Should the NJO really have had such a "clean" ending and resolution?

So the NJO was pretty much focused all around the Vong. There were several characteristics that made them so alien and so wrong, and I felt that they were important plot devices to the series, something that the ending involving Zonama Sekot doesn't seem to do justice to.

Firstly, they use organic creatures in place of mechanical technology, secondly they come from outside the galaxy, where space travel is supposed to be impossible. Finally, they're invisible to the Force. In a way, these things (especially the third) in a way add up to an entity that were supposed to shatter the Jedi's belief and faith in the Force, or at least this was how I feel the series was portrayed to be aiming at.

In the same way that Luke Skywalker's world is shattered when he finds out that his father is not dead but is actually the man behind Darth Vader, I felt that the same treatment was going to be done to the Jacen, Jaina, and the new generation of Jedi. Having grown up being taught that the Force was universal, the fact that they're now facing an enemy that doesn't exist in the Force at all has to shatter that reality and leave them treading in unfamiliar waters.

So what if there was no Zonama Sekot and no Vong homeworld to come around and provide such a clear-cut resolution and convenient explanation to this dilemma? What if Luke's fears came to pass and the Jedi had to slaughter every last Vong as they drove them from the Core back out to the galactic rim? The Jedi's belief in peaceful resolution to conflict would also have been shaken to its foundations and the Vong would have remained an abyss and an abnormality not only in the Force, but the fabric of the GFFA's reality (perhaps not unlike Darth Nihilus).

Any thoughts? Would this have made for a better plotline for the NJO?

 

There's barely enough Vong to fit a Jumbojet. They had tens of thousands of warships, all sparsely manned because their bridge crew is all telepathic "automated." Massive 10km starships barely fit 5000 crew. Starbuck's attitude, they make a big deal about losing 10,000 soldiers because they're species probably numbers barely 100,000 all up---and that's a super generous estimate!

 

They probably had billions of soldiers actually. It's just by the time that they got to Coruscant, they were dying out.

 

If they had to beat them back towards the galactic rim, it would have taken many more years for the war to end. It would also have cost more young Jedi their lives and might have ripped apart the Solo-Skywalker family forever if one more of their children died so soon after Anakin. So...I'm happy with the way things went.

 

We'll probably never know as NJO plated games with this to prevent fans working out the size of the enemy, thus it goes from invading horde to thinly stretched from book to book. DW cleared the mess up, along with a lot of others, but the actual answer? Who knows?

As to the Q: Yes. After 19 books, there should be a clear ending and resolution.

 

A clear ending and resolution would have been fine. But then they put all the Vong on a bus, and hit the reset button on just about everything except Chewie and Anakin. (Yuzzhan'tar? What's that? )

 

Well quite, I loathed (and still do) DN and especially TJK.

 

Tassadar's sacrifice, you loath Joiner King? Karsa take you!

 

Can't touch me, Icarium owes me.

 

Wait, who said space travel outside the galaxy was *impossible*? I'm sure that would have been news to the crew of Outbound Flight (which was entered into the canon long before the idea of the Vong).

*Challenge*, not shatter. If it actually "shattered" their faith in the Force -- i.e. it turned out that the Force wasn't a real metaphysical entity after all, just a bizarre local phenomenon due to mutations unique to life in the GFFA -- then the story would've deserved the "IT DESTROYED CANON" status it already has with many purists anyway.

No. For me, it would've been a reason to throw the book against the wall.

Quite. Maybe for hardcore fans of the NJO it's lamentable that the NJO didn't basically erase the Star Wars EU forever and create a Whole New EU that would revolve around the NJO's concepts and themes forever. Not for me.

 

Well, isn't that what happened, at least if you ask a dark side denier?

 

So what if there was no Zonama Sekot and no Vong homeworld to come around and provide such a clear-cut resolution and convenient explanation to this dilemma? What if Luke's fears came to pass and the Jedi had to slaughter every last Vong as they drove them from the Core back out to the galactic rim? The Jedi's belief in peaceful resolution to conflict would also have been shaken to its foundations and the Vong would have remained an abyss and an abnormality not only in the Force, but the fabric of the GFFA's reality (perhaps not unlike Darth Nihilus).

