Lit The "Bring Back Legends" movement -- good or bad for the fandom?

eh, the NJO annoying me is mildly on topic.

It's the fact Legends had its upside and downside.

Not everyone can agree what should have been canon and not.

 

First, FS assumed I haven't read TUF, I did. I can comment on what I read and what I hear.

 

Much as I like Malazan, it's playing ' we must redeem The Crippled God' card in the last book, when said Crippled God has, up to that point been behind the bulk of the trouble in the series, is similar to how NJO handled the redemption of the Vong. Brought in at the last minute and was criminally short-changed.

Which is why, despite my dislike of NJO as a story, I find Legacy's handling of the consequences from it so interesting. That it takes time for the Vong to even comprehend the wounds they dealt the galaxy, but upon understanding, decades later, their successors seek to offer restitution to the galaxy, with Jedi backing? That's a great idea.

 

For others. Not you specifically. Hypothetically if someone reads up to Balance Point, you or anyone wouldn't know about Zonama Sekot. Summaries can be good and bad, You get the board picture but all of the minor details?

 

Yeah, but in some exceptional cases, the broad summary is better, I mean, if someone offered you a summary of Crucible over your actual reading experience you'd take it, wouldn't you FS?

 

I'm not in a position to say with absolute certainty that these TOR stories were written recently, but simply by dint of how they're being presented (the TOR developers' blog) I'm pretty sure they're new material, as in written after the Legends announcement.

 

Depends. I might get sickened reading about Han getting the stuffing beat out of him on 3 occasions but I think I'd need that extra in-depth description to swear it off entirely.

 

The origins of this thread is...a derailed thread. Mission definitely accomplished.

I've become less interested in this thread as the arguments become better reasoned and thought out. #bringbringthefanaticallegendspsychos

 

I'm not sure if I should actually engage in NJO discussion. I had no idea Charlemagne19 wasn't a fan.

 

If it makes you feel any better, I'm entirely capable of judging a series by multiple criteria rather than saying, "THE NJO SUCKS." I can overall say I'm not a fan of it and wish it wasn't canon (wish granted!) but that doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of enjoyable qualities to it.

The Unifying Force is one of my favorite Star Wars books and as controversial as it was, Traitor (and later Shatterpoint) is one of the most important books to me in my life (and I owe Matt Stover a beer if I ever meet him for making me re-evaluate a lot of things about my life and morality). I didn't HATE any of the books leading up to Destiny's Way and I felt Destiny's Way did a lot of things which reversed bad decisions made earlier.

I also can honestly say that I am very-very upset that R.A. Salvatore was scared away from writing future EU novels because I loved what he did in the first book and felt his style meshed well with what I wanted from the NJO.

I also do respect the attempt to do something different with Star Wars. It just wasn't my cup of tea in the end since, like Legacy of the Force, its problems were not with the writing or the authors but the premise bothering me.

 

Looking at what you've said, it's similar to what I've seen Jedi Ben say were his problems as well, in addition to some other people that don't dismiss it outright but have legitimate beefs with the story.

When the series was being published, I was pretty lukewarm on it myself. It was destroying everything awesome: all the Bantam planets and characters, not to mention Coruscant, which I found really troubling that we were finally introduced to it visually in the prequels and then it gets completely ruined (and then it got better). I even agree that it's stupid on the part of the New Republic to self-destruct, in a way, but I also recognize that this was a trait that the New Republic demonstrated throughout the Bantam run, nearly fulfilling it during the Caamas crisis, so it also makes logical sense to me that it would follow through with that when something a thousand times worse than that happens. It's one of those things like where a character does something stupid and it pisses you off as a story decision. Sometimes there's actually a really good reason for it, and I feel like you have to bite your tongue when that's the case. When it's for the sake of plot and there's no good reason for it, that's when it's a problem. See: Caedus. Of course, it's wholly subjective, considering there's people that feel that Caedus was adequately justified. They're wrong, of course.

I suppose the tl;dr is the series was something that I was on the fence about until the very end, and IMO the payoff justified the decisions that were made over the course of the five years.

 

I also agree that probably the biggest problem in retrospect with the NJO was the rather transparently plot-driven nature of the war. The Yuuzhan Vong constantly win without much real reason for the first half, then the tide turns also without much real reason.

 

Disagree. They win early on because the New Republic shows the same traits it showed in the Zahn penned Bantam novels of fracturing under external pressure, e.g. Fey'lya in TTT and Bothawui in HOT. They also win early on, and start to lose in the second half for the same reason, because Tsavong Lah actually wasn't particularly good as a strategist, and just zerged the New Republic, so they ran out of reserves entirely in Destiny's Way. They couldn't continue to fight offensively without being unable to defend somewhere else. This problem also coincides with the fact that they suddenly had a lot more territory to defend.

That was also the New Republic's problem: what to defend. Disparate interests fractured the collective defense. Things became organized later on in the war, when there wasn't much left to lose anyway.

 

The problem with that is twofold:

First, several of the individual books or two-parters prior to Destiny's Way end with what are actually draws or pyrrhic victories for the New Republic (Ithor and Fondor, notably). Yet somehow whenever the next book comes up, the Vong have taken over even more of the galaxy. And they do have limited resources, so the fact that the war just keeps turning in their direction regardless of what actually happens onscreen really does feel like they just have an "I win" button that they eventually lose.

