Lit The Great River - The problem with the "the new EU"... A haven for Legends fans.

It seems to me Rob is the last pro-BBLer still posting.

And while I often disagree with him, he really looks to use an evidence-based and reasoned approach.

Most BBLers who posted in these threads took the Zeta/Child of Winds constant outrage, saying the same thing again and again path. But they were much worse at putting together a coherent argument or, sometimes, sentence.

I would love more Legends. But that group of weirdo zealots turned me off to their message.

 

Some of the final EU stories that I hadn't bothered with before, like that two 'trilogy' of OT stories that was arbitrarily broken up by the announcement.

The key phrase is "certain people here".

 

I just want to be clear that I've never requested for that thread to be reopened. It was simply relevant to the discussion at hand to mention it.

I guess to me this all comes across as a 'I don't want to talk about this so you shouldn't either' type vibe. I know Uli has gone on the record saying it isn't that, but that is how it comes across to me.

 

No worries -- I was addressing the implication that I'd stifled a vibrant discussion when that wasn't the case. It was locked because it had played out.

I totally understand and appreciate where that vibe is coming from, because I really don't want to talk about it. I don't feel I've denied that, especially? (This is where you find a quote where I explicitly do and I look silly)

I prefer the forum to be a place where we come together to shoot the **** about SW books, novels and comics rather than engender needlessly divisive inter-fandom drama that throws people into "opposing" camps.

If the conversation showed signs of offering something beyond that I'd -- and I imagine the rest of the staff -- would be more amenable to it.

But I do hasten to add that we haven't precluded BBL discussion entirely, just locked the mega-thread it didn't need.

The only reason I got involved this time is because this was struck me as yet another example of "let's point at those awful people" and I like to discourage those kinds of contributions when I can, rather than actively engage with them. (Which, IMO, leads to more of them)

 

HOTJ is complete for some time now.

 

Yes, Heart of the Jedi is completely available at this point. At least the last I checked it was.

 

HOTJ must of gone into a completely different direction than the Thrawn Trilogy was headed so they couldn't publish it if they were wanting to expand on the story that Zahn wrote.

 

From what I've read thus far there isn't much of a reason that it couldn't have fit in. It would be easy compared to aligning the Thrawn Trilogy with Dark Empire in one continuity.

The impression I get is that the whole story takes place shortly after Endor, so it would have no effect of Zahn's books which are five years later in the timeline.

 

That's true. Difference may have been though that Dark Empire and the Thrawn Trilogy were created by two separate companies so they couldn't just outright say that the other can't publish it. Where as HOTJ and the Thrawn books were all from Bantam. At least according to the Wook it wasn't Lucasfilm that said HOTJ couldn't be published it was Bantam.

 

Been a while since I looked at it. Will have to now.

 

Valin__Kenobi just posted this on facebook and I figured this was the best thread for it. Anyway, Haden Blackman once wrote a pitch for a video game called Episode VII: Shadows of the Sith starring an adult Ben Skywalker walking the line between light and dark while taking on an evil Solo. He took some elements from that pitch, combined them with elements from other game pitches, and they became The Force Unleashed.

 

Some people have said that they liked Luke in the EU, but they found him unbearable or out of character in LOTF and FOTJ. Anyone on here feel this way and why?

 

A large part of it by most accounts are:

• Luke saying compassion is for those who deserve it.
• Sending a load of Mandos to die in a trap
• Being inclined towards cold, chessmaster moves at times, where people are seen as disposable.

 

Not being Luke Skywalker, along with pretty much everyone not being themselves, which was kind of a fundamental problem of the post-NJO Denningverse.

 

Add rampant dogmatism to that list.

 

Related to what Jedi Ben mentioned, I had a serious issue with how he treated Jacen and, to a lesser extent in LOTF, even Ben. As JB said, there was this growing sense as you're reading the books that Luke sees himself as some sort of all-powerful morality judge. Gone is the humble Luke of the past who was always willing to keep an open mind and admit when he was wrong. And for a while, I thought the authors were doing this intentionally. Give Luke so much hubris and so little compassion toward his fallen nephew that, secretly, they were writing it so that he'd be heading for a fall himself. But yeah... no, that's not what they did.

 

And you somehow survived reading all that crap Barriss while I bailed out at Betrayal...

 

It's been a long time since I read LOTF and FOTJ. From what you're saying, Satele and Yoda were better Grand Masters than Luke. The aspect of Luke's personality I like the most is his belief that certain people can be redeemed in spite of other people doubting it.

