Books Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars

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That does remind me, I saw some speculation between the book and the game that Luke would find Cere's archive at some point, but that is obviously not to be. Heck, even if Vader hadn't found it the death star would have done its work.

 

Second connection. Again end game spoilers but this one was likely just a coincidence. It is funny though

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"Because this isn't one of Greez's favorite poorly written holodra-mas? Merrin answered. Real life rarely works like that. Contrived plots and dramatic, overwrought backstabs are few and far between. People simply make choices, and you're stuck with the outcome"

Maggs definitely knew the plot of Survivor. So this just reads weird. I more just find it funny.

also
Spoilers just for the book

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Cal is so innocent in this book. Poor dude could not read a sign if he tried. It’s better that way. I wouldn’t want to know someone had sex on my bed either.

I actually think Cal is very well written in this book. So far I like how all the characters have been written well except for one thing. I don’t like how fast Merrin trusted and fell for Fret. One can think of someone as hot without them having sex with them 3 days later.

I mean one can, but that doesn’t strike me as something Merrin would do. Trust someone that fast with something so intimate. It took Cal a long ass time to gain Merrin’s trust. I assume it took Malicos a while and he never truly did. The books timeline at this point should have been stretched out by a couple months. It would make more sense than this happening within like a week at most of them meeting each other.

 

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I had a hard time hearing Merrin's voice in the book tbh. So much of the lovestruck teen of it didn't feel like the cynical Nightsister that had seen her people slaughtered to me.

 

But again I like how all the characters are written just not Fret and Merrin with

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the romance I don’t even mind Fret as a character anymore. Just how fast it happened is my big problem.

 

More thoughts with quotes spoiler for the whole game you were warned

Spoiler: Spoilers for all of Jedi Survivor

“Wanting to see the best in people was going to get him killed one day-or worse, get someone he cared about killed. He hated that. He hated that it might be bad to try to see the good in people.”


Reminds me a lot of what happened with bode


This line in the book just made me laugh


“Unfortunately, he was decidedly not present. He was very much wrapped up in the fact that Merrin--their Merrin-had known a potentially life-threatening piece of information and had kept it from the rest of the crew.

Because of a hot purple lady with a mullet.”


There was a tale told by elders on Dathomir about when Nightsisters were overwhelmed with emotion, when the only other choices in front of them would be to shut down or to run away. There was a downside to playing with fire: It rarely stayed under a person's control. Fire was wild and rabid and hungry, it knew no limits, and it would eat and eat and eat forever until it ran out of fuel.


This part reminds me a lot of that Fire scene on Jedha. Honestly a lot of the book does


Also speaking of that scene on Jedha. It’s very obvious that the author knew Merrin and Cal were end game. There is a lot more of it from Cal’s perspective of him being jealous and protective of Merrin. But there are also a few moments from Merrin’s perspective where it’s shown she has feelings for him.


I think Cal’s perspective makes this more obvious. Obvious enough you could get it before playing the game. The Merrin hints are more subtle and come through more when you know they ended up together.

 

Spoiler

Sounds like a great reason to play Cal with a mullet in Jedi Survivor ;p

 

Yea lol.

Anyway final review spoiler tagged but it doesn’t have any spoilers for the game just the book.

Spoiler

So my whole review spoilers for the book and not Jedi Survivor


The book improves greatly about midway through. It goes from like a 6/10 to an 8 out of 10. It’s just a shame the book wasn’t that good from the start. I still can’t get over how quickly Merrin trusts fret. It still seems out of character. I know the book says basically it was the will of the force blah blah blah. But that’s just a poor excuse. If the start of the book was stretched out over a few months instead it would have worked a lot better.


I think the book has some interesting connections in retrospect to Jedi Survivor, but you definitely don’t lose anything by not reading it. Although I am happy I did as I really like the characters. And Merrin improves vastly in the second half of the book.


Overall a good book. If not a bit to erotic for my taste in parts. If the book was stretched out over a few more weeks or months and the descriptions turned down to a 6 instead of a 10 I would say it was a great book. Right now it’s a good one.


Do I understand why people dislike the book? Yes. Do I think it’s also over hated by some? Also yes.

TLDR book is good if a bit to much erotic descriptions and some weird characterization that could have been fixed with like 1 paragraph. Second half of the book improves tremendously

Yes I think it’s worth a read, but just be prepared for more descriptive detail than most would find needed.

 

Look, all Fenn did was drop by to fix Merrin's fridge, after which the temperature went up and....

 

There were some parts of the book I really liked. So Maggs can write well. I am just stuck on that one thing that would have taken a page or 2 at most to fix and make this book like a 9-10/10. (I am horrible at rating things almost every episode of TV Star Wars I have given a 9 or ten)

it’s really just

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how quickly they fell for each other which I don’t like.

and it seems so obvious to me that I am confused why someone wouldn’t just stretch it out. And maybe I am the only one who thinks that would improve the book tremendously but it would IMO. As again the second half is great. It’s just I got so hung up on just that during the first half it distracted me.

 

I’m not going to mince words here.

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Merrin and Fret having sex on Cal’s bed is inexcusably offensive. It’s a violation of Cal’s private space and makes them both look bad. On its own, that’s bad enough, being the kind of taboo fetish content you expect in sexy fanfiction, not a serious book. But it’s made so much worse because Cal has psychometry. It is completely plausible that Cal goes to bed one night and has a vision of the girl he likes having sex with another person. Yikes.

