Lit Books Poe Dameron: Free Fall by Alex Segura

...Um, what? I don't get it.

 

It's a webcomic (Awkward Zombie) by a woman who wrote a huge number of fanfics about a character that had a minimum of development in Fire Emblem.

Then the character got put in Super Smash Brothers!

And....turned out to be completely cheerful and goofy!

She was kind of off-put and her blog is hilarious. "I mean, it's objectively stupid of me to think they're getting Marth WRONG given they own him but I've been writing him about ten years so..."

A Star Wars equivalent is finally meeting Revan and the Exile in THE OLD REPUBLIC and they're nothing like your PC.

 

Ohhhh, okay, I get it now. lol.

Well, at least it's only almost two years for me instead of a whole decade. xD

 

Not done with it yet... but...

Spoiler

New Republic Security Bureau

gave me a big smile and made me shout Ha, I knew

Spoiler

Empress Mon Mothma was not doing away with Imperial concepts that proved useful.

 

Did the book add anything on the Battle of Endor?

 

Decided to take a punt on this - no idea when it'll arrive.

 

Spoiler

I feel like there is a bit of a disconnect between how angry Zorii was at Poe at the end of this book and how quick she was to come to his aide in TROS. I would understand her actions in TROS if their parting was more on the sad yet understanding side, but the book makes it seems like she's out for Poe's life by the end. Also, the freighted nature of their relationship seems poorly served by the end of TROS, where Poe gives her that look and Zorii shakes him off. My head-canon is that they'll meet up again post-TROS - it is implied that Zorii and Babu are the only surviving Spice Runners, and by showing up at the Battle of Exegol they're pretty much Resistance/New Republic fighters now, if typical Star Wars logic applies (criminal absolution obtained by helping out the heroes in their hour of need, regardless of the severity and pervasiveness of their criminal activity).

Speaking of unresolved questions, do you think that Zorii killed her mother in that battle, killer her in some way after, or did her mother lose her position as Spice Runner leader some other way (less likely in my eyes). They established that the leader wears the helmet, so Zorii is definitely the leader by TROS.

 

Spoiler

Not that I recall. The book suggests that there were no major battles/upheavals after the Battle of Jakku (of course, this can and hopefully will be changed with further books, comics, TV, or films) and at several points the author lumps the Battle of Endor together with the Battle of Jakku, as if to say that these battles were essentially the one-two punch that defeated the Empire, leaving behind a vacuum that the New Republic is doing a poor time of filling. Hence why gangs like the Spicerunners of Kajimi are looking to expand their influence

 

I read this book over the course of this weekend. It was a nice, breezy read. As with other Canon books that chart the maturity of an established character (Rebel Rising comes to mind), it doesn't have much to say about the State of the Galaxy, but it does a good job of explaining (or retconning, if you're feeling less generous) how the Poe that was introduced in TFA and elaborated upon in TLJ and his own comic series connects to the details about Poe introduced in TROS. I've heard people say that Finn was the Han of the sequel trilogy, but after this book at TROS I think that association firmly belongs to Poe (even down to the similarities in the relationship between Poe/Zorii and Han/Qi'ra).

 

So, I've figured out the timeline for this novel (I think):

By chapter 16, Poe was in the Spice Runners gang for a month
By chapter 23, it's been 4 months (They ran into Trune after a month, then in Ch. 23 it had been three months since that encounter.)
By chapter 26 it's been eight months since he joined up.
By chapter 30 it had been "a few months" since Kes and L'ulo tracked him down and he decided to stay with the Spice Runners
By chapter 33, they've been on Kijimi for a month
The rest of the novel takes place over the space of less than a month.
So, I'd say about 13 months. And since a year in SW time is only 10 months, he was in that gang for almost a year and a half.

 

Legends said 10 months. Canon indicates 12 months.

 

So Poe ends his time with the spice runners circa 19 ABY, and meets with them again in ROS 35 ABY. 16 years is a long time, yet he acts like it wasn't that long ago and asks for hacking help on Threepio.

This would be like me approaching Nobel laureates Professors Smoot and Perlmutter, who I also last worked with 16 years ago (2004) and also had worked with for something like a year, and start asking for favors. I'll be lucky if either of them even remember who I am.

 

Right, the movie implies that the gap was a lot smaller, as in Poe spent at least a couple of years, maybe into his early or mid-twenties, with the Spice Runners before leaving for the NRN and then the Resistance. In fact, the movie implies that he went straight from the Spice Runners to the Resistance, which we know is wrong based on prior material. In the book his tenure with the Spice Runners is much shorter, presumably because its harder to keep Poe's character morally clean (relatively speaking) and consistent with the character as first introduced in TFA if he spent years with a drug cartel.

 

I enjoyed the book, and it did help me reconcile the new info from TROS with what we knew about Poe.

What disappointed me was the repeated references to the weakness and ineffectiveness of the New Republic. For the sake of the "Return of the Jedi is still a happy ending" idea, I had preferred to think of the Republic as having a long early period of peace, prosperity, and rebuilding before falling into the factionalism and stasis we see in Bloodline. So it at least got to a good place before slowing down. But this makes it seem like it never really got much momentum outside the Core. Hopefully that just reflects the perspective of the criminal element trying to convince people that they weren't doing anything wrong.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

 

Mine is sitting somewhere in the Amazon UK delivery pipeline. Was supposed to come today but I got this on the tracking update screen this morning -'Delay in delivery due to external factors' . Status has since been updated to say it's at the final delivery station but that was at 3PM so I'm not holding my breath on delivery today.

 

The TROS Visual Dictionary places Poe leaving home and joining the Spice Runners as 16 BSI (so, 18 ABY) and dates his return home to 11 BSI (so, 23 ABY).

If he left the Spice Runners in 19 ABY, that means he must have done something for the next 4 years before arriving home.

Wookieepedia insists he stayed with the Spice Runners till 23 ABY

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/23_ABY

but that's not what the Visual Dictionary book actually states - it only states that he arrived home then, not that he left the Spice Runners then.

 

This is about what I'd thought too--except at the very end of the book Poe reflects on "the past few years". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Maybe it's the past few years leading up to him joining the Spice Runners, and his year in the Spice Runners.

 

One thing this book continues is a bold aesthetic style - this is bright blue, in contrast to the muted 'adult' books. (Alphabet Squadron might be defying that.)

 

My copy came from Amazon UK yesterday evening so it's in the to-read pile.

 

So, I'm starting to think Kes died from that frog monster bite. If he didn't, then you would think the FO (Or Terex in the comics at the very least) would use him as leverage against Poe or set a bounty on Kes. In Star Wars Resistance, Kaz’s dad told him he put the family in danger by being in the Resistance. Well, Poe is more important and caused way more damage to the FO than Kaz did. If the Xionos were in danger, Kes should have been, too.

 

Interesting book now I finished it... but slowgoing and repetitive. Predictable even. And I missed a lot at the end about his return and joining up with the NR, how his crimes were forgiven or not and he had to repent. Glossing over that by sheer not including it is criminal! Likewise how his dad and Lulo reacted upon his return. Sigh... the interesting parts were ignored and not in the book.

My rating: 3/10