Any thoughts? Would this have made for a better plotline for the NJO?

I think I like that idea, personally.

 

After Nineteen books a good clean ending was great. It was a great series but its time to move on. Why does it seem everyone wants things to have sort of a cliffhanger ending to everything. A good clean ending is good for the soul.

 

19 books = ending required, 'nuff said.

I'm not sure I'd have wanted it to drag on any longer. If they'd wanted the story to extend to the Vong genocide, then they'd probably have been best consolidating the war we saw down and having had the 19 books cover the genocide too, not stretch it out to 30 or whatever.

If there's one thing the recent series have really bugged me about, its the lack of endings. Even a dark ending like ROTS is an ending, but they haven't really even had those. What bugs me about not having endings is its a cocktail for disappointment should future plans not pan out the way editors and publishers intend.

If Scary Movie taught people anything its that cancelling something before you finish the story makes people crazy.

I blame my personal insanity on the final episode of Dungeons & Dragons never being made. I wanted to know what happened to Venger, dagnabbit.

Personally I always felt the Vong resembled the Exile better. As far as we know, Nihilus never really turned his back on the Force, per se, he just became... a sort of insatiable hole. A, um, Force black hole, to play further word games.

I would agree with you though to at least some extent (I liked the NJO so I wouldn't have wanted it to have been massively different), but I'd have enjoyed a bit more philosophical pondering a la Traitor, which I never personally felt was conveyed that much. I always felt the Vong simply confused the Jedi more than they really scared them.

After KOTOR2, I think it would have been quite fun for the Vong to have had the same effect the Exile had when she returned to Coruscant: to have terrified the Jedi by possibility of their sheer existence. The Force is life, so how could you have life without the Force? By the Jedi's understanding, the Vong should have been dead already.

It would have been interesting if rather than the Vong being "understood" as a strange alien race that early, they could have played with the audience IU and OOU as to whether the Vong were "just some weird aliens" or genuinely some freakish Force demons. Though, I expect even if such ideas got discussed, they probably got thrown out with the Sith invasion story.

Of course, nearly everything that I'd have enjoyed is based on retcon arguments of concepts created after much of it was penned. We didn't have midichlorians until TPM, so the Vong were conceived a little early for them and the "inability to exist without the Force" idea to play into the story that heavily. And KOTOR2 was obviously not until after the NJO was even finished.

But oh well. Its always easier to think up interesting ideas in retrospect.

 

. . .but the fabric of the GFFA's reality (perhaps not unlike Darth Nihilus).


I didn't write that; I was just agreeing with Alpha Red.

 

My bad. Post edited.

 

Same here. TUF was an excellent ending given what Luceno had to work with, but did the NJO realise its full potential, with all the space it had to work with? Definitely not. What should have been an epic war story was hamstrung by a lack of conviction - NJO was at its best when it felt like a war - DT, BP, parts of SBS, EL, DW and TUF - that's 8 books out of 19.

 

NJO didn't do a bad job though, we got some truly fantastic books out of it that we're still arguing about. And by the time TUF was there we already had hints of what was coming after, didn't we? No one was 100% what it was which is why Luceno left it so open.

IIRC he was inspired by The Return of the King.

 

It depends on how you look at it. As a series of novels, the NJO most definitely needed a "clean" ending and resolution, because people who've been following the series for years want some kind of closure. Yes, they're probably going to pick up the next books that come out, but Star Wars isn't a major continuing series in the sense that every book follows up on the last book. It's a series of storylines that play out within each contained series of books.

On the flipside, the NJO as a major conflict within the GFFA actually did not have a "clean" resolution. Though the majority of the Vong surrendered, there were still many who kept fighting, as TUF tells us. The rest of the galaxy has to pick up the pieces and rebuild, and life will go on. Since Star Wars is a continuing history, nothing ever really ends. Unfortunately, there isn't a Holonet News channel on our TV that broadcasts news from the GFFA to us 24/7 (but if there was, I'd never be more than ten feet from a TV ever) so we don't get the day-to-day stories of what goes on. Instead we get specific events as they unfold, and so obviously readers are going to want some kind of closer at the end of one book, let alone nineteen.