On top of that,

Spoiler: Jedi: Survivor spoilers

Cal and Merrin eventually become a couple themselves. This makes the whole thing even more uncomfortably awkward in hindsight.

I have no idea how this made it past the editors. It overshadows the whole book.

 

Oh totally. That’s another thing that threw me off, but it wasn’t as bad as how fast it happened. Again if you remove that. Change how fast it happened and tweak Fret’s first appearance it would be a pretty good book all things considered. Especially because I really do love the second half.

these are all very easy fixes which is what confuses me the most.

 

I hated that part.

Spoiler

Merrin has her own bunk. She literally shacked up with a stranger on Cal's bunk, where his meditation space is and his workbench. And she used her magic to seal the area closed. Then she gets pissy with Cal, who was already beating himself up with guilt, for using his psychometry on Frets stuff in Merrin's bunk room.

That's one of the things that made that whole storyline feel so cringe worthy to me. I'm certainly not used to Star Wars novels being that overtly sexual, but it's the inconsideration for Cal's only personal space on the ship that really bothered me *and* that it was increasingly the main point of the book.

 

Well, doing unethical things is not uncommon for Dark Side users, and Merrin is one of them after all.

 

Well she is and she isn’t. From my understanding of the book nightsister Magik is very emotions driven. They can still use it otherwise, but it’s not as potent when they are angry or very happy or whatever

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a lot of the book has to do with Merrin feeling nothing really just feeling lost. And she loves Fret so that’s where she pulls her Magik from. Then she hates Fret and that’s where she pulls her Magik from again, but finally she realizes the Mantis crew is like a family to her and she would do anything to protect them and uses that love of her adoptive family to power her Magik. Where’s before it was only powered by hate.

so I don’t think it’s completely black and white thing. I don’t think Magik is inherently a dark side ability. It’s just another facet and face of the force. Again we don’t really have a lot of examples of nightsisters in canon. The only real examples that use Magik are Talzin and Merrin. And Talzin is definitely a dark sider as she is purely motivated by Revenge it seems. And power. Merrin not so much.

 

Merrin is quite vengeful in this book, although

Spoiler

much less

in the second game.
Talzin also initially wanted to become a Sith, so she is most likely much more of a dark sider than other Nightsisters.

 

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Since the Singing Mountain Clan and other nightsister witch clans have been mentioned, it would be interesting to see them with a non-darkside version of magik, if they ever get explored again.

 

Honestly I think it’s much more likely they’ll stay to small roles. Thry seem solely focused on the nightsisters

 

True. Honestly, even before the canon switch, nightsisters had been dominating the screentime with other witches rarely mentioned, even though nightsisters were supposedly the minority - and with the canon switch there is even less reason to focus on the non-nightsisters.

Still, it would be great imo, regardless of how unlikely it would be.

 

I mean to be fair I think the non nightsister witches of dathomir were only made canon like a year ago or maybe 2. If I recall itwas with that clone wars anthology novel. They may have been mentioned before.

so maybe they plan on doing something with the other clans. Honestly I would love a whole series of books or a game or something that explores dathomir and it’s cultures or even just the nightsisters in depth. Despite how much of a role they played in TCW and in the Star Wars Jedi: series we still barely know anything about them. Exploring the Sith and Jedi is all well and good, but it gets boring after a while. There are god knows how many other organizations that are force sensitive explore those. It’s part of the reason despite it’s flaws. (Which this book has many) I still really like it.

 

Oh also I don’t know how I forgot about this at the time one last connection to Jedi survivor.

spoilers for the game

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in the book they help to save a force sensitive in the game they try to help move the hidden Path to Tanalorr. That is definitely not a coincidence. But again something you couldn’t possibly have gathered if you read the book before the game

 

This video made reading the book 10% better
Language though so be warned


had this come across my recommended and had to share

 

I just remembered I forgot to post my thoughts on the book.

Over all it's ok, but not good, or even close to good really. Still has the issue of the author not being as funny as they think they are. Also I HATED Merins 'romance' with the Kresh woman, could not stand it at all, every time it came up, I just wanted to move on.

I liked Cal and his attraction to Merin, that was better handled.

The action was fine, a little, disarming, some might say.

It's fine, I guess. But easily the weakest of the "Jedi" stories so far.

 

Yeah I have to completely agree. There was so much side-plot romance in it that didn't really contribute to the plot, and not enough fleshing out of the characters to make it feel deserved. What I mean by that is that the actual plot progressed in such a haphazard way where we went from picking a character up, to having them in love, to having them betray them all in the space of a few chapters where they had been distrusted by the crew only a few chapters before. It felt very jarring and not very earned.

The actual overall plot just felt very thin. I'm sorry to say but it feels this way for a lot of the newer SW books which is why I've tuned out of them to an extent. It feels like, much with the other media, things are produced as concepts first and stories second (i.e. they're focussed on a particular character, or tie-in) rather than a great story idea that comes to life. The fact the books are so insistent on following different sets of characters because they can't use Han, Luke and Leia or other key characters to 'save' them for TV shows just makes the books we do get much less interesting because each one has to build an entirely (or almost entirely in this case) new set of characters for us to invest in, all in the first 50-100 pages before launching into the plot. Either this book needed another 200 pages (and therefore a more meaningful plot) or shouldn't have been produced.