Lit Reading NJO...Again

I'm in the middle of "Conquest" now. I like how Greg Keyes is flashing out the relationship between Anakin and Tahiri. They are so opposite in their character but still complementing each other. When reading the passages about Solusar and Tionne I think of the reminder here in this thread to read YJK (and at least my smartphone already knows that abbreviation )

We see after "Hero's Trial" some other peace brigadists and their motives in joining the Yuuzhan Vong.

Borsk Fey'lya is great in twisting facts around and here like in the TTT one has a tinging feeling he is commiting treason on the NR. So there are diplomatic channels between the Yuuzhan Vong and the NR. And much to Jaina's chagrin we hear that Borsk did archive sooo much more for the galaxy than her yet.

Somebody else here thinking of Alden's Han Solo crying out to Qi'ra in SOLO "I'll be back. I promise you. I'll be back!" when Tahiri gets caught?

Anakin making a glider out of three ships and Vehn is doubting it will work. "And that's why you fail" Jek 14 told Anakin sr. in the LEGO Star Wars Yoda Chronicles series ep. "Attack of the Jedi" when Jek 14 was doing the same on Endor. Another NJO easter egg in this series?

I just read the chapter when Nen Yim steps in. When the young women touches a real planet for the first time I strongly remember that bare foot touching real grass scene in Disney's "Rapunzel Tangled". Now I'm waiting for Vua Rapuung.

 

Got the Edge of Victory and Agents of Chaos duology SBCC Collections

 

Finished Conquest. Vua Rapuung was interesting. How he killed that Shamed One "Q'eu!", telling Anakin that he was just a Shamed One, while he, Vua Rapuung is not a real Shamed One but something better. Greg Keyes described very well the sensitive "holy cows" in the thinking of both. I'll see if Anakin really needs the shimmerer in the future to sense Yuuzhan Vong.

Rebirth: Can't tell you how often I read that Nen Yim/Onimi scenes. I'm wondering if the scene, when Kae Kwaad is touching her is just an allusion to something more. I mean, Kae Kwaad is telling Nen Yim that his thoughts are dropping like blood to his feet. Then Nen Yim approaches that close that their bodies are touching. Why is she coming that close after his words? Are these words kind of a code to circumlocute the proposal? And do they do such often? And when Greg Keyes writes: "It was over fast", was that just about some touching? Or did he even more to Nen Yim not to be told in order to get this series down to be presentable to readers from 12 years on?

 

Is everybody here finished with reading NJO or are there some special Star Wars vacations I don't know?

There are some things about the shaper caste I don't get. In the introduction of Mezhaan Kwaad, in "Conquest" is written that she would have liked to have a child but it is forbidden because this is for masters only. But isn't she a master already. And later, Nen Yim remembers a bygone and forbidden love when this traitor is sent to her into the vivarium. But why was this love forbidden when he was an initiate of her own caste? And why the heck in "Edge of Victory" Tahiri Veila is crying "Do ro'ik vong pratte!" on Eriadu? I think Mezhaan Kwaad should have taught her that "Fyy roog, fyy roog!" battle cry of the shaper caste, wouldn't she? Or was that just another heresy of hers?

I'm still pondering upon how Kae Kwaad became Nen Yim's new master. Tjuulan Kwaad wanted her to be restricted, for sure. I did smile broadly when Tjuulan told Nen Yim that even when Tsavong Lah did pardon her, the Warmaster is by far incompetent to figure out the whole dangerous weight of her and Mezhan's heresy. Tsavong should not hear this.

I guess that Tjuulan Kwaad did report Nen Yim's recent behavior to Shimrra directly, not assuming that Onimi harbors special interest in such heresies.

 

I am still stuck on Force Heretic. Soooooo boring. I diverted to Clone Wars Seige and First Shot.

