Lit History of the Old Republic

I know McEwok and I'm not sure I can really answer that question.

 

Geez. Now I'm sort of glad I never knew the guy.

 

But you will never know the 'true' relationship between Anakin Solo and Mara Jade

 

He had his quirks. I personally didn't dislike his contributions to TEGTW though.

 

Again, no knowledge of the guy myself, and I don't really know which of the EGTW parts were him so those previous examples could have been cherrypicking to make him sound bad for all I know - but the definite impression that I'm getting in this thread is that I would have been very unhappy to learn he was getting to contribute to canon had I known who he was at the time.

 

You might find The Essential Guide to Warfare endnotes of interest - any bit that begins with "Paul Urquhart writes" is him:

http://jasonfry.tumblr.com/post/20843004826/eg-to-warfare-endnotes-pt-1

 

Eh. I'm not trying to build up evidence for a vendetta or anything (frankly I'm sorry for derailing the thread in the first place). It's just: screwing up Old Republic stuff + screwing up the NJO and Vergere + genuinely creepy fanwank + a name so dumb it breaks past my normal "fans of a series that featured a bounty hunter named 'Greedo' in its first installment have no right to be criticizing names... that is a lot of my buttons pushed right there.

 

I'd love to see proper coverage of what happened between the Dawn of the Jedi era and the founding of the Republic.

 

I completely forgot about his Mara and Anakin theory. There's a fine line between genius and insanity, and that's not anywhere near that line.

 

I guess that SW video "The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns a New Page" was exaggerating when it said the EU would just be a resource for new canon products moving forward. We have like half a dozen encyclopedias and guides and a boatload of RPG material. All of which would be nice, if it was actually part of the canon.

 

I think calling it a theory is generous. There were things he actually had serious interest in, and things he liked to joke about to stir people up. I seriously doubt he'd have given a moment's consideration to actually trying to put the Anakin thing in Warfare--even if there'd been a natural place for it, which there wasn't.

 

He wrote explicit fanfiction about his Mara-Anakin theory, does that count as "serious interest" or not?

 

Now I have to go to write an explicit Waru/Luke fic, just in case I one day write something canon.

 

I bet JediMara77 has opinions about that.

 

is there really going to be a book about the old republic?

 

No. You've hallucinated.

 

I ship Luke with exactly two beings. Waru ain't one of them.

 

You can't deny that Luke was really deeply into Waru. He really saw Waru's hidden depths.

But, in the end they were of different worlds. And so Waruke couldn't last.

 

Mara Jade and Maara Jaade?

 

I'm going to have to agree with Coop here.

(I'm also tempted to add an echoic "Cyril Connolly?" to any discussion about self-knowledge, which is a sort of combined Abel Peña / Monty Python / James Bond joke that no-one will get...)

In no particular order...

1.) Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis, as Jello might say.

2.) I take full responsibility for Skere Kaan's forename. I also pondered something riffing on "Noonien Sing" or "Genghis" (at one point, he was almost called Tuelv Kaan, but that sounded too like a couple of six-packs of beer).

3.) The Vergere scene was a response to the contrasting interpretations of the character which Matt Stover and Troy Denning had been running from the start. It's there for you to make your own mind up about, and I hoped that readers who knew enough about the character to recognize the context would realise that it's not actually pushing any specific agenda at all. Personally, I love what both Mr. Stover and Mr. Denning did, and I guess ultimately it was a meditation on the way that the paradox of their apparently irreconcilable takes, poised neatly on the faultline between Star by Star and Traitor, accidentally breaks the Galaxy.

3.) Marakin. Do I really have to keep saying that a.) I simply don't find it strange to occasionally ponder the sex-lives of fictional adults over the federal age of consent who aren't blood relatives, especially when it's referencing themes that are inherently redolent in the monomyth (I normally throw King Arthur at people, but at this point, I'm tempted to say something about David Niven's James Bond, River Phoenix's Indiana Jones, and Mata Hari) and b.) I feel very bad in hindsight, because I didn't realise that a slightly tongue-in-cheek personal lit-crit sideline by one fanboy (pursued very intermittently from 2003 to no later than 2007, if memory serves) would blind anyone to the obvious point, which is that Luke/Mara and Anakin/Tahiri are the two most patently right partnerships in the entire Star Wars canon, something that should be clear to anyone who actually knows me at all...? Also, it wasn't even my idea - it was something someone else raised in a wide-ranging conversation among some fanboys...

