Lit Star Wars: Invasion! Come back! Are you cancelled? WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?!

Ugh, so I was rereading Invasion the other day and reliving the crippling pain of its utter disappearance from the rotating schedule (COME BACK), and it really sucks that we're probably never going to find out what was going to happen. So, I made this thread.

SHARE WITH ME YOUR THEORIES!

- What role do you think the Outer Rim Alliance would have played in the war?

- What the hell did Nina DO to her kids?

- Was Dray connected to any other group we know of? Where did he come from? Dark Jedi or Sith or something else?

- What's this super-weapon implied to be made out of the bits of that dead Jedi? Was that why Nina was cast out mysteriously so long ago? And was it coincidence or design that saw her end up on Artorias, the same planet her two nemeses ended up invading?

- Did Nina know about Dulac?

- What happens when Arbeloa gets another skull? Does he wear the most important skull, or does he just put it on top of the one he has now, in an ever-growing tower of skullhats?

- About how many issues would we each have to buy to make this profitable enough to get another arc?

DARK HORSE, I'M NOT PROUD. I WILL BEG.

 

The Hutt resistance would have absorbed it and as we know won the war.

Some Vong shaping.

Insane left over from the Old Order.

Yep, propely some kind of super Thrall.

I always figured she was one of the shapers that found out the Overlords were lying about were new tech was coming from.

Coincidence aka Plot convenience

Properly not, or she would likely have made him disappear.

Properly always just his most worthy kill.

No clue, I am not always sure if sales numbers are really the only factor, as LFL seems to out to have anything related to the Vong war pretty much ignored. Legacy cut short, LOTF + FOTJ basically make no mention of it, Mercy Kill being the only place where it really gets references.

Maybe we can get a Kick Starter going.

 

More Invasion or the entertainment itself of watching beccatoria beg...

It's a tough call, but I'll go with the former.

Give us Invasion: WAR and end this!

 

Invasion has to get wrapped up at some point: there are some serious issues that can't just be left hanging. The concept of the Outer Rim Alliance is also really fascinating. Hopefully a sourcebook or something can wrap up some plot points if Dark Horse doesn't.

 

IWoD?

 

Jaina aka Imperial womb of destiny

 

Here we go

Imperial Womb of Destiny = Jaina Solo (because we know -- thanks to Legacy -- that she's bound to start the Fel line at some point).

EDIT: ninja'd

 

What bothers me most was at one of the conventions, when asked if Legacy would return Randy said something along the lines of, "We feel Invasion at reached a natural stopping point, and won't be continuing at the moment. Maybe in the future we will bring it out again, but there are many more EXCITING stories that we will be focusing on."

Natural ending point? Invasion ended on a huge cliffhanger clearly setting up the next arc that may never be...

 

All I have to say is that it needs to come back. Invasion: War!

 

I have to give credit to the character of Kaye. It takes a lot of talent to write a character so terrible she single-handedly ruins a once promising story.

I kid, I kid...

There were actually a lot of things bad with Invasion.

(She was definitely the worst, though.)

 

Well, yeah, but what shaping? Like, what did she do? Just make them stronger and faster? How did they go so long without realising it? Is it triggered under certain circumstances? Is Kaye Force-sensitive too, or did she simply sense her father's death through her brother not because he was present, but because they have some sort of villip-like connection due to Nina's interference?

So why the red lightsaber? If he's from the Old Order, that's clearly symbolic. Does he consider himself a Sith? Does he just think red is pretty unlike the colour blue, it never tricks him into thinking he can taste it?

Possibly, but it's a big coincidence if it was one. Even if her intention wasn't quite so specific in its motivations, was she planning some sort of eventual confrontation? Or at least planning for the possibility?

Yes, here I'm inclined to agree with you. I mostly ask because Nina's surname is a reference to the most famous incarnation of the Arthurian legends, while Dulac (well, Du Lac) is the surname of the knight famous for betraying the King with his Queen. I don't for a second think it's a literal romantic parallel, and likely the parallel is more broad, with them both being Vong, while Dulac's betrayal is more mortally literal. But it did make me wonder if there was some sort of blackmail truce going on between them.

