Lit Sword of the Jedi by Christie Golden

Rewriting post-NJO is polishing a turd.

 

I haven't re-read that since shortly after it came out. Perhaps I should again.

The thing is none of the deaths made sense - Omas could have stepped down, Shevu was pointless, Pellaeon is still WTF, Jacen shouldn't have died (though Caedus needed to), Mara relies on Jacen going dark... You could rewrite without any of them. FOTJ's injuries etc from Abeloth battles actually make sense given what they're facing. Otherwise no sense.

Skywalkers and solos on opposite sides of confederation makes some sense in the first couple books. And it actually kinda worked. Very little else about the family dynamic did though.

What's interesting though is some of the plot points (confederacy, Abeloth, Kesh sith) were good ideas but VERY poorly executed.

It may not be salvageable, but now I'm curious.

Anyway having derailed this thread enough, I'll be making a fan fic thread sometime in the next week to continue this discussion.(if anyone was interested in that idea, PM me if you want to chat)

 

Darth_Henning Good Luck. I've gone back and forth on liking the trilogy over the years. Omas was ruined after the NJO. I miss Shevu and Lekauf a lot. It was time for Pellaeon to die, the way it happened was terrible but it was time. The Big 3 should be out of the picture imo so I'm not too bothered that Mara's death happened, just how it did. That was terrible. I'm torn on the split. The ideas were good but poorly executed alright.

 

I stopped reading FOTJ when Kenth died. Just put down the book right there and never finished the series. Not because I was any major fan of Kenth's, but I had had enough of characters with pointless deaths contributing to a nonsensical plot.

I was hoping Sword of the Jedi might get me reading books on that end of the SW timeline again. Maybe it would have redeemed some of those silly post-TUF plots and finally done something worthwhile with Jaina, because killing Jacen was certainly not that. *sigh*

 

This, this, this, this, this, this bloody this. Each character has a role they should fill and in LOTF/FOTJ none of them bloody fit the right role. I don't have a problem with Wedge siding with Corellia against the GA on principle...if the rebellion had actually been one resembling the Rebel Alliance, instead of the Separatists. As it is, it just makes Wedge (and Han) look like they put homeworld above the good of the galaxy. IMO, they either should've a) had Han and Wedge side with Corellia and have the rebellion be more Rebel Alliance style, or b) had it Separatist style and had Han and Wedge dead set against it.

As for Jacen, he should've been the introspective "how can this war end" character. He should've gone on peace talks with Leia to speak with Prime Minister Saxan and the other leaders of the Confederacy (Thrackan should've been killed by Han, not Mirta). Gejjen and Teppler and the others can still have a role. Jaina should've been a military character (as she was in the book) but she should've been more heavily featured than she was in the first three books; out of them, only in Tempest did she have a memorable role, and that's sad.

Luke and Mara should've had two roles: teaching Ben and, if they were still going to feature Sith, then they should've hunted Lumiya down (as they did in Tempest). Ben should've had at least two friends with him throughout the series, similar to how Jacen had Danni after DW, and Jaina had Jag after the EL duology. Maybe not a love interest, but at least a constant companion-type character.

Boba and Mirta's role, I personally did not mind, even though it did not line up with the main characters' story at all in Sacrifice. That's the only change I'd make, I guess; make them more important to the overall story. And I think I'd still include Jaina being trained by Boba, but I would have had her, Luke, and Boba all training together–that way Luke cancels out Boba's more violent tendencies while Boba cancels out Luke's meeker side.

So yeah, there was a lot of potential in LOTF, to say nothing of FOTJ. Both of these series could've been truly phenomenal if they'd gone...you know...any other direction. Any.

 

For me, Legacy of the Force is a "jump the shark" moment for the ongoing EU story -- though I guess you might have an argument that Dark Nest was, I'd say it was The Joiner King through Betrayal collectively and downhill from there. It's unsalvageable. I gave FOTJ a shot, but it's just not fixable. And the foundation of LOTF is Darth Caedus, so if you remove that from the equation, you're left with no Legacy of the Force. And the premise that the galaxy was fractured and Jacen united it -- against him -- is inherently faulty. The galaxy was already united against the Yuuzhan Vong. If that didn't last for the sake of this story, why would it last this time around? That's the issue for the 2GCW.