4.) This is probably the most important point I need to make here: I've always drawn a clear distinction between several different levels of STAR WARS topic, in ascending order of importance:
A.) Free-ranging fan discussion (the mythic potential of fictional characters' paternity falls in this category).
B.) Personal taste (my uncompromised and uncompromising enthusiasm for Anakin/Tahiri falls in this category).
C.) Stuff I think works as part of the STAR WARS canon (most of canon itself falls in this category, so does everything I contributed to WARFARE, and above all, the ultra-completist approach to continuity which led me to do a lot of fleet junk longposts when I'd rather have been reading Greg Keyes novels is a fairly obvious statement of my principles on this point; and yes, for me, Kaan's forename falls into this category too ).
D.) What the professional people making the professional decisions decide works for canon overrules everything else (the finished product of WARFARE, for example, falls in this category; everything with a LucasBooks logo falls into this category, as do all the decisions that go into making them).
Contributing WARFARE was a very fun opportunity to offer some of my own thoughts under heading (C.) to contribute in a finished product shaped fundamentally under heading (D.) by what other people higher up the STAR WARS food chain felt was right. And in this day and age, (D.) has been completely redefined in terms of Abramsverse and Legends, which renders everything I've ever thought about the matter happily irrelevant.

6.) Vthuil: I'm sincerely sorry if I pushed your buttons. I've responded tangentially to at least one topic above, but I can't really give a focused reply because I'm not sure what you think I "screwed up" with regard to the OR and Vergere exactly...? I'd be interested to hear your opinions, but if you don't want to derail the thread, you're welcome to reply to me by Private Message...

I guess that makes a topic (F.) as well - I'm always open to discussion with people, and while I have clear opinions and strong enthusiasms on some topics, I'm not in the least bit dogmatic about forcing them on anyone at all.

Now, everyone, please, go back to discussing this new canon/legends material that we've got to accompany these new movies?


Mac

 

Wow, that's an extremely polite and well-articulated response to what I have to admit was some fairly shallowly-based criticism on my part. I'm favorably impressed.

That said, to elaborate on the points you question:

• I really don't like "Darth Naga Sadow". It's kind of a nitpicky thing, but I don't care for attempts to retcon in similarities between the TOTJ-era Sith and later movie-style Sith. Giving Sadow a Darth title comes across as an example of that, especially because it's a completely insignificant throwaway reference that could easily have been omitted.
• With the Vergere thing, I guess the simplest way to put it is that I'm pretty uncompromisingly hostile to most of the things Troy Denning has done with Star Wars (and I don't just limit that to Vergere). So any attempt to strike a balance between his work and Stover's Traitor - IMO one of the finest novels of the entire Expanded Universe - does not go over well with me.

(As for the Mara/Anakin thing, I'm not going to discuss it further since I'm clearly too unfamiliar with the context. But I will say that in general I find appeals to the "monomyth" a very unconvincing defense of anything.)

 

No worries - thanks for listening, and for the prompt, concise, lucid and classy response. Let's see if I can do as well:

* If I remember right, my thinking about "Darth Naga Sadow" was as follows - on one level, it creates immediate familiarity for the less-specialized fan for whom all Sith are Darths, with the jazzy option that this one has three names; in terms of serious continuity wrangling, the term had already been established in canon as a really ancient word originally meaning "emperor", with particular reference to a strand of political hostility to the Core political tradition embodied by the Republic, and it seemed like the sort of title that Sadow would thus naturally use, albeit not with anything much like its later Banite meaning - we know it worked its way into the Sith tradition at some point, after all; I was also homaging the semantic slipperiness of some of the Abel Peña Sith linguistics stuff (we're dealing with three separate meanings here - Darth qua "emperor", Darth qua "translation of Sith'ari", and Darth qua "Sith Lord", and the way that subsequent history can change the perceived meaning of the past), and there was also probably a nod in there the way that a faux "continuity" of galactic emperors is written into the main political ideology in the Dune novels - claim the title, claim the heritage, that sort of thing. All of which doesn't change or invalidate your reaction in the slightest, and perhaps reveals that I have a natural tendancy to fly over-complex mental aerobatics on autopilot over breakfast, and I sometimes don't even notice I'm doing it; but I hope at least explains that I wasn't in any sense wanting to make the TotJ Sith into anachronistic Banites...?

* Your uncompromising opinion on Vergere is noted, and respected, and rather enjoyed. It seems appropriate? On the other hand, I had what I saw as the responsibility of not playing favourites, and in this case, the advantage of not wanting to, either. The scene is designed to be readable from a thoroughly Stoverish POV, though - Vergere is, after all, acting, for the benefit of her audience, and that scene would read totally different if we had her internal monlogue to counterpoint it....

All of which perhaps does nothing for you at all, but I hope at least explains that I wasn't simply taking stances you would find directly contrary...?

(As to the question of appeals to the monomyth - I doubt I'm going to convince you, and you certainly don't have to take its seriously; but it's a tool which is part of the Lucas storytelling arsenal, and it ultimately consists of nothing more than objective references to canonical works - in the non-STAR WARS sense! - in which similar plotpoints have happened before....)


Mac

 

Ha, I knew you'd amble in here eventually.