I don't really think so, though. Nina's fury and raw pain and vengeance seem to visceral to be locked away like that. She'd die trying to kill him before being controlled by him, I think.

(I still don't understand why Dulac, in attempting to cleanse himself in the Embrace of Pain, was still wearing his human masquer though...)

I DON'T BELIEVE YOU ARE SORRY AND THIS HURTS ME.

And now I'm torn between avenging myself for this slight or taking all the support I can get for Invasion: War. It's a tough call, but I'll go with the latter. For now...

Ugh, agreed. SO interesting. Especially if it's known that it's being led by a Vong. I really, REALLY wasn't expecting Nina to out herself like that. And clearly she knows secrets that could be ruinous to certain Vong groups and now they know she's at large and just, gah, it just exploded into fascinating with that revelation.

Even if they do put some information in a sourcebook at some point, I can't see it happening soon. I don't recall there being many on the upcoming release schedule that it would fit into and while it looks awesome, Fantasy Flight's RPG hasn't even released the first of its three core setting books, let alone gotten to obscure eras like the NJO has become.

Wait, he SAID that? I heard he said that they weren't planning to do anything with it in 2013 because they had such a full plate "something" had to give (and clearly that something couldn't be those bloody precious Darth Vader or Darth Maul series...), but a natural endpoint? What?

It's a natural endpoint for an end-of-season cliffhanger. And maybe if we'd gotten -

a) a clear answer on who Nina was, why she was cast out, how she came to have such a different perspective on love and affection and what she did to her kids
b) a clear answer on the weapon the Vong have built and the threat it poses
c) Finn back with his mother and sister, and a clear assertion of how they will be proceeding with the Outer Rim Alliance from here on out

then I might think that, okay, they've resolved the immediate mysteries, we now have an unresolved wider conflict - with Dray as a sneaky wildcard - but that would feel much more like a resolution for the moment with the bigger conflict still ahead (like if the "I'm your Father," revelation had happened at the end of ANH, perhaps?) than what we've got, which feels like the set-up to the final act.

Dude, I am not even joking, she's the best thing about it. Hmm, no, maybe that's Nina. But Kaye has some fascinating characterisation.

Nina and Kaye's storyline beat Finn's into the ground with a baseball bat half full of iron filings.

I want a skull hat.

 

Because I am a nice guy ( ), I looked up the quote from the Convention on Newsarama.

Main point is:
Q: Whatever happened to Star Wars Invasion?

Stradley: It reached kind of an ending point. Every few years we try to bring in new titles and cycle old titles out. We reached a satisfying stopping point, and also realized the artist wasn’t going to be able to do it for awhile. We may go back and revisit those characters, but it will probably lie still for a couple of years.

 

Ah well, that's sad news, but all things must come to an end. Now, I've got this great idea for a new Vader comic...

 

It totally didn't reach an ending point! It reached an exhilarating beginning point and was snatched from us! Snatched from me! Snatched from my skull hat!

...replaced with a noghri skull hat.

 

I actually liked Kaye... But yeah, so disappointed this did not continue. There was still plenty to see and ended at the beginning of a story. Nothing was resolved so not sure if it had reached a point where one could leave it. We had the Outer Rim Alliance, arguably the first resistance force against the Vong invasion if we make guesses on the timeline but no idea of its role in the war. The mystery of what Nina did to the kids and also Draay who had taken the droid sidekick hostage. So many questions hope it gets revived but my fear is it might be dead in the water. Hope I am wrong.

On Draay, he's a Jedi of the Old Republic. Tom Taylor uses a younger Draay in his Darth Maul comic and he has his master killed plus arms cut off by Maul. Guess that might be the start of his fall.

 

They are Shapers; they create all kinds of odd stuff, though yes she seems to have mainly buffed their physical abilities.

Properly triggered by extraordinary stress at a certain age.

