Lit Unreleased Vader's Legacy is no longer unreleased!

The long-awaited Vader's Legacy article has finally been made available. There's a very useful and informative discussion about it here:



...and the usual Wook page, for reference:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Vader's_Legacy

...it's not often that we get unreleased EU works, so this is an extra special event.

@Sinrebirth any OneCanon implications in it?

 

I was just wondering about this a week ago.

 

I just found out about it myself. I hope nobody else misses out on it. I was kinda surprised that there wasn't already a thread or notice of some sort on here. I'm pretty much never the newsbreaker, and usually out of the loop on these kinds of developments. I hope you enjoy it and spread the word.

 

I think personally the biggest things to come from this is Vongerella's name and how Vader got Obi-Wan's lightsaber.

Also the reference to Bast trying to escape from the Death Star was nice

 

We also get

Spoiler

definitive deaths for Tremayne and Galen Marek, two of the last Imperial loose ends from the old EU.

 

We knew all this from Force Unleased though and this was written before the second one so.

 

Oh, it was from before the second one, whoops. I was thrown off because it says here that Vader kills him, when it's Sidious who kills him in the game.

 

I broke the news in the general questions thread but didn't feel like making a thread for it myself.

It's nice to see yet another seemingly lost piece of SW media gets uncovered but the material itself has a rough proportion of good ideas and fannish fixations that I personally find a bit much.

The 501st was trained in anti-Jedi tactics on Kamino by Atha (was said techniques shooting them? because that is what they did) they were at Endor and had survivors after the battle(did they hide out on the moon to get picked up after the rebels won or were they stationed uselessly on the ISDs themselves? Because I am fairly certain the empire never returned to pick up stragglers) and then very specifically were also at Mindor(makes some sense for some former members to be there but the way this is written implies that Cronal recruited the 501st specifically and possibly exclusively), then Thrawn reformed the 501st because he understood the value of symbols (except that it wasn't him who came up with the name... It was the Hand of Judgement... And also most members and enemies of the EOTH don't know what a 501st even is)

Bast Castle being owned by the Bast Family given to Vader as an apology for Moradmin leaving the death star, presumably to explain why there was a Moradmin lookalike in the holiday special is... a bit much and I am glad that idea wasn't revisited. The castle seems too lived in for Vader to only have had it for four years and for him to keep so many personal items of sentimental items like obiwan's lightsaber and an image of Luke. The castle was always written as a symbol of Vader's fascination and study into sith philosophy and it being an apology gift given to him four years ago feels like it takes away something.

I want to like the Vost Tyne section but it genuinely feels like Pena has no idea on what to do with him so he just gave him a Dengar-type gimmick that just feels bizarre. It feels like it's on the edge of a decent idea but ultimately amounts to a gimmick that reminds me of how underwhelming Declann was. It seems like openly force-using imperial admirals is an idea no one wants to expand upon. I think a more Streen-like situation where he suffers from too much psychic empathy and Vader teaches him to curb that nonsense would have been more fitting imo.

It's easy to be overly negative which I don't want to do, but generally the new stuff that wasn't incorporated into other stories or articles is kinda eh, which I suppose is generally how it goes in writing. Though I do like Jixtus being the one to retrieve obiwan's lightsaber and what scattered information there is on "Vongerella" could be interesting, but I think Pena has done a decent job of taking the more interesting bits and incorporating them elsewhere so what's left is just generally cutting room stuff.

 

Its also a reference to that action figure that said he was one of the few to evaculate the Death Star.

 

I wonder if Aliens in the Empire Part 3 will surface...

 

Yeah, there appears to be some cut off text regarding a possible backstory for Taxion Axmis or something related to her.

I will say, while I am glad that this saw the light of day, it wasn't quite the same level of "lore-dump" that I expected from a typical Abel G. Pena work... although I suspect that's due to it being unfinished/unpublished. I imagine Pena had hoped to update and finish it like how he did for his 2013 articles (Imperial Warlords, Aliens of the Empire, and Droids) but never got the chance to. Regardless, it's still nice to see what could have been and I look forward to see what other lost works might crop up.

 

My PDF of the most recent edition of SE says that Tremayne was killed by Jaalib Brandl in the Corporate Sector.

 

Do we know precisely who released this? Peña himself?

 

Wait, what?

Spoiler

Is this a Supernatural Encounters scenario where Galen Marek’s death was written AFTER it was cancelled or are we really getting a pseudo conclusion to TFU2?

EDIT: there is no conclusion to Marek, this was written in 2009 and the text reflects the ending of the original game before he was resurrected

 

Another related goodie surfaces! Faith Reborn: A Sith Destiny is a short story Abel wrote as a companion piece to VL, and was canceled at the same time. More Vongerella, Lumiya, Tremayne, the Brandls, and other disciples of everyone's favorite walking iron lung await within, along with an amusing revelation of a certain someone's twin brother...

 

I do like having Vongerella as that missing link for Lumiya's apperentices.

 

Faith Reborn is certainly an interesting read, but highlights many issues that I have with many of Pena's stories: using references simply to add feats and bodycounts to his favored characters, sometimes to the point of reverting their arcs or ending them inconclusively:

- Zeta Magnus being responsible for every single bio-weapon the CIS ever used according to Skyewalker as well as their sole source of cloning facilities(nevermind that cloning isnt that rare of a science)

- Kir Kanos showing up decades after CEIII and CEII to attempt to enact vengeance on Luke for his part in killing Palpatine(while to be fair this was written before CEIII was published, it still makes Kanos needlessly static for decades when CEII already gave him somewhat heroic traits and had him actively aide D'asta, and also makes him feel rather pathetic)

- Lumiya torturing and enslaving the Nevaan once more just so that she can have nelvaan mutant slaves for about two sentences

- the Brandls both coincidentally attacking Tremayne's palace simultaneously with Lumiya and Vongerella just so that Lumiya winds up with a higher body count towards the end nevermind Adalric surrendering to the NR due to the appeals of his son and not wanting his home to be needlessly damaged

The attempted throughline of "how sith philosophy has changed from Palpatine to Lumiya to Krayt" is hilariously undermined by the fact that Krayt's One Sith differs from "Palpatine's circus of darkside sycophants" in aesthetics only to the point that various sources imply that he independently came up with the name and tenants of the "One Sith" himself. It almost feels like that is the point, because Lumiya implicitly didnt give up her rage against skywalker despite that also being a key point being highlighted as how her philosophy evolves from its predecessors. However, even if that is the point it winds up feeling pointless and weird when wrapped up in such melodramatic and sycophantic tones that never even approaches any level of self awareness, would have been better if she left the Sith at the end in my opinion.

 

I also noticed their homeworld was described as a frigid wasteland, but from what I recall that was only because of the CIS generator

 

I still don't really get the point of explaining why Lumiya has two different eye colors

 

I'm curious who the "voice" is in the cut content? Was one idea that this was written by Caedus?

 

It was written by "Vongerella"/Svelt Aller, as you can see in the tie-in short story

https://mega.nz/file/sC0RjKDD#fsVx0mpNGkyFlbbMxQQ_V4xGVSpWKANgSkUI6bntpZQ