IG: @jedisufism

 

The NRI thing is subtler and more complex than you might think. The characterization note which sums this up for me is a little biographical detail for Belindi Kalenda. She's clearly a "good guy", but when she arrives at Coronet in Ambush at Corellia, she's driving the transport of a gang of robbers who she casually murdered when they held her up. Now yes, maybe they were complete thugs, but maybe they were just desperate and a bit incompetent. She isn't the sort who takes the time to find out, or shows much regret about what she's just done. There's a rather neat counterpoint between that and a scene later in the Corellian trilogy when Mara's made a sloppier-than-usual headshot and left a very messy corpse on the stairs of Leia's front room - Leia, who in her younger days put a lot of pistol shots through stormtroopers, is appalled by the sight...

The other point that needs to be raised here is that Drayson, who we're generally cued to think of as a "good guy", is also tied up in Alpha Red, as is Joi Ecroth (I didn't recall A'baht's remark to him in Before the Storm, "I don't believe I like you, Admiral", when I wrote his NJO resignation in WARFARE, but I think that very much fits as well)...

There are a lot of questions being asked here, which invite the reader to make up his or her own mind. I think that's good writing, myself?

My answer, which only hit me years after first reading the novels, is that Tsavvy is actually a Quorealist.

This is never made clear in the novels (there's a lot like that!) but can be inferred from his close political alliance with Harrar, who's implied to be the secret leader of the Quorealist movement.

Tsavvy thus challenged his father as a feint, to appear to support Shimrra and thus preserve the leverage and status of Domain Lah.

The fact that in Dark Journey, Tsavvy sends his son Khalee to Harrar in the hope that Khalee will maybe learn how to hide his real agenda further emphasises that Tsavvy is also concealing his politics.

Tsavong seems to be related to tsasai, "baton of command", the name of the short amphistaff of a senior officer, and to the noun for "make, command, cause", whose imperative form is tsii - so I think the name means "leader of vong".

I think that's forbidden for masters. Junior members of Shaper domains are the ones who are allowed.

The practical answer is that "Fyy roog! Fyy roog!" was probably only made up for Destiny's Way.

The continuity-saving answer is that Do ro'ik vong pratte! may be used more widely than just by the warriors, that Riina perhaps selfidentifies as a warrior, and if so, that may be a deliberate decision on Mezhan Kwaad's part as she's clearly not expected to become a normal Shaper, nor has she had the appropriate training.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Regarding the NRI, they aren’t bad guys so much as they are foils.

In a more cynical setting such as Warhammer 40K, alpha red would have been used without a second thought. If it had been say the imperium of man fighting the Yuuzhan vong.

The NRI in the NJO epitomize, the “good people willing to do morally unconscionable things for survival” archetype. This is contrasted with Jacen and Vergere, and later Luke’s attitude of “no we don’t have to become monsters ourselves to win, we can win by transforming the Vong, not destroying them”.

 

Pity we never got the aftermath of Alpha Red... its like a nuclear bomb, once there it cannot be removed. And everybody got it then and can target anybody with it. Aliens targeting human superiority, slave races targettung Hutts, Hutts targeting their enemies, Chiss targeting plenty others.. a new balance of power, or rather cold war of threats and counter threats.

I get that the NRI is complex and like with Cassian Andor in Rogue One, some decisions have to be made fast and on the move, so killing informants is dark but maybe worth the risk? I still can't call it good or acceptable but I see the point and use. Thing is, coming from such a field-experienced attitude, most older Intelligence officers still practice the same behavior as back in the day when they were in the field. Instead of long analysis, they tend to reach to quick decisions and rather fall on the act fast and disseminate later part of the scale than being too late and sorry to not have acted sooner as politicians do. Given the slugglish slow politicians and their committies it's no wonder Intel and military see no need to go at it slow given others already do. Rogue One had this in several instances as we see with Draven's rash decisions and order leading to friendly fire.

Now, kudos for the Alliance to trying to stay good and not sink to Saw's level of guerilla warfare, but war did turn messy post ANH and I wonder how open the New Republic is about this part of its rise... or if it also tries to silence these details and present a smoother image instead of adressing the grim reality and accounting for it in the full banking on honesty and maybe some reparations for those caught in the middle?