I always assumed Force sensitive

He killed Darth Maul and took his weapon.

Properly not Sith, but he seems to have suffered a severe trauma in the past and seems more irrational and insane than can be healthy.

She properly planned a confrontation down the line the Vong might just have struck to early.

The Mask is a Vong tool so not "unclean" unlike GFFA tech.

Otherwise he would already be wearing half the ships worth of Vong warrior not just the Commander.

They might take it as an encouragement

 

I think it's pretty obvious. Finn would have continued wandering around, trying to find himself a storyline. Dray would have tried to attack the Vong with a bowl of pasta, because haha he's so crazy. After a thousand issues, he and that one Vong guy would have been stabbed by Finn because he has to do something eventually. The Outer Rim Alliance would have continued proving how stupid the poopy New Republic is. Nina would have beaten the Yuuzhan Vong singlehandedly because ultraviolence is always the answer. Kaye, meanwhile, would have singlehandedly defeated the New Republic because someone gave her a parking ticket. The end of the comic would have been her and Skullhat setting out to wander the galaxy, bullying everyone they come across and slaughtering planetary populations every time Kaye is told "No."

 

I dunno, I think that's a fairly reductive perspective. I agree that Finn struggled to find a plot at this point, but he's now at least free of the restrictive structure of either being one of Luke's Jedi or simply following around a different "haha crazy," master. I do agree, Dray's introduction could have been better; I wasn't taken with him initially and even now I'm not completely sold on the menacing crazy, but it's better than the benevolent crazy. Both are arguably an annoying continuation of the mystical/violent insanity tropes but at least this way we have a wild card introduced into the situation, plus I find Dray as menacing more convincing than Dray as a mentor. The notion that there are pieces of Finn "missing" and he's separated from the person who could explain what and why - perhaps I read too much into it, but it reminded me of the idea that the missing pieces of Vader affected his overall relationship to the Force. Finn is...similar but full of Yuuzhan Vong bits, it seems.

I wasn't thrilled with the way they portrayed Feyl'lya, I agree, the final arc felt slightly too dogmatic in its need to show the abandonment of worlds by the NR, but I'm not sure it's completely inappropriate in the context of the early days of the war and the general confusion and competing narratives about who was really to blame.

I think I'd rather wait and see how the Outer Rim Alliance was handled before deciding whether or not it was unrealistic, and what kinds of victories they scored, if any/many. Nina fascinates me because she's so obviously genuine in her motivations but also completely removed from the light/dark morality we're used to. What interests me about her is the way she is very much written as a Vong, but one with different, and compassionate priorities. She Vong-shaped her kids without telling their father, she's not apologetic about her violence, but I also think it's supposed to be unsettling, the way her Vong-self sits ill at ease with her human guise. The tension is deliberate. Kaye's horrified by the violence her mother employs against the Vong experiments - she's furious and confused, and Nina shuts herself away expecting sanction and judgement for her behaviour. This is largely tabled due to the death of Caled, which I think is a deliberate mirror of Kaye's temporary acceptance of her mother's revelation - a mix of revulsion at the violence, an understanding from her practical nature, that now is not a useful time to press the matter, mixed with a deep, teenaged confusion about her own identity, this time because she's just discovered her mother's ultraviolence has literally infected her, meaning she wants to regress to the kid who is loved by her mother.

It's the relationship Dray didn't establish with Finn, but also one based on genuine love.

Nina has no qualms about massacring a room full of Imperial officers and then lying about it to levy co-operation into a plan that, ultimately, is more about the destruction of resources than Vong ships. Ultraviolence is a core tool in Nina's repertoire because she is Vong, and for one who defected, I think it's interesting to keep that, even while she clearly hates the ultraviolence of her former nation. It's something I think we're supposed to find...tense.

Kaye...I don't really get the hate. I appreciated that her ability to beat Vong was actually explained, and I don't really see why one would characterise her blunt refusal to allow her ship to be commandeered - the ship which as we're shown many times, is the only security her people now have - as throwing a temper tantrum because she was told no. As I went into a little above, I think watching her navigate the brutal and violent world of the Vong, and, now, her mother, would have been interesting to watch.

