Lit Fate of the Jedi issues...

Well we do know that Roan Fel's wife was Hapan-which implies that the Hapans were seen as equals or near equals of the Felpire-enough they could marry into the Fel dynasty.

 

I could swear I remember Denning referring to the Legacy comics as "one possible future" or a similar term.

Which in turn implied the existence of a multiverse well before the Canon-Legends split.

 

If it gets me benstra I will take it.

But it is still a hypocritical stance.

 

Double post-hit the reply button without typing anything silly mistake on my part.

 

I find it very hard to believe Lucasfilm would have allowed denning to outright contradict legacy. At least I hope they would not have allowed him to do that.

 

I think they just wanted him to write a conclusion to the big 3, to not kill them,

Spoiler

but retire them(If you guys are still talking about Crucible)

I think Denning would have been done with Star Wars, with or without the reboot.

 

Didn't denning mention having some planned trilogy post crucible to be written by him? Or was that just rumor? But yeah he had been writing Star Wars for years-and his reputation amongst the fanbase was already controversial enough as it was.

 

So he did have another trilogy planned.

 

Yes. Chiss vs. the Anzats, I think?
Mentioned somewhere during that conversation.

 

The Anzats? Is that a joke? Sounds terrible. Also sounds like Dark Nest 2.0

 

The anzati would be the proper plural use of the word.

 

T-Den had another trilogy lined up? I never knew that. I follow him on facebook but not twitter so I missed that entirely.

If they had announced a new Denning trilogy back in 2012/13, I can't say I would have been excited. Fate of the Jedi just burned me out so hard that I didn't bother with Crucible and could barely muster myself to read Mercy Kill. And when they announced that they were giving Christie Golden of all people an entire trilogy, I knew it would be a hard pass. Giving another one to an author who also wrote three terrible FOTJ books wouldn't have garnered any more excitement.

Actually, 2 1/3 terrible FOTJ books. Two thirds of his first one (Abyss? the names all blend together) were actually quite good. But they were the exception rather than the rule, and he's also the man who wrote Invincible, Vortexferno and Apocabyss. Or was one of them called Maelstrom? Maybe Snowsquall? I could have sworn there was one just called "Ouch!" The boring, unimaginative one-word LOTF/FOTJ titles stopped having any meaning pretty quickly.

The announcement of another Denning trilogy wouldn't have surprised me, though. When they gave Golden a post-FOTJ trilogy, they made it pretty clear that the further employment of an author by LFL/Del Rey wasn't conditional on the quality of their previous output, but rather on the mere fact they had previous output at all. And also that forty-five years after Jedi, the EU was so convoluted that they likely felt there was too much baggage on which to catch up new authors. New authors can write books in other eras, but when it comes to the continuing post-ROTJ narrative, stick with people who know the material (although asserting that Golden actually knew the material is... arguable). Allston, Denning, Golden, rinse and repeat. And maybe a Luceno now and then.

There was also the rumor (was it ever confirmed?) that Traviss had been their first choice for FOTJ but she turned it down. I mean... how deeply would their heads have had to be buried in the sand? After all of the incredibly negative fan reaction and backlash to Legacy of the Force, doubling down on doing the exact same thing again with the exact same authors? Christ. FOTJ was bad enough, but making a third of it be about Superman Boba Fett would have somehow made it even worse. Especially when Denning and Allston indicated in that one comic-con panel that was filmed and posted online back in 2009 that Traviss's disinterest in working with them was the primary reason behind LOTF's disastrous intra-continuity.

Disney buying Lucasfilm was the best thing that could have happened to the EU. FOTJ wasn't just awful, it was insultingly awful, and there was zero indication that any lesson had been learned at all. The post-ROTJ planning team absolutely deserved to have their playtoys taken away from them.

 

I find it utterly astounding they were planning on keeping Denning around for yet another trilogy-the denningverse moniker most certainly existed in 2013 amongst EU fans. His reputation amongst the fanbase was very divisive.

As for Golden-I think she wasn't as familiar or comfortable in writing star wars and that showed-some GFFAisms(datapads, slicers, etc...) she got wrong-showing she didn't know the "little details" very well. Maybe she would have acclimated to it, maybe not.

But keeping Denning on for yet another trilogy post Crucible seems very tone deaf-almost as if they didn't bother to even pay attention to the attitude of the fans to the author who had written something like 44% of the post NJO.

 

There were just so many indications that they couldn't have cared less about the fans. Like making FOTJ nine hardcovers and having absolutely nothing at all happen in about seven of them. The NJO and LOTF were committed to the concept of making the more-expensive hardcovers true event books, but FOTJ treated its $25 hardcovers as $2.99 comic issues where not much happens but if you hold out for the entire arc it'll finally feel like a story. They completely gave up on the idea of each novel being able to stand alone. Remember the climax of Omen? No? That's because there wasn't one. The book fizzled out into nothingness after 230 pages. And they felt like they could justify making it a hardcover. Utterly insulting.

 

That's just so stupid and self defeating-I mean surely they knew that the Star Wars fans who actually read the novels was a tiny minority within the fandom-I mean why go out of one's way to alienate the only people who are reliably going to buy your stuff?

It just seems so utterly arrogant and ridiculous on Lucasfilm's part-I just don't understand how they couldn't care at all.

 

I cannot belive that they gave Denning ANOTHER set of books after FotJ. Golden I don't mind but like why more Denning? Did he have pictures of someone, did he win a bet? Why?