 

Well given Alpha Red didn't have to be used and Vergere temporarily sabotaged it. I imagine it was buried, in some vault or in the best case scenario destroyed to try and close Pandora's box.

 

Good catch on Belindi Kalenda.

The moment I'd picked up on was a little earlier in Starfighters of Adumar. And specifically the moment where Wedge tells Tomer Darpen "you can't explain your whole revised plan to General Cracken - he'd never go for it." That's almost certainly true, because if it wasn't, Darpen wouldn't have had to do all this plotting in the dark, even imposing a blackout to cover his activities - he could've simply called Cracken up and had him confirm his orders. Darpen is pretty clearly written as a rogue operator in the book, who's acting without his superiors' approval (or at least without their having the full picture of what he's doing) because he knows they wouldn't approve. But his schemes are also exactly what you can imagine future directors like Dif Scaur and Borath Maddeus signing off on. He loses the battle for Adumar, but his kind ultimately win the war for control of the NRI.

To link this with the "how did the Rebellion avoid becoming a criminal cartel" argument in the headcanon thread - I could see it being plausible that Mon Mothma and the entire original generation of leaders imposed tight discipline on the organization. Ergo, even people like Cracken would have bright red lines that they would not allow themselves or their service to cross (like the Adumar plot) - probably because after experiencing the rise of Palpatine and the Empire, they knew how dangerous it is to have a security state that's not on a tight leash. I could also see this being the kind of norm that would fade away with time as new generations, which hadn't experienced the rise of Palpatine, took over from the older ones.

 

In this sense, isn't Alpha Red just the latest in an already notable line of such weapons? The Empire deployed the Krytos virus to target as many nonhuman species as possible, then the Diversity Alliance modified it to target humans... I can't remember if Alpha Red was a further evolution of Krytos or if it was just in the same vein, but viruses that target certain species had already started proliferating at that point. (You might even say they were an arms race of their own, arguably an even more terrifying one than the Empire's superweapons).

 

No, DA found the Emperor's secret stock of viruses, among them one that targeted humans

 

Not to forget TCW scientists that tried to develop a virus targeting clones and by extension it easily can mutate to target all humanity. It indeed is a trend.

Be glad no Bothan ar'kai member got their hands on any of those!

 

The emperor certainly liked it stocks... Wasn't there even an attempt to develop a virus targeting only Forceusers at some point? Involving Jenna Zan Arbor and else? They could transfer midichlorians to empower non-Forceusers with the Force and drain Forceusers of it literally already. As for the Emperors stocks:
Mount Tantiss had his DNA collection for cloning. Then there is his virus lab... and his other sites. It's like he has a secret map with storehouses, observatories and bases all across the galaxy and the gffa is his LOST island where the Force is battling for balance.


Speaking of clones, how availeable was cloning and DNA in the gffa anyway? I mean, we havn't seen many coups using clone replacements. Coups in later eras tended to rather use Human Replica Droids despite their costs, and earlier earas relied on actors or shapeshifters over clones. Given cloning industry on Khomm, Kamino and Arkania one would guess cloning is albeit pricey readily availeable for wealthy customers to replace body parts that are failing them or for other nefarious means. The Millennium Falcon novel showed us what advanced healthcare for the rich can really achieve in the gffa.

But given all this, why did clones not get used as often as they could be? I mean, what stopps Hutts to collect celebrity dna and clone them? Or why did the Empire never hunt for the Emperors DNA to clone him (before it knew of his Dark Empire plans)? Wasn't there enough left in his private rooms in the Palace? Well Thrawn collected clones in a way as per Crosscurrent.

 

Actually I'm surprised the New Republic held off on using Alpha Red as long as they did. I can see the Jedi saying no, but for any other political or military leader they'd be very hard pressed to do the same.

 

If you are told the risk of it targeting you yourself is high if it mutates you are rethinking your actions Especially if you intend to unleash something biological at a species exceeding your own species biotech level and knowledge... which is as it happens extremely skilled at mutations and mutating stuff, people, etc.

