Lit The New Jedi Order: Still polarizing? Or has it fared better over time?

Someone hates something I like, they must be idiots!

You lost me with the first sentence even before you began gushing about the series.

 

But the rest of the post is inspiring!

 

Maybe so. If you want me to recognize the NJOs merits starting your argument with an insult is still a bad idea.

 

Well if you hate the Vong on principle without knowing anything about them, that is pretty dumb.

 

Not really. If you don't care for invasion stories then you're likely going to loathe the Vong as the agents on that basis alone.

 

You should still give them a chance. You won't know if you like something unless you give it a chance. If you don't give something a chance you won't know what you are missing. Don't listen to others opinions. Do whatever it is and make your own opinions.

 

I don't hate the Vong on principle. I forced myself to read through ten books of the series and in total I only really liked about two of them. I can hardly motivate myself to continue. Don't you think I have already given this enough of a chance?

 

Its more like the people that have only read one book or so. Enemy Lines duology, Traitor and The Unifying Force await still.

 

I heard this before. "Oh, wait until you get to the good parts. You will love Star by Stars. Just continue and you will be richly rewarded. Blablabla."

If I continue, it will be by my own choice and not because of some empty promise.

 

Except that's what we do every day, quite often when deciding what to buy and read and watch, especially when money's tight. We go by recommendations, critic reviews, personal experience with an author or other - for instance is there any point ploughing through the NJO when you know DR had so little confidence in their work they flushed the post-TUF status quo away faster than you could blink? (I know A1983's probably going to have an interesting answer on this one!)

Also, time is an investment like any other.

 

Yet it was DR that made those moves, apparently as part of a plan!

I'm far from NJO's biggest fan but TUF set up an interesting post-event status quo, I don't get why they'd then throw that out given the amount of work they put in to get there.

 

I read all of the NJO series and I still hate the series and the Vong. I liked TUF, but I still feel that the series was too dark and negative, and depressing. It started the downward spiral of the post-RotJ EU, in my opinion. Things have never recovered.

 

Part of the issue with the NJO is that is was, as a project, too large. To those people who really dislike the series, all of the things they hate about it are there from relatively early in Vector Prime, and then they keep on going or thousands of pages. In creating the NJO, Del Rey made an extremely risky bet - they went all in on a massive biotech alien invasion that placed the whole galaxy in peril and occupied such a scale it was pre-destined to take a dozen books or more.

Whatever the literary merits of that bet, it did not pay off economically. The evidence is in the choices made since the NJO was completed. No books published during the war, no video games, no comics until Invasion. The period, despite having massive amounts of room, was abandoned. If it really had a durable economic appeal, that would have never happened. I mean, Del Rey keeps going back to the New Republic and Clone Wars eras, it is only the NJO that's left fallow.

 

"Ambition" is certainly not a word that's applied often to tie-in fiction, and that alone is worth no small measure of respect. I can't speak for the NJO's quality myself, considering the minor fact that I haven't actually read it, but to me the NJO seemed to be the publishers actually trying to take a step forward with the franchise. Instead of having each book carry the events of the films on their shoulders, create an entirely new era of Star Wars, one that doesn't even attempt to regurgitate what readers are already used to.

In addition, the NJO brought it some great new writers that have sustained the franchise. Can anyone say Stover and Luceno?

I also don't think the fact that the NJO isn't an era that's constantly revisited is necessarily a bad thing; let it stand alone as a series.

 

Something of a strawman but I'll play along. I think you misunderstand me, to an extent. I certainly do not begrudge people enjoying something I don't or disliking something I enjoy. When I speak bluntly in this matter, it is one part melodrama, the other holistic.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe has never been good, as a whole. This includes the Bantam era, NJO itself, and what followed it up until today. Some things are inspired, some are silly pulp fun, but a great deal of it is just...bad. So, I look at the anger about the NJO...and I will outright admit you are in your rights to point out that my perspective may not be entirely without personal affect... but at the same time I also am looking at it within the context of the entire EU, particularly what follows. And I see things far more problematic than the NJO ever was.

As a side note, I will state that NJO not even my favorite, large media project that the EU's engaged in. That distinction actually belongs to Shadows of the Empire.

 

Sadly, I don't give a flying hoot about the context of the rest EU. I know there's a lot of nonsense in it which is why I don't particularly care about its state. If something good crops up, and this happens frequently, I buy and enjoy it. But that's it.

I also don't begrudge the ambition involved in NJO. I even have some respect for it. But bottom line for me is that I can't enjoy the end product. I may reread Conquest one day but none of the other novels up to Dark Journey.

 

Hmm, what's got you so interested in Conquest DP?

 

The limited return to the NJO doesn't mean that it was a flop. The whole predicate of the NJO, as a product, was that the consumers wanted a focus on a cohesive story pushing the timeline forward. The biggest interest in the post-ROTJ era is in "what happens next?" The decisions since have followed that strategy -- the narrative keeps pushing forward rather than going back to fill in the gaps. That's where the post-ROTJ effort is concentrated. When non-storyline-pushing Big Three stories are thrown in, they tend to be placed near the movies not because the NJO is specifically unsuccessful, but because those stories are targeting a more casual reader who just wants fun Big Three adventures like in the movies, and setting them in the movie era trades on that familiarity.

Sure, the NJO hasn't been touched by much of anything except Invasion since it ended -- but the thing about the NJO was that it was a mostly self-contained big narrative that told as much of the story it had to tell as possible; it isn't as conducive to one-off adventures as other eras, but it still does allow for more stories, as Invasion has showed. It's just a matter of time; it hasn't been that long. Since the Bantam era closed down, it's only gotten four novels. The comics haven't touched Bantam since the nineties, save the belated Crimson Empire sequel and the Rogue Leader arc thrown off to fill out an Omnibus. There just isn't a lot of going back, and you have to give the going back time. It doesn't prove that the NJO was in any way a bad economic bet, any more than any other EU era.

 

X-Wing Mercy Kill is also a very effective demonstration of what can be done with a return to the Vong/NJO era.

 

I think it did a fine job developing Anakin and Tahiri, having me actually invest into Anakins future. It also got me interested into the Vong shaper caste or Vua Rapuung. It included some real internal conflict in Vong culture, having them appear much more multi-facetted than they were before. Suddenly they appeared more like a real people instead of the evil to the core pants they were before. I also liked the smaller scale conflict in this. Planetary annihilation plots have become boring at this point. The smaller, much more personal struggle of Conquest had me interested in the outcome for the characters I now cared about. I also find the idea of a half human half Vong character very interesting and find it sad this promising storyline was supposedly dropped later.