Anyone wanna see Vong in the GA?

I would love to Nas Choka as a commanding officer in the GA military. It would be great if Jacen drafted in a few. It would surely piss a number of people off.

 

*Sighs*

Just when I was hoping for a quiet evening...
Seriously, it would probably not work. In-verse, the populace would never stand for it. Out-verse...same thing.

 

No. Kriff no.

 

No. It simply wouldn't work. I'd say if the GA comes back to power after Legacy then they can perhaps start to include Vong in the military and stuff, but not bloody well until.

 

Last we saw in The Joiner King, the Vong were still looking for excuses to subjugate each other. It would be interesting to see in another century or so, but they need to work on their bloodlust and their superiority complex first.

 

I think it'd be better for everyone involved if the Vong were all sucked into a black hole something, never to be seen again.

 

Yeah. Way too soon for that.

 

I wonder what an unmutilated Vong looks like-- best I can tell, they're pretty much noseless Humans with greyish skin.

Makes you wonder just how far-flung Humanity is...

 

What, they accepted Imperials.

(I refuse to believe the Vong killed more than the Galactic Empire)

 

Even if they didn't, they had to be responsible for killing nearly as many, in a quarter of the time, and with no intention of stopping.

 

The thing is..you can't have a race of beings that never gets ingrained into society at some point in time. Yeah, now might be too early, but post Legacy (as in the comics) after it is shown that their good intentions were sabotaged and the Sith were the ones behind the most recent galaxy splitting incident they are going to have to be accepted at some time. Why wouldn't they? Let's examine.

A. They want in, Everyone else wants to keep them out. - You are encouraging them to retain their crazy "KILL EVERYONE NOW!" attitude by ostracizing them. They will eventually build themselves up and attack.

B. The don't want in. Everyone else wants them in. - They are probably up to something. Make them come under Alliance control with alliance representation. This isn't a Corellia thing where Corellians fit in with the rest of society...they just want freedom...these guys need to be kept where they can be seen.

C. They don't want in, the alliance doesn't want them in. - This is probably the worst case scenario. Both sides will maintain hard feelings against each other until they erupt into a new war.

Carnage

 

In general, the oddity of the Vong is mostly the fact that they're almost annihilated.

Let's face it, a galaxy spanning race fits on one world.

 

Hell yes, thirty years down the road.

 

That I find a little hard to swallow. Their main force gets destroyed at the battle for Yuzzhan'tar but what about the Vong spread across the worlds that they have took during the war? I think one of the books states that the resistance gets beat down along the way....but how many Vong were holding these planets? 50? I think it seems unreasonable that all the Vong are living on Sekot right now.

Carnage

 

The only place I want to see the Vong is on the end of my pike.

 

I'm sure everyone will be shocked to hear that I object to the use of the term "mutilated" to describe Vong ritual scarification. It's a totally legitimate part of their culture, at least insofar as it's undergone willingly, and in the real world similar practices are important parts of the spiritual, cultural, and sexual traditions of various cultures and modern subcultures.

Also, while I'm here, I object to the frequent usage of said Vong practices as evidence for an argument that the Vong as a whole are irredeemably savage or anything like that.

Clicky clicky for further reference, and all that.

 

I think the Vong under Nas Choka were already pretty much on their last legs. The Warrior's Caste had already been decimated by Destiny's Way (how many was it? Half their warrior caste?) and the fighting got nowhere near as fierce as it had by that time. Elbaq 9 equalled the casualties at Coruscant and Ackbar's doctrine was just to kill as many small groups of Vong as humanly (or alienly) as possible.

Honestly, I'm not surprised if the Vong were reduced to "garrison commanders" with most of the guards being mindless surge corral slaves.

Let's not forget also that Nas Choka helped the Republic slaughter all remaining Free Vong

 

This has nothing to do with the current topic and everything to do with the fact I'm a know-it-all. Decimation literally means "reduced by one-tenth". It's an old Roman Legion rule of thumb concerning causalities. If you lost one-tenth of your fighting force (be it 1,000 of 10,000 or 4 of 40) then you were considered a technical failure, even if you won the battle. I just hate seeing the word misused...even if it has been appropriated by the vernacular to mean "lost a significant number".

And speaking of what Vong look like with out their self-inflicted mutilation...why didn't anybody ever think to torture a Vong with a bacta tank and plastic-surgery droid? Hmmm?