Second, I feel like the New Republic's self-destructive tendencies from the Bantam era were overplayed by the NJO. Part of it feels like a natural extrapolation into an era where there's one continuing threat instead of a lot of episodic "adventures", but some things feel really arbitrary. The one that always stands out is Fey'lya - pretty much everything he does as Chief of State feels like exactly what you'd expect from him given his previous appearances, but those previous appearances also make it really hard to understand how he became Chief of State save by authorial fiat. When last seen, he was pretty discredited as a major leader, and while seven years is a long time in politics, the fact that we never actually saw him make a comeback makes it look a lot like a case of "Idiot Ball". Meanwhile, people who did act as stabilizing forces and competent leaders are, again somewhat arbitrarily, often played down or just plain unpersoned ("Ponc who?").

 

I suppose that's a consequence of this being a massive galactic war which we simply don't see a majority of, but merely a lot of pivotal battles, or even simply battles that the Big 3 or the Solo children are witnesses to or participants of. I suppose that is a flaw of the series, that frequently we're told about the Yuuzhan Vong taking territory without being shown it. Though we are shown how powerful they are. I think the way it's presented fits with what we later learn about their war strategy, but that's my opinion.

I don't think it's unbelievable for a democratic system that we're shown is driven more by politics than by pragmatism for Fey'lya to be CoS, or better leaders to be cast aside. Look what happened to Ackbar in TTT, for instance.

My view of it is that at some point during the Bantam/New Republic era, the Rebellion went from being glued together by opposition to the Empire, to a point where the Empire became sufficiently weak, and the New Republic became sufficiently massive that this uniting principle was no longer strong enough to keep things together, so it became prone to these political struggles that are endemic to it and the Old Republic, which are what the Empire was a reaction to and why the common people would support such an institution, at least initially.

 

For me, the best way to put it is that one of my responses to TUF: If this was the destination all along, what the hell kind of map were they using?

As to the NR, I think that demonstrates one of DR's tendencies to take the negative route. They did it with the NR, by deciding that the Caamas Crisis was not a wake-up call. To invoke Tony Stark as a reply: "I respectfully disagree!" They did it with Jacen by deciding he would be a drug-seeking super-hippy willing to burn the entire galaxy so long as he got his high, m'kay?

The other element to NR though is I don't buy Fey'Lya as this suicidally self-interested politician that NJO renders him as. Wants power? Yes. Will do nearly anything to get it? Yes. Nearly anything to keep it? Yes. Wants to stay on top so much he'll burn it all down in the face of an enemy instead of ripping said enemy a new one in order to stay on top even longer? Nope.

But, given the route they decided on, Destiny's Way, politically, was a gigantic loss of nerve. NR senators should have been lynched in the streets, been barricading their homes and being very, very scared due to either being corrupt or being utter failures that got trillions killed. Instead, they all get given a pass!

Would there have been a good solution? I'm sceptical, NJO had boxed itself into a corner and DW was it's get-out-of-jail-free card.

What mystifies me still is that, having had the balls to stick with NJO all the way to the end, DR then jettison the consequences of it out the nearest airlock the first chance they get. Hence my liking the Legacy comics...

I think the way to read NJO is to not engage with it seriously, treat it as a Hollywood Blockbuster story, with smidgens of Bay-splosions, Snyder-level destruction and angst, lots of angst.

 

From what I can gather of the NJO era (I only read Vector Prime), the Vong story was a mixed bag which contained some character deaths that people hated, but also included the Vong which people liked. Apart from the Legacy comics and the occasional stand alone book, I get the impression that everything thereafter was near universally loathed, which I guess explains why the Bring Back Legends group isn't bigger. I think had this reboot happened earlier, either pre Vong or just post Vong, there would have been far more rage, but the opportunity to get rid of some disliked parts of Canon, and the feeling that this part of the storyline was not going anywhere exciting tempered that flame.

 

The thing about Borsk is, he was never INCOMPETENT. Well, sometimes he was but he was basically portrayed as a humanoid jackal who pounced on weakness but was able to work well at knowing what people wanted.

I can't imagine Borsk would react in any way to the situation with the Vong except, "kill these guys to protect my stuff."

It also would have been nice just for them to explain some of the changes, like, "Oh, Borsk was elected on a campaign of anti-human bias and tax reductions."

I agree, 100%.

That's part of the problem with the New Jedi Order in that the consequences are simulatenously shrugged off but too big to ignore. 365 trillion people being killed is equivalent to 50,000 Earth-sized worlds being destroyed or, on a basic idea of every planet in the Star Wars galaxy roughly averaging about that with some being Coruscant and some being Tatooine.

While on a rough average, that would mean only the equivalent to 35,000,000 people on Earth being killed or equivalent to far less than the number killed in fighting during World War 2, it kind of drastically undercuts the importance of the Empire given they destroyed Alderaan as their most terrible action.

