Lit General post NJO Discussion thread.

Over on the LOTF thread, it has reached a point where it’s just a general discussion of post NJO plots, characters, and themes, really just a general discussion on the denningverse.

I think a general thread is more appropriate given it is longer a matter of not spoiling content, and I know of no other active threads.

https://boards.theforce.net/threads...ost-invincible.50047118/page-72#post-57387646

If the staff disapprove they are of course free to close it and redirect discussion to wherever they see fit. Anyway, this thread is intended to broadly cover DNT, LOTF, FOTJ and Crucible and anything else in that time period.

 

Ah yes, the long spiral. This was marketed as a new era new adventures for Star Wars, but it wasn't. I mean how many times did the Sith take over the galaxy?

 

I remember the days when I hated Mace Windu... I clearly hadn't met Denningverse!Luke yet

 

Do you feel they are similar?

 

I love the Sith but there were just too many of them in this post NJO
I could have appreciated, however, if there had been a few books with some of the Sith as the main protagonists

 

Prequels!Mace and Denningverse!Luke are both very cold Jedi Masters and very deep in the Order hierarchy but where the books gave Mace a much more open and warm side, Denningverse!Luke was just unfriendly and cruel

 

Stover Mace always works to save lives. Denning Luke, doesn't, he doesn't seem to care about others. I mean he orders a mass assassination in Apocalypse.

 

Apart of me wonders if Denning was just emulating the current cultural zeitgeist of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Where anti heroes and “hard men doing hard things while hard” was in vogue.

You had the dark Knight, Watchmen(I think?), various cop shows, etc... that presented the notion that to beat the bad guy you had to be as ruthless or more than the bad guy.

Also the notion may have been that idealistic or compassionate heroes aren’t popular, goody two shoes and Boy Scouts and such. Maybe that was just Denning’s belief.

I dunno.

 

Thing is though Luke is never really played as an anti hero, the narration always has his side and he is shown to not be morally compromised at all.

Also not sure if Batman really is the type of dark anti hero that Denning seemed to ewoke. Batman doesn't kill, never. Even if movies sometimes ignore/downplay that aspect if him. Batman would have never murdered Jacen, he would have brought him to the Arkham Asylum and just as with Harvey Dent kept hope to one day get the hero back...

 

I just realized Aurra Sing must be 91 in Tempest
I think at some point I have to stop trying to figure it out, for the sake of my sanity

 

What was crazy to me was that only one year after the prequels ended, they decided to literally give us the prequel story all over again. I mean, what the hell? For one thing the reception to the prequels was at best mixed in the first place, and for another, can you give us a little bit of a breather before you tell them all over again?

 

I certainly think so.

I think this is also when they definitely jettisoned the Bantam era politics in favor of the modern zeitgeist of "the government is bad, and the people running it are either well-meaning but impotent, or dupes, or outright villains who're looking for any chance to go full autocratic."

There was a lot of it running through the prequels already, but that makes sense for the story: it's supposed to set up how the galaxy collapsed into the Empire we saw in the original movies, so government has to be bad and dysfunctional at this point. There's also a lot of it running through the NJO, but you can partly explain that as not "the government is bad," but "sometimes the government will produce bad administrations," especially since Borsk Fey'lya is never taken all the way to the extreme of being an actual bad guy, even as he drives the heroes nuts. And, of course, they get a better and newer government halfway through the war, and Destiny's Way and the reorganization from New Republic to GA suggest that a lot of the people in government are aware of its shortcomings and working to address it.

LOTF just feels like the point where they threw their arms up and said "welp, you know what, government is just bad. Not just in certain ways or certain circumstances where it makes sense, but as a general axiom."

 

They threw some of that '70 is the new 40' crap at us when we figured that out. I can accept that Yoda is 800-odd, and that Wookies live longer, but Aurra is basically human -- so the suspension of disbelief falls down. They could have just introduced a new assassin, but were lazy, I guess.

 

There seemed to be a lot of unnecessary forced PT tie ins going around. The random holo of Padme in Dark Nest or Jacen flow walking to ROTS come to mind.

 

my guess is that was them being like “finally we aren’t bound by the no PT rule” anymore so they could finally start adding stuff with full context

 

Yeah, there was definitely a sense of people excited to play with the new toys about it.

 

I didn't mind that too much...the 'who's my mother' sub-plot was in two of the three books, even if it was a bit contrived.

This actually did bug me quite a bit. In order for flow-walking to work, plot-wise, we have to assume that the room has memory. (The 'if-these-walls-could-talk' theme) In the case you bring up though, it doesn't work. Why? Because the original Temple was torn down. LotF states that it was rebuild as an exact replica, which is why Jacen can flow-walk....but being rebuilt isn't the same as being original. The actual structure isn't the same, so Jacen is only going to be able to go back as far as this new building; probably a decade or so.

We could take a leap and say that the building doesn't really matter, and that the actual air has memory....but if that's the case, why does Jacen need to touch anything?

 

I wish we could have seen what Padme's family was up to in that era.

 

Weird thing about Aurra Sing is she doesn’t die, she’s just locked up and apparently forgotten about. Her being around I don’t have an issue with, given her Anzati heritage(she’s going to live a long time).

 

I think that while obviously this wasn’t going to happen to a trilogy like DNT meant to move forward the overall plot post-NJO, there needed to have been a series set pre-NJO not unlike Tatooine Ghost that really tied the post-Endor period and the Prequel period together. For example, a post-Black Fleet Crisis book focusing on Luke and Leia’s relationship to Padme would have tied up that loose end and moved past some of the things that hold back the post-NJO period.

 

You know given how much development the PT era got-countless worlds, species, etc... it’s really a shame that so little of it actually was ever integrated into the post NJO EU.

 

It feels almost like a parody of NJO. Like you say NJO had SOME elements of 'government bad', but post NJO takes it up to 11. Now the heroes are all kicking ass and taking names. Since people didn't like thinking Luke/Jacen so now no one thinks and that is a good thing. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt, it seems.

 

It’s ruefully amusing that the Empire has more elections over LotF/FotJ than the GA, and they don’t even elect Dalaa to boot. Something went horribly wrong here.

 

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up don't it.

 

I like how Luke Jedi started to look like the PT but i believe the EU should end with the Vong War