 

I want to see a deep and well thought out story that deals with Vong racism. Some of the ways people thought and talked about the Vong during the war were simply appalling, and if the posters here are any barometer for the GFFA, things are no better now. Honestly, a lot of the things posters here say about the Vong actually disgusts me in a very real way. And I would like to see an intelligent SW story that dealt with that, with intrinsic historical prejudice passed on for generations, with people who blamed Vong who hadn't even been born as of TUF for the war, with people still calling for Alpha Red years later, and things of that nature. I'm not after something light and fluffy with everyone holding hands at the end, but something that can really get at what is an extremely difficult issue and explore it in all its complexity. 'Course, who am I kidding, but a guy can dream, right?

(I'm hoping that we might get into some of this territory, at the very least, when the Vongforming-gone-awry that seems to have been a major catalyst for Legacy is finally told. I fear we're going to get a shallow story with simplistic people, nice, friendly Vong, and mostly Really Evil Sith (TM), but I do hold out hope that there might be something better in the works.)

If the results of all that allow the Vong eventually to be integrated into the GA, then I'm all for that, but I'd not set that as the desired endpoint, just as a perfectly acceptable destination of the journey. I'd not like to see the Vong destroyed or expelled unless that's the only and inevitable conclusion of the situation, and then it's possible that I won't be able to read on from that point because I'd be so appalled.

-Paul

 

I think, from the context of your post, you mean anti-Vong racism, for lack of a more precise term. You could argue that the Vong themselves are also racist against non-Vong, but since they don't seem to have a problem with converts, per se, it seems to be more a religious bigotry than a species thing.

In any case, I would love to see these topics taken seriously, and I am also appalled by the way many posters on this board and people in general fandom talk about the Vong, and the way these sentiments seems to be reflected totally uncritically by LFL-sanctioned material. It's kind of like the way I'm appalled at the way many fans defend the Tusken massacre in AOTC, and not nearly enough people call them out on it.

I would like to point at the way the Battlestar Galactica series treats Human/Cylon relations with a great deal of complexity as a model for this sort of thing in the SW EU. BSG has otherwise sympathetic Human characters who are total anti-Cylon bigots, Cylon extremists and moderates, atrocities committed by both sides, characters who start off hating one faction or the other but who change over time, etc. However, whoever does what to whom, there's definitely a distinct sense that the bigots on both sides are misguided and destructive.

 

Meh, I don't really care for the Vong, and it seems most of the galaxy probably doesn't care for the Vong that much either, even decades later. The Vong were one of the worst threats in recent history (and possibly in the history in the galaxy, but that'd be too broad to tell for sure). If I remember right, at the beginning of the Dark Nest trilogy, it was mentinoed that there were still Bothans looking for the rest of the Vong to kill them off and finish their crusade against them.

Vong bio-technology is probably one of the best in the galaxy, but then they're used as scapegoats which led up to the fall of the Galactic Alliance, so no, I don't think we'd ever see the Vong as part of the GA for at least another few decades (until around the Ossus Project). Not to mention the Vong still have to deal with centuries of their messed up culture.

And most of the major plots lines at the moment (both LoTF and Legacy comics) seem more focused on traditionally evil Sith than something like the Vong right now anyway. Although with Legacy's time period, and with how they're still fleshing out a lot of details, who knows in that time period.

 

Ah, yes, diz, you're interpreting me correctly. I knew what I was talking about. Though I would certainly want to see the issues dealt with from both sides -- I imagine the Vong have as many issues with the GA as the GA does with the Vong. (I'm not reading LotF, so I don't know if any of this has come up there, but as of the end of TUF, I don't think we had a really clear sense of how the Vong at large would have felt about the GA. I'd anticipate there are simmering issues there we haven't really seen yet.) The bottom line is that it's complex, and it should be treated as such, which it hasn't to date and which most EU leads me to believe it's not apt to be soon.

I'm only a few episodes into BSG 2.5, but I do like the general approach they've been lightly taking to the Cylon/human question, and it could certainly lay the groundwork for something of the type I would like to see.

(I'm sure it says something about my psychology that in multiple sci-fi verses I find myself supporting non-human Others who launched an [arguably, at least] unprovoked attack on an established human civilization with whom the framework of the story would tend to encourage us to sympathize.)

And yes, Tusken massacre defenders disturb me, too. Though not as much as Alpha Red proponents. I suppose because the latent current political analogy is not quite as glaring in the former.

-Paul

 

I just think it would be cool if Jason bought in a Vong commander. It would totally blow everyone away and further alienate him from those closest to him.

I actually loved the NJO and the Vong

 

Well, we now know they're using Vong biotech as of Tempest - Ben wears a lightweight and less restrictive version of vonduun crab armour when he's about to go up against Luke in their practice-duel.