The Empire destroyed a lot of worlds in the Outer Rim territories but, really, I can't see them having done more than a couple of hundred. Likewise, it's all done to faceless masses. Darth Krayt only destroys a couple of worlds in Star Wars: Legacy but the consequences for what happens to Dac are a horrific long-standing nightmare for the people of the galaxy.

Coruscant is fixed next book.

I also felt the sheer horror of the Yuuzhan Vong's actions kind of deaded the reader to what they were capable of. If the Yuuzhan Vong destroy all technology, droids, civilization, torture everyone they find, and sacrifice them then they really can't be treated as anything but the absolute worst threat to everyone ever done.
And with that context, you run into some severely Un-Star-Wars-ish things. Like Alpha-Red is something which should be TOTALLY EVIL but the lack of the deployment killed perhaps how many more people than the Yuuzhan Vong exist in numbers? That's not the kind of number crunching which should exist in this setting but it was the kind which the scale of the destruction started to call into question for.

If the Vong are say, a trillion people, versus 30 trillion they kill from DW to TUF, the morality starts to skew in odd directions.

There's also the resolution which is very-very Star Wars but something which runs into the Darth Vader effect. A lot of people have trouble with Darth Vader's redemption
in real-life. I don't because the Force is all-forgiving. However, the Yuuzhan Vong kind of do get a royal case of escaping karma. Real-life is often this way and I know peace is often messy (to quote Littlefinger, you only make peace with your messy) but it felt like their redemption was a light switch.
I don't think I would have had nearly the same level of problem if the Shamed Ones had revolted to help overthrow the Warrior Caste because they're an oppressed victim of the Vong, too, but the ending just has them throwin in the same situation as before--but now on Zonoma Seskot.

There's also the fact killing the Supreme Overlord is the magic bullet in the same way killing the Emperor was (but WASN'T in the EU). All I can think of regarding it is, "So, this means Luke could have ended the war at any point by killing Shimmra?" It's kind of like the plot of Revan where Revan and the Exile forget they're genius tacticians and decide to become assassins instead only in reverse.
It seems, literally, we just needed Riddick to go and kill the bad guy and take over.

I guess, in short version, I think they really over-compensated trying to make an irredeemable bad guy and I felt lik I was reading villains from Warhammer 40K. The thing is, I love WH40K but it is the pollar opposite universe from Star Wars.

I think you're more or less right that a lot of Literature fans were suffering fatigue from NJO, DN, LOTF, and FOTJ. Jacen Solo was a character who distinguished himself as THE flagship character of the New Jedi Order and having him turned into the villain only to be killed by Jaina Solo then SIDELINE Jaina for Ben Skywalker kind of burned a lot of fans out.

For example, as a Mara Jade fan, I can't argue Legends has Mara Jade since she's dead at the hands of her nephew.

 

Onimi, not Shimmra was the real Supreme Overlord, Charles.

The 'Shamed Ones' did rebel and help the GA stop the Warrior caste - thousands of them died fighting on the side of the GA during the retaking of Coruscant. They had previously rescued and hidden quite a number of Alliance captives during the aborted 'Celebration Sacrifice'.

'Shamed Ones' are now known as 'The Extolled' on Zonama Sekot.

 

Shimmra dying still would have ended the threat though, since Omni was Jaffar not the Sultan.

 

But able to control other Yuuzhan Vong though the Force (implanted Yammosk tissue).

 

Yeah, well, I've had my problems with some of the stuff in DN, LOTF and FOTJ, too, but overall, the good always outweighed the bad.
DN, for example. Good idea overall, but for the whole three books, I was always like, nooo, I don't want to side with some stupid bugs against my all-time favourite race in the GFFA!
But that's personal taste. And who am I to force that view on anyone.

I think Jacen being a new Sith Lord was a pretty good idea, actually. To me, it was credible.
But Mara... no, when that happened, I was ready to throw the book against the wall, so angry was I.
Same with Tahiri killing Pellaeon. But still, I'm not shouting from the rooftop, hey, you all gotta hate this!
Then, last year, I read Crucible.
And I actually liked it. Had they picked it up from there - well, I don't know, it could have been good. Again, my opinion.
But I do understand why some of this is highly controversial, and even, to an extent, why some here say, hey, good riddance.
The problem is that with the reboot, they took away everything.
And this means also the really, really great stuff.
Being in a generous mood , I could even live with a cut before the NJO. That would have left them every possibility of storytelling.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the NJO, and I loved to hate the Yuuzhan Vong. That series had ist flaws, but overall, I highly enjoyed it; it was the defining book series for me when I was 17 - 19 (I remember we got the German version of Vector Prime later, about 2001 (?)and I had to wait what felt like an eternity for the translated versions, so I read Luceno's Agents of Chaos in the original version - cursing, with two different dictionaries, but eventually, I got better - and I had the timeline wrong, so I read Dark Tide later).
So what I want to say is, yes, they took away the stuff I was upset about.
But they also took what I loved dearly. And that's what does not make it okay to me.
Continue the EU as a separate timeline - yes, I'm in.
Throw it away completely - and I won't stop complaining.

 

This board needs trigger warnings

 

Sorry?

 

I forget that people don't realize I'm really sarcastic.