Lit What bothers you the most about the Yuuzhan Vong? Spoilers in case

Nen Yim was pretty cool.


yes the shaper caste and the 6 cortex was fairly indepth and brilliant part of the lore.

 

As someone who just got into Doctor Who... yeah, this is pretty much accurate.

My big problem- Star Wars is to me escapist fiction. I... don't really like moral relativism, or gratuitous violence and onscreen torture, in my escapist fiction, since it kind of defeats the point of letting my imagination take me away to a place that's better than the oft-depressing real one we all inhabit.

Before anyone brings in Owen and Beru's corpses, Alderaan being destroyed, Han's torture at Bespin, etc.- prior to Revenge of the Sith, the movies... really didn't dwell on it more than was necessary to establish it had happened. The fact that they didn't constantly dwell on it allowed viewers to not be forced to go over the horribleness in excrutiating detail, because, hey, the movie's already moved on, and if you dwell on that one moment you miss all the good stuff.

With the NJO... we basically had pages and pages and pages of "This is horrible. We are going to make you read through us going over exactly how horrible and heart-wrenching and painful and evil all of this is because that's the focus of this series so deal with it". This kind of tone has continued to this day in Del Ray's efforts.

Did anyone else nearly get physically ill at the point of view showing what it feels like to be disemboweled in Invincible? I can't be the only squeamish guy who reads these books.

It's... this tone of "gritty grimdark grittiness for gritty grimdark grittiness's sake" that NJO introduced to the fiction. Especially in Troy Denning's works. It's not even really realism. Jaina gets disemboweled, Saba has her brain exposed, Caedus gets a faceful of extra long needles, and these things are played for shock as are character deaths... but the ones who survive these things, once they're used for shock, we get the "they got better" excuse without even showing us how.

For all that it's gone into, one could get the impression that Jaina got over being disemboweled with bedrest.

Frankly, the Vong were the gateway for this kind of stuff to creep into the fiction. Sure Lucas went in this direction with Anakin's immolation and transformation into Vader and all, but this sort of stuff was first introduced to Star Wars with the NJO, and the sadomasochist villains it brought with it.

I have every expectation that people who enjoyed the NJO more than I did (the only book in that series I'd reread again that wasn't part of an attempt to reread all the post-ROTJ EU at my local library is The Unifying Force TBPH) will rip my post a new one, and frankly, that's their perogative.

This thread isn't about bashing or apologizing or any of that. It's about what bothers each and every one of us most about the Vong. For me, it's the way that they opened the door for Saba stumbling around with an exposed brain.

 

I agree with Troy Denning's stories being unnecessarily gruesome, but having just re-read the NJO last month, I don't think that it is necessarily gruesome compared to what followed it. The Yuuzhan Vong were obsessed with pain, but I thought the combat in the series was mostly only as gory or gruesome as you would see in typical SFF fiction. The most gruesome and disturbing thing that I've seen in Star Wars was actually in the X-Wing: Rogue Leader comic miniseries...

As for morality in SW... I'd rather the stories have the moral awareness of the NJO than the lack of moral awareness of the stories that have followed.

 

I don't know if I'd necessarily blame Denning's personal excesses as a writer on the Vong. I'd rather blame that on Denning.

 

I read them, but that was a long time ago and they weren't too memorable.

I think most of the race died. Winning by building a rampart of corpses and all that. And some survivors didn't go to Sekot...

But I get what you mean. That feeling they existed in whatever numbers were convenient for the plot.

 

Comparing the vong to the Domnion? Name 3 domnion characters who actually had an character Arc, say Like Nen yim, or nom Anore?.

Story wise the Dominion is a Ancient theocracy, Just like the Vong.

Their bio-bred warriors Chant "Victory is Life", They are just as likely to break their word when their Ally gives the what they want.


The are almost exactly the same as antagonists go.