Plus Sith.


I appreciate the unironic working title of "Sith Rising" though.

 

So DigitalMessiah, instead of LOTF, what would you have done?

 

Revanfan1

One-off stories for Jacen, Jaina, Luke, et al. in the same vein as LSATSOM, TG, SQ, etc. Ignoring the issues with LOTF's plot altogether, I think it was a mistake to follow up a five year, nineteen book series with a three year, nine book series. Granted, there was slightly under two years and a trilogy between the two series and nothing else, but the primary problem which people seem to be reacting to now is having had the Big 3 and co. locked down under more or less one writer for all this time. Even the NJO wasn't dominated by Luceno or any one writer. If multiple writers all worked on their own one-offs, like Zahn doing a Luke and Mara novel, Stover or Luceno doing a Jacen novel, and Allston doing a Jaina/Wraith/Rogue Squadron novel, you've got characters all developing collectively under different writers and you don't get something like the Vergere retcon and you don't get Darth Caedus and you don't get the Jedi order coalescing into a monolithic entity in which the Jedi all sit around in the Jedi temple on Coruscant and take orders from unnecessarily antagonistic politicians as a source of conflict.

As to what those smaller stories should be about? I could probably come up with some interesting ideas -- I already had mentioned one a few months ago about Jacen having a Yuuzhan Vong companion that acts as a foil for him. But I'm a phony fan that wouldn't work for Star Wars for free.

 

I hate to admit it, but you are right.

DN by itself? tolerable. Add LOTF to the end and HOOOO boy. FOTJ was better, but stemmed from a poor prior series so has numerous flaws.

Remove Darth Caedus and you could have an interesting series about other things, but yeah, it does remove the whole "Legacy of the Force" title from making sense.

 

I don't think Dark Nest is tolerable for reasons which would utterly derail the thread were I to go into them.

 

Fair. May be a difference of opinion there. Though having not read it for a decade, my opinion may have changed.

Will add that to the re-read list for the aforementioned project

 

I only read The Swarm War out of all the DNT books and really liked it for the campy Star Wars vs. Starship Troopers pictures it drew in my head. The hive mind thing has been done once or a hundred times before but its application in DNT, at least in the final book, wasn't too bad. Denning definitely could've left the Killiks behind at the end of DNT for the benefit of succeeding stories. I don't think the Chiss or the Killiks had gotten a ton of exposure up to that point, and DNT was a much welcome break from more Imps or Vong.

Then LOTF happened.

 

LOTF and FOTJ could've been so much better...

 

Basically anything could be better. The Star Wars saga, LotR, anything. I find myself actually enjoying FotJ and LotF.

 

Bad premise leads to bad series. No premise leads to bad series.

 

I love FotJ. Every January I have a tradition of reading the whole series.

 

So you've done this exactly once? 'Cuz there's only been one January so far where the whole series has been available.

Seriously, I'll read it again someday just do a review. But I will dread plodding through it from Allies onward.

 

I look at the Vong War like a World War 2 thing, and the Swarm War as the Korean War. You know, Star Wars over the years went through a lot of changes and some of it was good to some and some of it was bad to others. But, I for one really liked all the post ROTJ stuff. I would love to debate this and say some of it is good and bad, but after what 2015 it won't matter cause Star Wars will have a new movie and the movie is post ROTJ and the stuff that came before will be re-written. Unless they go 50 years in the future which we know won't happen

 

No. This January will be my third time doing it.

 

Don't think of it as "rewritten." Think of it as "revealed to be Luke Skywalker's long coma fantasy after he drunkenly fell over a guardrail during the Ewok celebration at the end of Episode VI."

We're talking a pretty long fall.

 

Really? Was Apocalypse even out in January 2012?

 

ARCs were available.

 

FOTJ for the most part is pretty mediocre, I liked Outcast, Omen and Allies. The others were just simply boring, I didn't even make it through Vortex. Right now I'm on book #8 but I haven't had much time to read it.

 

Apocalypse came out in March of 2012. I started off with Outcast and by the time I had got up to Apocalypse it was around April, and therefore already out.

 

Smart.