Unless you are Bothan...

 

Which TCW ep. was it?

 

Less the tv show and more the accompanying books and comics by Karen Traviss no less. I miss her great contributions. Even though she mary sued some and had her flaws she overall brought a lot in I loved. Republic Commando series of novels.

 

I don't know about that one.

 

Jedi Apprentice book series

 

EDIT: got the revised version ready in time. This can stay.

I see the NJO as more complicated - that contrast to me is a surface narrative, and whether by deiberate authorial intention or not, there's also a deeper storyline in which Luke and Jacen are guilty, if that's the right word, of trying to impose "big" (and thus clumsy) solutions which aim to assimilate everyone into a single dogmatic and unified power structure - as a result, they're actually closer to the "morally unconscionable" than they realise, and prone to overlook the dubious side of people they see as allies.

The real contrast would thus be between the people who get caught up in this sort of controlling agenda and the people who are able to stand apart and ask questions, or at least manage to keep their own conscience in private and act accordingly... the storyline presumably intended for Jacen to make the transition into that second group, but for whatever reason, the novels couldn't sustain his journey.

Also, your "more cynical" alternative, I would actually characterise that as "more unrealistic". The idea that big-dog immorality can ever be big enough to avoid blowback has never seemed to me to be anything more than a naive fascist fantasy.

I don't think there was anything to get. The whole thing is like the Empire's superlasers. The project was dumb and counterproductive, and once you recognize the mistakes and destroy the plans and infrastructure, you have no way to reconstitute the thing and no-one is going to make the misguided effort to try again.

Well, except the Hutts, but we all know how Durga's version ended up - they never seem to have built a workable thing bigger than the shipkiller canon on the Errant Venture...

I've always though that this reflected a contrast within the Rebellion/New Republic, actually. There are a group of leaders in there - Ackbar, Drayson, Sov, Scaur - who tend to sit behind their desks and send forward those they consider as pawns, and tell themselves that they're making necessary sacrifices for a greater end (an approach which rarely actually ends well); then there's the people like Cracken, Garm, Borsk, Ral'rai, and A'baht, who might have to get themselves dirty, but are not going to make the mistake of elevating doing dirty things to the level of virtuous ideology.

The fact that the second group are far more willing to get themselves physically dirty, and thus understand the practicalities of the line-of-contact far better, means that they're less likely to share the same sense of detachment.

The difference is also precisely that Darpen is a rogue agent, whereas... actually, screw that. Darpen stinks of Hiram Drayson. Heroes are people who stop their own government from making a mess.

At this point, I'm imagining Ral'rai whistling innocently, and Cracken putting on his very, very best sabbac face.

If you listen, you can hear Booster Terrik laughing in the background.

"And what?" Mara asks, casually. "You think a Space Irish cop who's married Booster Terrik's daughter is straight?"

Lando, at least, has the dignity to look a little shifty and uncomfortable while all this is going on.

The irony is that the Rebelllion do become a cartel (and I don't mean the one that Karrde, Booster, Mirax, Mara, Lando, and probably Wedge are involved in).
They're just a business cartel with the backing of Galactic legitimacy - think about the way that Kyp is encouraged to go around shooting smugglers on behalf of politically-linked shipping concerns, and then shift the verbiage to the side a little bit?

Or to take your example, the way a crook like Tomer Darpen becomes legitimate after Endor.

Borsk was a good guy. That's sort of the point. I doubt that Drayson and Traest and all the other people involved actually told him about Alpha Red.

Creating a clone body seems relatively easy in Star Wars. Creating a clone mind is much more difficult. The majority of the clones we see are mass-produced without personal memories - but even this process is susceptible to madness; the Kaminoans avoid "programming" clones' minds altogether, and regard a clone as needing around a decade of intense training to guarantee quality results in terms of professionalism and loyalty; Thrawn managed to cut the time for flash-grown and flash-printed clones down to a couple of weeks with ysalamiri to block the Force-weirdness and his Chiss emphasis on quality of technique and construction - the choice of templates like Soontir Fel, who were psychologically "grounded", also seems to have been designed to help with the stability issues. The Khommites are somewhere in-between these systems - they're "accelerated" to "near-adolescence" (at what speed we don't know) and implicitly given some basic intellectual programming in the process, but they don't seem to be programmed with personal memories, and are then raised and educated by their prototypes.