If you said Peacekeeper's as we had Scorpius, Crais and Aryn Sun, I could have agreed with you. But the Dominion vs The Vong as antagonists in a story, they are about equal. With a slight edge going to the Vong because Vong characters had story arcs.

 

Really? What Motivated Nom Anore was Diffrent from what Motivated Nen Yim, their goals were also very diffrent as they were very diffrent cahracters.

How was the Dalek from Dalek diffrent from any other Dalek?

 

Except the Dominion were far less indulged, their ships got blown up, their food supply blasted, their shipyards immolated - it was far more even, though yeah, the Dominion would have creamed the Feds if not the wormhole prophets.

I knew there was a big omission from the list I posted but couldn't nail it - it was Farscape. Scorpius is.... as villains go he's something else.

The other thing I'd throw in here is that books have considerable advantages over TV in this area, an infinite budget in effect. Casts can be as large as you like, the scale can go upwards and upwards and when a book has hundreds of pages, the depth that allows if tapped is vast, never mind more flexibility for how much time goes by. And NJO had 20 books! That's why I saw it as having so much untapped potential.

 

That there don't seems to be any real downside for them to exist on an lower wavelength of the Force than anything else in the galaxy and the speed which they created the voxyn

 

They don't have their own force users, though at times that might actually be an upside.

 

Yes, no Traviss that tells them to suck it

 

All the Vong really needed to do was hire the Mandos then.

 

They tried that. The Mandos didn't fall for it.

 

People seem to be under the supposition that Mandos are stupid; they aren't. They were smart enough to see through the Vong's lies.

 

They did until Taviss said they did not and people apparently just let her run with that.

 

Can you explain?

 

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/tyrants-test-question.50015238/page-3#post-51013434

 

That we don't have more stories with them and that Nom Anor hasn't reappeared.
Also that Kre'fey and the Jedi and the Jedi didn't leave Borsk to rot after Dark Tide.

 

I enjoyed the Yuuzhan Vong as a refreshingly different threat, and as a bold means of taking Star Wars literature in a new direction. The stakes were extremely high in the NJO series, perhaps higher than in any other conflict in the Star Wars chronology.

However, many of the Vong names for technology and weaponry were fairly silly, and didn't sound remotely dangerous. Blorash jelly sounds like a children's party food; it is supposed to be an immobilizing bioweapon. A dovin basal sounds like a cuddly little animal that loves to be stroked - a dove/hamster hybrid, perhaps. Coralskippers also sound fairly benign.

Yorik coral? Every time I read these two words I think of Cletus the slack jawed yokel.


'Hey maw, I dun got me some yorik coral!'

 

\well i like them over the Borg, The Sith, and any other Star Trek or Star Wars villian. If there are some other powerful species that bulldozed the sci fi universe that had unique tech and abilities, i am all ears

 

What bothers me the most about the Vong? That their actions led to Jacen going dark side.

 

How about how after massacring over a hundred trillion people, most of them civilians, the Vong leadership were handed their own private planet to retire to without a single war crimes tribunal being convened?

Mind you, this wasn't really problematic until Jacen (who to most of the characters is a beloved family member, as opposed to some extragalactic invader who kills whoever the hell he wants because the most important gods in his pantheon are the gods of slaughter and treachery, and they say so) did way less, and was swiftly declared beyond redemption and in need of a swift lightsaber through the heart.

 

The whole redemption thing has been thrown on its head in the EU.

 

Well that's because Jacen and his Sith master had Luke and the Jedi fooled into thinking that resolving the Yuuzhan Vong War in an amicable manner was a better course of action than genocide.

 

it was a better course of action. it worked. Jacen was fully light sided all the way till TUF, if not until the five year journey.

When Ben flowalked, he saw that Jacen was light sided, but yet still already irrevocably lost to the course of his life that lead him to darkness.. Not that it matters. All of this vanishes and will be called, "The Visions of Luke Skywalker." It is all non-canon now according to Disney.