. I say baby because frankly, Cade SUCKs so much it's no longer sucking. I feel to empathy toward him nor any of his crew. Marasiah was okay but then she went out of the picture and just became a Jaina clone. Neither of his darker skin'd co pilot nor his pink engineer can carry a candle to Leia or Chewie. They have no literary appeal for me. I don't root for any of them like I rooted for Mara or Callista.

 

I wasn't disagreeing with anything - seeing people say "LucasArts" just bugs me.

 

"The entire era 50-19 BBY is pointless. No matter what they do, boom Order 66." Just because we know the endpoint already (which is still a rather long ways off) doesn't mean we can't get meaningful and great stories leading up to it.