The other type that seems to be reasonably stable are blank duplicates into which the original mind is transferred (Palpatine/Set Harth, Bevel Lemelisk). This seems generally reliable, but probably comes with "dark side points", and may also be susceptible to causing lunacy (unless you go with the old fanboy headcanon, and say that the increasingly bonkers Palpatine clones merely think they have the mind of the original, like Joruus did)...

The number of individual-copy clones with duplicated minds and memories is very small - I'm not sure if the pre-reboot canon ever established whether the clone of Isard was part of a standard "benefits package" available to top-ranking Imperials, or simply asn essentially improvised plan using a single second-hand cloning cylinder, but stability is not that girl's strong suit. The question of whether there even was a clone of Pestage seems a little ambiguous. Thrawn, who could turn out a stormtrooper or a TIE Pilot in two weeks, set a Kaminoan-style ten-year schedule for producing his own clone copy (even with ysalamiri around the cylinder). The difference there is that the Thrawn clone has a full personality copy - and that raises an interesting question; did the clone of Major Tierce have the memories of the original? Probably not...

We also see what may be a hint of an alternative Imperial workaround in Children of the Jedi with constructed memories/personalities being printed as a secondary input onto a pre-constructed and stable mind - you can thus "improve" your basic stormtroopers with more sophisticated skills and motives, and perhaps do so repeatedly, with mission-specific packages... but the memories and motivations involved seem deliberately limited, and what's not clear is whether this technique is designed for clones or conscripts.

The one individual-copy clone we see who was produced in less than a decade and does seem to be adequately stable is Feeena D'asta, but given that Nom Anor was involved, she may be a product of Vongtech, which uses very different techniques.

And per An Apology, everyone is actually a clone, except maybe Jaina.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I’m not sure what you mean by Luke and Jacen wanting to impose some sort of unified power structure.

The Vong are still the Vong. And it’s painfully clear, saving them aside, Vong society needed to change. Not just because that meant they wouldn’t be genocided, but also because Vong society was morally and spiritually bankrupt and broken in the highest degree.

So if anything, it’s wrongheaded in my view to say that they were imposing something unjust on the Vong. After all, Jacen and Luke weren’t waging a galactic war of conquest, genocide, terror and oppressing people, sacrificing them, and so on.

 

So would you say Ackbar and desk commanders pushing pawns are the more dangerous than Intel folks who know the risks and frontline? Ideology is a dangerous damokles sword.. on one side it can be useful but on the other it also blinds and allows for dark things to happen in its name.

Given the two groups, where would you put other Rebels? Mon Mothma is rather ideologist and pushing around than getting stuff done herself whereas Leia and Holdo are down to earth on the front. Bail is a practical man not detached from the people. I guess Mothmas rise after Bail's death and Garm's leaving really pushed things towards the ideologist camp.

In that regard I get how Mothmas New Republic continued the ideology camps position and drove it to a new level rivalling Palpatines COMPNOR when it comes to whitewashing the Rebellion and NR. She can blame any criminal activity to rogue elements. Given she considers everyone but herself a rogue... its even true

In a way the criminal element the Rebellion used was a pain in the Republics beginnings and no wonder down the line the NR was forced to facilitate a legalised Smugglers Alliance and such organisations giving their former allies a legal face looking more like a transport and relief organisation. Though more like a NR version of pirates with a license to raid the enemy.

Guess they had a hard time to stop overeager law enforcement and other curious circles to move against their allies in the underworld. In a way its like governments use false flag operations and create organisations in foreign territory for various purposes... that may or may not backfire down the line and turn on them. Not in the case of the NR, but in the real world the US had this multiple times.