 

Sure, it reached its high point in DN and its hell-spawn, but the slow conversion of Luke's order to being just like the old order started in NJO and I loathed that. Not the problems being posed by there being more Jedi, but that the solution was to replicate the old order - padawans, Jedi Council. Hey, that bunch? You remember they all got killed, right? By all means take the good stuff but don't go the carbon copy route.

LFL somehow got it into its head that the audience was full of dumb idiots. Because the audience would not possibly understand that the Jedi change over time and will be different in different eras. No! It's one unchanging Jedi Order over millennia. Remember that the people buying stuff up until NJO had been quite at ease with a 4000 year past order that was radically different to that seen in the films, an order that influenced Luke's initial training. So why the drive for consistency from 1999 onwards, where consistency = mono-vision and one version only? Who knows? At least it looks like these errors won't be repeated.

 

That x 1000. Also, all the post-2005 artwork of NJO characters had them wearing the stupid Tatooine moisture farmer robes of the OJO, rather than the flightsuits and stuff that they were always described as wearing and drawn as wearing on the Japanese NJO covers. That annoyed me more than anything.

(Seriously. The prequels were WRONG. If they were Jedi Robes, why the hell would Obi-Wan wear them while he was IN HIDING? And why would Uncle Owen and Wioslea wear them too?)

 

I stopped at Vortex (FOTJ's book six) because 1) the Saba/Kenth stupidity and 2) I was getting the paperbacks and by the time that came out the last FOTJ was already released, so I knew in advance that the series went nowhere and most of the plots were left unresolved, including Jacen's. I swear you can read Allston's Outcast (FOTJ 1) and see it as initiating something amazing -- father and son finally doing something together, searching for what made Jacen crazy and trying to find a cure for the Horns' insane kids to boot. THAT COULD HAVE BEEN COOL.

And yes, part of the problem was that Luke's diverse group of Jedi, who had all suffered way more hell together than any group of Jedi prior (the Empire, Exar Kun, the Empire, Leviathans, the Empire, Yuuzhan Vong...) suddenly start having stuffy council meetings and turn against one another because they can't agree on how to handle ****ing DAALA of all people. Because...

That. That exactly. Because the book team decided to ditch everything they had developed with their generation of the NJO in order to make them more consistent with the OJO and the films, even though they're two entirely different groups with two entirely different histories.

Oh yeah, totally. Luke is sort of a blind idiot in LOTF so that's not 100% awful (chalk it up to authors wanting to develop other characters over him so setting him on the back burner for a while -- that's almost understandable), but FOTJ begins with him trying to find out what happened to Jacen and bond more with Ben. So CLEARLY the authors knew, or at least Allston knew for a while, what had gone wrong with LOTF and were trying to fix it. But then the series just goes off the deep end almost immediately and nothing's resolved, and Luke's like "if any of you other Jedi even think of pulling a Caedus, I'LL SEE YOU IN HELL. LITERALLY. LIKE I SAW MY NEPHEW AND TOLD HIM TO HAVE A NICE DAMNATION."

And yeah, the "Compassion is for those who deserve it" is like a twisted version of Dumbledore's "Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it," which was twisted in the movies to become "for those who deserve it". Actually I'm almost certain that's where the FOTJ quote intentionally came from, since it was Dumbledore's last speech in HP: Deathly Hollows 2. Because Luke only watched the movie and didn't read the books.

 

The Be Jedi or leave speech was the beginning of the end.
Then the Skywalker/Solo split in early LOTF was another nail in the coffin. Which, the EU never recovered from imo.
And then Daala as COS.
I stuck around until the end because there usually was something good in each book but looking back at it all, it just snowballed.
If they had planned it out from the beginning, DNT/LOTF/FOTJ could have been amazing imo.

 

Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here with my Roan Fel profile pic.

Seriously though, I'm in the camp that believes that, while there were a lot of problems with those, Legacy made it all worth it. You want to know why? Because John Ostrander is the man.

 

The eu had its issues, especially post NJO series. I do miss it though. I find the novels we are getting now largely are inferior to early eu. I do think Bloodlines and Lost Stars are the main bright spots, and I liked the young readers trilogy as well. The other books have been hit and miss. Tarkin, LOTS, and New Dawn were pretty good, though I have issues. HttJ, Aftermath were disasters to me. So not a bad start, but I am dubious we will get the wonderful top line novels comparable to the eu's best. well see.

 

We will see. However the one huge advantage we have now (though people who prefer reading over watching tv shows or movies may not think so) is that we will be getting movies every single year for a long time to come. For me Star Wars is a movie franchise first and foremost so if all the novels are doing is filling in the gaps that doesn't bother me at all because I will have movies blazing new trails.