Lit The two canons and "happy ending overrides"

anyway re: the OP-- the reason the new stuff feels so bad or weird is because it's an arbitrary reset, rather than a logical continuation of the story: the "what's next" is always going to undo the happy ending to some extent, because without conflict you don't have story, but the old eu up to the end of the NJO built on what came before in logical, more-or-less satisfying ways. Palpatine comes back... but he's gone completely mad, has lost all his craftiness, and his defeat serves as a vehicle for Luke to come to terms with both his own darkness and his father's fall, and sets him up with the confidence to finally reestablish the Jedi. The Vong invade... but they're a completely new enemy for the new generation, allowing the saga to explore new themes and ideas. And so on and so on.

I think another less discussed reason the new stuff is unsatisfying is because star wars at its best is a story of each subsequent generation being at least a bit better than the one that came before, passing the torch forward to a hopefully better galaxy, but the new one (much like the Denningverse) totally tosses that aspect out. Instead of the mistakes Han and Leia make as parents and Luke makes as a teacher giving the Solo kids fuel for dramatic growth and inspiration to maybe do better than their mom and dad and uncle did, they result in the sole Solo kid becoming an irredeemable monster. And that's if you even agree that they made mistakes, because it's unclear if that's what we're even supposed to believe. Like, yeah, you have Rey and Poe and Finn, but Finn's a joke character going nowhere, Rey is... there, and Poe... well, Poe spends the entirety of TLJ getting told off by his elders, who are basically depicted as Right In Every Way, so.

(It's weird, because I keep seeing thinkpieces about how TLJ Is About The Next Generation Not and TLJ Ruins Your Heroes And That's Okay and I just... don't see it? Like TLJ basically ends with Luke totally pwning Kylo's whiny punk ass in the most Denningesque of fashions and Rey being like jeepers, Luke was right all along, he really is a dick!, and then Leia wakes up to take back over and All Is As It Should Be and they're the Rebellion once again and like how is this at all about torch-passing, thematically? Or the older generation being wrong about anything except not aborting their awful son before his blackened soul could be brought forth to ruin their lives?)

 

Yeah, that's why The Truce at Bakura follows up on all those alien invasion teasers in Return of the Jedi... No that's not quite right, I meant that's why Luke's fall to the dark side in Dark Empire is immediately followed up by the government giving him the go-ahead to start an academy... No, that doesn't make sense either, maybe I was thinking about the time The New Jedi Order put Jacen Solo through his great trial, which he came through appearing as a being of light, then became Darth Caedus in the very...

Did we read the same EU? I know you specify "up to the end of the NJO" but there was a lot of nonsense both before and after that which you can't just ignore to make your point.

 

I mean luke's force ghost begged his descedant to become a Jedi again and encouraged him to keep on living when he was ready to die.

That's an impact but not a major or groundshaking one.

 

See this is what I think makes the ST far interesting is that like OT and the PT to degree Star Wars is reflecting real life....A life were the Baby Boomers (OT generation) started out as idealist and now for the most part (And many people and research has said this) have gotten more cynical, conservative in some points while only a few still have those 'hippie' ideals and have passed the torch to a new generation with a world in worse shape (Some achievments made but we still kinda screwed) the hope of a better future they warned never came....and also the fact we have to deal with some real life First Order issues (Trying to be as politically friendly as possible). So in some ways TFA and TLJ is probably the most releastic (And I use the term relatively) take on Star Wars for at the end of the day like in real life, there are no happy endings.

 

i mean was a random one-off threat that was dealt with in a novel irl and week in universe and didn't have any big impact on the characters or universe, so.

what lol?

like i said, post-NJO makes the same mistakes the Awakens-verse does, so no argument there.

not seeing the before, and the after I'm not ignoring, I'm addressing directly, lol. The EU novels after the NJO took a gigantic dive and fell into the same pitfalls the new Disney-financed movies do, there's no two ways about it.

 

In response to "What lol?" The Jedi Academy Trilogy comes right after Dark Empire; not only did Luke face no consequences for his defection, he thinks he's 'recovered' enough to go right into Jedi Mastering. No wonder he lost so many students over the years.


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why would there be any consequences? did you read dark empire?

 

Yep. Luke went on an unsanctioned undercover mission (which, being unsanctioned, isn't any different than a defection) and while there turned to the dark side for real. By the standards the sequel trilogy have been held to, he should be tried as an accessory to the devastation of Mon Cala and any other planets the Reborn Emperor went after.

 

so far as the NR government is concerned he was captured by the emperor, made the most of his situation to sabotage the imperial war machine from within, and then rescued by his sister, in the process killing the Emperor (not for good, granted, but what can you do) and destroying his flagship. not seeing what they'd find objectionable there.

 

Not to mention just being around the Dark Side is bad in itself....Like taking drugs, your gonna get effected and will be consequences for doing it even if there is no 'malevolent' intent

 

Legends takes a different, and better, approach to the Dark Side rather than what amounts to Light Side Nazism. Star Wars is a story of redemption, after all. New Canon... well it hasn't really established what it's opinion is, but going by Rebels and TCW, its similar even if the Empire is portrayed as cartoon villains, its ironically the Dark Siders themselves that are more grey.

I'm pretty sure most of the Galaxy's population never exactly figured out it was Luke in charge of the Imperial Forces either, so there's nothing for them to find unreasonable either. That and his role in his undercover agent position literally saved Dac/Mon Calamari from total annihilation.