Holy curveball, this is a perfect writeup of the various methods advantages and disadvantages even accounting for non-clone memory tech and imprints. Thx for that!

Depending on the clones purpose, I do see that a stable imposter is difficult to create, especially if you only got the dna, not the memories. So that would speak in favor of using actors, shapeshifters or HRD that can learn from a smaller dataset and improvise the rest.

Hutts though may not have any need for imposters but merely look to copy the bodies for their collection. Holofakers probably are cheaper as per Children of the Jedi but you get the image.

There is also the case of Dr.Evazans new canon monstrositiers like the Decraniated which basically are bodies without brains and instead using a droidbrain, fleshbots. In a less creepy looking way this may be a way to get around the lack of memory imprints or its troubles. Simply place a HRD droid brain, undetecteable to medscans unless you do surgery into a clone body and you have a working solution that does not require any clone madness inducing memory issues.

Cray Mingla and Nichos Mar's experiments with transfering minds comes to mind. Scientists believed they immortalised the soul but in fact merely copied behavioral patterns etc. to a computer. The original was still dead.

Regarding Ssi Ruuvi entechment, transfering full consciousnesses seems to be possible at least into artificial bodies. If back though too?

More perfect imprints of full personalities and wisdom did the Jedi and Sith achieve with their holocron technology. So a Jedi immortalized in a crystal (Immortal Rur? Eternal Ruur? Ruuuuur?) implanted in a droid body or fleshbody? Iron Knights level 2.0!

Anyway, the Vong probably can craft artificial biological brains and imprint them with their cloning method that f.e. created the Slayers and others.

Maybe the solution lies in a combination oft he above methods. Clone body + Vonggrown brain? Ssi Ruuvi entechment combined with Jedi imprinted crystals?

Now we enter Shadowrun and Cyberpunk territory with memory alterations, memories imprinted over others and two people in one brain...

With Jedi able to imprint on crystals whose matrix is superior to standard computer technology data-wise, and with Jedi Mindtricks basically being a partial override and imprint in a foreign brain, this is the foundation of Bodyhopping. Bodyhopping simply is a more invasive fully overriting Mindtrick that includes erasing the original in a battle of the minds as well as transfering ones essence to the new body, not just ones minddata. Or it'd be a Forcepower to copy oneself while still alive... unseen as of yet and related it could exist! Storypotential (notes it down quick).

The Emperor basically simply needs to order mandatory health checks or injections and in secret Inquisitors alter the minds of all people slightly... voila nobody remembers the Jedi anymore or somesuch. But your explanation worked better that it is indeed logical for short time changing a lot of perception of the past as I read in another post somewhere.




Well, Apology was epic. Given everyone but Jaina is a clone... I still say there is a slight chance Jaina is an HRD. Which would explain why Jag needed Wyn Fel to take the throne... given no children with HRD Jaina possible.

 

Well, that is in fact what I said on that thread - that the New Republic did, in fact, end up going partially criminal. The analogy I used was to the French and Italian governments after 1945, cutting lots of breaks to those elements of the mob that had helped them during the war - because they had bigger fish to fry, because "thank you for your service," and because it's always useful to have friends like these in the shadows. That's still different from ending up a complete Mafia-state like, say, Noriega-era Panama; no government ever completely escapes corruption in its ranks, after all. But it's still worth noting that they got plenty of dirt on themselves.

And I always thought that part of the Corran/Mirax marriage deserved a little more fleshing out. I, Jedi pretty much baldly states that, while Mirax isn't trafficking heavy ****, she's still cheating the Space IRS to the tune of lots and lots of money. It's not that I don't believe Corran could be talked into tolerating or ignoring that for Mirax's sake, but you'd expect at least a pretty loud protest when he finds out and quite a bit of discomfort afterwards. Instead it's thrown in casually and with no comment.

 

I think joining the Rebels and falling in love with Mirax made Corran realize that crime isn't really a big deal.