Lit Cult Encounters and Supernatural Encounters (even more new Legends material!)

edit: double post

 

Interviewer: The big shocker of this book is that Abeloth has a connection to Mortis and that Luke brings up his father’s experience on the planet (as seen in The Clone Wars Season 3). Can you talk about how you developed that connection and the process of collaborating with The Clone Wars crew?

Denning: Basically, we started the development of Abeloth with the idea that she was going to be attached to the Celestials somehow. We thought originally that she would probably be a servant to the Celestials, and that they were the ones who had inhabited the planet in the Maw. We never really thought that we would actually be showing the Celestials as characters. We came up with the idea that she would be a servant who had become corrupted. About the time we were writing Allies and Vortex, we were emailing back and forth and, of course, copying in the continuity people at Lucasfilm. At that point, one of the people –– I think it was Leland Chee –– said, “You know, they’re doing something in The Clone Wars that will deal with characters that are kind of Celestials, so we should probably check on this and coordinate. We really don’t want to have two different groups of characters of this nature running around the galaxy.” This made a lot of sense, because you don’t want more than one being that’s in charge of the balance of the force.

We were a little bit nervous about whether this would be something that caused us a problem or not. But of course we said, “Well yeah, we really don’t want to be doing anything that’s going to duplicate efforts in the EU.” So Leland approached Dave Filoni and explained what we were doing and said, “Can we work with them on this?” And Dave was really gracious and very accommodating and did everything he could to help us make this work. From that point on, we never really wanted to call the Ones in Mortis “Celestials,” but that was what we were thinking of them as. We didn’t want to pin them down, because you don’t want to pin down anything about Mortis, but that was our concept. The Ones became what we were going to do with the Celestials. They’re not really Celestials –– that’s why, if you look at the way the Killiks think of them, they are “what Celestials become.” The Killiks really don’t remember anything quite accurately. It’s all filtered through the minds of people who’ve become Joiners. That’s kind of a useful tool in this process, because I don’t really want to spell out exactly what the Celestials are. There are two reasons for that. One, they’re beyond our understanding, and I think the Killiks come back to that point. That’s probably the most accurate thing they say: you can’t understand what the Celestials are. Two, I don’t want to pin down in EU continuity that the Celestials are this and this and this. I just wanted to have them out there and say that Abeloth was someone who was involved with them.

 

Here's an interview with Chee on the Abeloth-Mortis connection:

https://roqoodepot.com/interviews/leland-chee/

Interviewer: In Apocalypse Troy Denning did a lot of work with the Celestials and tie-ins to The Clone Wars “Mortis Trilogy” episodes. How fine of a line did you have to walk there in keeping with canon and keeping some things mysterious?

Chee: Dave Filoni brought the Mortis Trilogy episodes to my attention very early on because we knew it would have huge ramifications over our understanding the Force. We had lengthy discussions about Animation’s plans for these characters, and I would run ideas by him and update him on our plans to tie them into Publishing’s efforts. Dave was very supportive of our tying Mortis into the EU and I constantly sought his guidance on areas where there was the potential for conflicting continuity. When you talk about lines being drawn, the thing to understand is that different lines will be drawn for different mediums. That the series even crossed the line of explaining the prophecy of the Chosen One was a line none of us aside from George thought we’d ever cross. I think any line you draw after that seems much less consequential.

Interviewer: When did work start on tying Fate of the Jedi into The Clone Wars? Was the Mortis stuff planned from the beginning, or did the Fate of the Jedi series change after those episodes were conceived?

Chee: When we had our first writers’ conference for Fate of the Jedi, the authors teamed together and laid out the groundwork for the series which they presented to the editorial staff. We always knew that this creature from the Maw was going to be a force far beyond what Star Wars fans were accustomed to, but we hadn’t clearly defined exactly how we were going to explain it. We knew it was going to be an organic process that would become clearer after the novels began to take shape. While this was going on, Dave was starting to tell me tidbits about the Mortis Trilogy and at some point it clicked in my head that The Clone Wars and Fate of the Jedi were both dealing with entities with immense powers pushing beyond the “mortal” Star Wars world. Soon after the release of Fate of the Jedi #2 Omen, we had another Fate of the Jedi writer’s conference and it was then that I revealed to the authors what Animation’s plans were in the series with regard to Mortis. I worked closely with Troy Denning is revealing what was going to happen in the Mortis episodes, and it just so happened that many of the ideas Troy was working on matched up nicely with what The Clone Wars was doing and he just took it from there.

My opinion: Considering that Lucas seems to be fine with the Whills and the Mortis Trio co-existing, Chee was wrong to think that there can't be multiple groups of gods balancing The Force, especially when you consider that Mortis might not have literally happened.

 

Oh, huh, so the Abeloth-Mortis connection went further back than we thought.

 

I still agree with Xendor-the force is a river from which many can drink and no one aspect rules over all the others.

 

My opinion: Developing two very similar but separate transcendental groups of Force-balancing beings, at the same time, and then revealing them at roughly the same time in different media, would have been a missed opportunity to tie the storytelling eras together and would have stood out like a sore thumb to consumers as sloppy and redundant.

 

That was sort of my reaction when Death Troopers and the Geonosian zombie episodes of TCW came out around the same time.

 

Yes! Can’t wait!

 

Anyone know what the Alien Archive says about the Force wielders/Mortis denizens?

 

I'm so ready for Supernatural Encounters .

Is Alien Archive out now?

 

so hyped

 

Good to know! I'll have to see if I can find it when I'm out and about.

 

The Halloween Literature banner! Waru!

 

Tomorrow! No idea when tomorrow, but tomorrow!

 

Ooru fthaghn! Gorog fthaghn! Ap fthaghn! Danda Sine fthaghn! Typhojem fthaghn! Abeloth fthaghn! El'Shuddem fthaghn!

 

"In his house at Mimban dead Typhojem waits dreaming."

 

Indeed. The whispers in my head have been quite insistent that I do so as of late.

 

"Farewell, Arhul Hextrophon, and beware; for I am El-Shuddem, the Crawling Chaos."