 

To be fair, Luke went on an unsanctioned mission in ESB as well. The X-wing pilots were told to "proceed to the rendezvous", and Luke took an X-wing belonging to the Alliance and went on a wild goose chase because he saw a ghost while freezing and half-dead.

Before The Jedi Academy Trilogy, there are also Dark Empire II and Empire's End, whose events clearly show that Luke is a Jedi again after his iffy "turn" to the dark side in DE... which did more harm to the Empire than to NR.

And for what it's worth, back when the majority of Legends was "C-canon", Leland Chee established that Luke did not actually fall to the dark side in DE, although he came close.

 

I'm not convinced this is a good thing, overall.

If TFA opened onto a galaxy we were told had been at war since the death of the Emperor, with Snoke as the first truly great unifier of Imperial Forces in decades, the saga would still have a sense of forward momentum. There would be a clear line from the victories of the OT to those of the ST, with the latter directly built on the former, and the damage wrought by Palpatine's PT machinations would be all the more pronounced.

Then, at the very least, it might still feel like one story.

 

So essentially you have the Big Three, Chewie, and the droids (at minimum) complicit in a conspiracy to cover up the facts of Luke's defection and fall from the New Republic, and that's the "logical and satisfying" way of bridging the disconnect between DE and the JAT? Talk about the cure being worse than the disease...

 

It feels like one story because Leia is the leader of the Resistance, Rey is studying under Luke (sort of), and Han Solo is a major character of TFA.

 

Also (Even though I know you disagree to a point) I feel a lot of Luke's cynical views of the Jedi can be believed by wider audiences more now because we've seen the PT and how the Jedi weren't always the perfect warriors we know them, sure we got hints at that in Ep 6 but I think the Prequels really created in the eyes of wider audiences of cynicism of the Jedi that Luke has in the film.

 

I've never cared about a single one of those faceless trillions (guess that's why the NJO never bothered me), just like I didn't care about anyone on Hosnian Prime, having not existed before then. I didn't really care about Alderaan, either, except as it related to Leia (and I guess the other survivors like Tycho and Winter). The destruction of Hosnian Prime didn't faze me a bit, it's not one of the depressing parts of the ST. If it had been Coruscant, I might have cared, Coruscant having some importance to me.

I care about Luke, Han and Leia. Maybe some vague but minor care for the New Republic, ie the Not Empire, and the ideas they stood for.

I really don't care about endless war, either. It's called Star Wars. At some point it gets to be a bit much, but as long as the heroes keep fighting those battles and winning those wars (which they did in Legends), the ending isn't overridden. Unless everything is destroyed just to play out Rebels vs Empire all over again, which the ST did.

All the ST had to do to avoid overriding the happy ending was simply kill the heroes (or let them die) before the "happy ending" (what this means exactly depends on the fan, as we've seen) was destroyed. Instead, the ST brought them as low as possible, destroyed everything in front of their faces, and then killed them, without restoring them.

This thread is happy ending override. Legends is over. Done. There's no more. What's there is what's there, and that's all. The story is frozen in time, the same way ROTJ appeared to be frozen in time. That's the way it is for me, anyway.

Death is the end for me. It was the end in Legends for me, too. Plus Luke's supposed appearance in Legacy was like in 130 ABY. There's got to be a statute of limitations at some point. If the ST occurred in 130 ABY with Luke long dead, it wouldn't qualify as a happy ending override for me, pretty much no matter what happened. They could dig up Luke's corpse and have sex with it, and it wouldn't count. Luke's dead.

It's not the same story just because it has the same characters.

 

Note: this is why Naboo should have been Alderaan.

Duh, George.

 

So Tarkin is going to blow up Palpatine's home planet without his permission? Vader would have killed Tarkin then and there...

 

He'd probably get a medal.

 

Well, Palpatine probably wanted to go slaughter the Gungans himself like you could do in the Phantom Menace PC game as Obi-Wan Kenobi (and still finish the game!).

 

I think Uli means that Padmé should've been from Alderaan, guys, not that it should've necessarily been Palpatine's homeworld.

nah the NR leadership knew about his fall to the dark side. they just didn't care, because Luke's spiritual fitness doesn't really concern them as much as his actual actions (and also they're actually capable of taking context into account, probably because they aren't engaged in a weirdly hostile positivity crusade).

 

Palpatine and Padme being from the same homeworld was a key element of TPM's plot.

Luke only REALLY turned to the Dark Side after his failed attempt at wiping out Palpatine's clones, and only Leia actually knew this. As far as the rest of the NR, they would believe that Luke had been kidnapped after an undercover operation against Palpatine and that Leia rescued him (the mute Luke in the background when hologram Palpatine demands his holocron back from the NR could just mean Luke was drugged). Nothing actually conclusively shows Luke was doing anything more than undercover work, and other Jedi (Quinlan Vos both canon and Legends, Obi-Wan Kenobi posing as Raako Hardeen) did far worse things while undercover. As such, Mon Mothma and the rest, knowing how Jedi undercover jobs worked in the past, likely had no problem welcoming Luke back especially as his undercover work resulted in Palpatine's final defeat.

 

no they 100% know he "turned." I mean aside from the fact that it's explicit in the comic ("But Leia's friends in the Alliance understand that what is about to happen transcends the technology of war... the confrontation with the Emperor-- and the fate of the galaxy-- is a matter only a Jedi can resolve") it's Luke, dyou really think he'd not talk everyone's ear off about the dangers of the dark side and how awful it was from the inside and blah blah blah. Luke isn't exactly a secretive guy.