 

Well Denning was the lead write r of the post NJO SW. Others like Luceno seemed to be more like contractors who would simply write stories according to what they are given, while the likes of Allston and Travis are focused just on one particular aspect(X-Wing and Mandos respecitvley) Maybe SotJ would have given Golden an opportunity to prove herself in a longer story. (Though I highly doubt it would have been the EU saving masterpiece some fans tend to claim
it would have been.)
Also Golden is a main writer for Blizzard(Warcaft/Starcraft) so she wouldn't be as available as Denning.

 

I thought they had plans for Traviss to write a second Imperial Commando book at least, as well as the Warfare guide (though I think at the time it was called something like Essential Guide to the Military, and if she had written it, boy would that have been a horror). Something about her not liking the TCW Mando episodes or something? Although if they had offered FotJ to her, I wouldn't have been surprised. She and Denning were some of Del Rey's most prolific authors in those days.

Sadly I don't think Del Rey had any problems with Denning. Whatever else, he had quantity and was consistent(ly bad) and was fast. Not to mention them being extra greedy with FotJ's all hardcover strategy, (LotF as all hardcvoer would have been hard to accept, FotJ as all hardcover was a bad joke at best. The NJO saga was dark and edgy, then for LotF and FotJ they turned that up to 11.

I could see Golden as similar to Traviss and Denning in that she could write fast, but I also didn't expect anything good from the possible Sword of the Jedi trilogy. If SotJ had turned out decent that would have been a shock. Del Rey had pretty thoroughly ruined the post-RotJ EU, so I don't miss that at all. Depending on possible hints, they were even trying to drag down the Legacy comics too, with the way they kept screwing around with possible Legacy background (Jag is suddenly in charge of the Imperial Remnant, then he's not, etc.).

 

Do you think they tanked the post NJO timeline on purpose to make us fans want and accept a potential upcoming reboot?

 

Was the reboot Del-Rey's idea? I thought it had something to do with the replacement of Michael Arndt with JJ Abrams.

 

Maybe Del Rey wasn´t planning a reboot here and now but given the lowering sales, them having killed of several popular characters like Chewie or Mara (whom they could bring back via a reboot), the fact that TFU3 apprently would have been an AU game(and the second being pretty close to the border of an AU), the stories beomcing more and more distant from the movies (both timeline and character wise), several rather massive lore contradictions in the Clone Wars and that entire talk with legacy being "a possible future" I think a reboot would have happened sooner or later even without the buyout.
Maybe it wouldn´t have been as groundshaking as the Disney reboot but more of a soft one, keeping popular storylines like the Thrawn trilogy around but removing plotlines like the Vong War and the Denningverse. At the very least I think the idea was there and if SotJ and Dennings new trilogy would have failed to win back the fanbasethan I think we would have seen some sort of reboot.

 

I suppose that's possible-but if one recalls the last years of the EU were its most cohesive. You had the essential Atlas, essential guide to warfare, a dawn of the Jedi book, legacy volume 2.

Basically it wasn't the bantam era in which continuity had to be stitched together or even the NJO.

I find it hard to believe that they would have rebooted the EU-at least immediately.

As for legacy being a "possible future"-we just have Denning's statement on that. No one at Lucasfilm, Leland Chee, or Sue Rostoni, or Shelly Shapiro or anybody else ever made a similar statement.

 

Yeah but still the point is the bigger the post Endor stuff became the less acsessible it became. You can´t really sell a new book series to new custormers when to really get what´s happening in it they would have to read 40+ books to learn what happened since Endor and who these new characters are. Especially if they did eventually retired the big 3. New readers wouldn´t know who Jaina, Jagged, Ben and Allana are, why the empire is suddenly good and so on. I mean they tried to make LotF more acsesible I think by trying to decrease the Vong war and its impact on the galaxy as well as brining a relativley new protagonist with Ben Skywalker. And that didn´t really work.
Also CW was basically doing its own thing, having Piel and Ventress(I know the book was published after the rebot but I seem to recall it was based on a planned storyline) die and Gardulla be alive, the Clone Chips recton, even planning to retcon the Vong into some dark side aliens from the unkown regions(which probably now became the Grysk). Not to mention stuff like the Chiss being prominent in TOR despite their race not being discovered until outbound flight. Yes you can certainly argue around some of these issues but I think some sort of reboot was coming. Maybe not everything but I feel that they would have tried to remove/change at least a few things and reset the post Endor story to an ealier date to bring back the big 3 into the foreground. Or alterntaivley they could have opened the door towards multiveres and different timelines altogether.

And I think when Disney tookover they went with that but probably decided to remove everything to have a clean start so to say. I honestly don´t think the decision came from Abrahms or was just about Chewie. To adapt the Thrawn trilogy the actors were to old and other storylines like NJO were just to controversial for the first Star Wars movies in over a decade.

 

Possibly your right-and that was always an enduring issue the EU had-the more expansive it became, the more esoteric it became.

It was a tall order for new fans to "dive in".

Often times they would ask "where do I start?" or "what's the most important books to read?"

Though if the EU had lasted a few more years until the rise of various fan YouTube channels-from Star Wars explained among others-I think internet sources such as YouTube could have served as entry points and explainers-helping show people who weren't already versed in the EU what the EU was.

Same thing with books like the essential reader's companion and atlas-these reference sources provided a general idea of what the EU was like content wise.