When we get down to it, there are places I'd levy criticism against this book. I think Finn's plotline foundered. I think that there's a deliberate choice going on here to show us a throwback to classic Star Wars with simplistic heroes and morality - the natural-born leader of a princess, the morally incorruptible would-be Jedi, the clear, evil threat and the indifferent evil of government power structures (this time both NR and Empire) who are almost cartoonishly inept, against the heroic, morally superior band of rag-tags fighting for truth and justice.

And then throwing the Forceless confusion of the Vong into the mix, which warps all the things around it. Mon Mothma is a monster; Princess Leia accidentally rips off heads; Luke is more (bio-)machine now, than man, and Obi-Wan turns out to be Darth Vader.

I do think that the simplistic villainy of the NR due to its complacency and Empire due to collaboration is probably the place this comes across worst, though, since there's no immediate subversive payoff, but as I said I would have liked to see more of how the Outer Rim Alliance functioned before determining that was down to poor writing (which it might have been; as I said, I also think Dray is misjudged).

I still think, though, that this series has gotten (pretty much) cancelled right as it was about to get interesting. Which makes me sad.

 

Well, I've laid out my problems with Invasion before, and even made a whole thread about it. But basically, becca, I hate to say it, but Invasion is awful. Kaye is a massive, spoiled bully, and the series asks us to CHEER for her massive spoiled bullyness. Is Kaye entitled to feel upset that an NR officer wants to take control of the captured enemy vessel currently controlled by a gang of nobody civilians and necessary for evacuation? Sure, she can feel possessive. But the officer's decision is far and away the most deeply reasonable position on the issue, yet not only does Kaye not recognize this fact, she responds by immediately resorting to violence and threats against a government official for doing the most reasonable thing in the world. And the book clearly expects us to cheer HER. It then goes on to do everything it can to vilify the officer and elevate Kay throughout the storyline, despite the fact that Kaye's response to every single goddamn time she fails to get total deference to her way is an immediate, psychopathic resort to threats and violence, with her big enforcer next to her. She's a self-obsessed, violent bully with no ability to recognize any viewpoint other than her own and who immediately, instantly resorts to psychopathic levels of violence to get her way. She just has no other response to disagreement, only a hair-trigger resort to violence. It's genuinely disturbing. She's not Princess Leia, she's goddamn Joe Pesci in Casino.

Yet consistently, Invasion asks us to cheer her on as a plucky heroine. It glorifies bullying, might-makes-right "heroes" (Nina's the same way, and Finn's trending in that direction) based on the idea that protagonists can do no wrong and what makes a character cool is their ability to beat up everyone they come across. It's positively Denningish. Add to that its weird determination to drag the New Republic -- the thing our heroes built -- through the mud as deeply as possible, and this series just has no business being part of Star Wars. It's philosophical garbage, caught up in glorifying an anti-authority stance not based on resistance to tyranny, or even a classically-liberal individualism, but a repulsive, bullying, petty, self-absorbed ****-you-I'll-do-what-I-want-authority-sucks petulance only a fourteen-year-old could find appealing. It's juvenile and either philosophically unconsidered or philosophically repugnant, and I find it genuinely and completely appalling.

Plus the plotting is terrible.

 

I dunno, dude, I still disagree. I don't think the plotting's brilliant. I mostly think the ideas are what makes the comic interesting, not so much the execution which is a shame.

But your characterisation of Kaye is still something that doesn't sit right with me. She arrives to evacuate people in danger. The first thing that happens is that instead of helping wounded onto the ship, the NR officer orders his people to seize the bridge. I don't think characterising this as childish and short-sighted on the officer's part is unfair. Kaye's goal is to get him to stop trying to take their ship by force and to get his officers to put down their weapons and help the wounded. Given his primary concern of securing the ship's bridge, Kaye may even be concerned that he will leave, abandoning those she's trying to evacuate. Perhaps this is a fear borne of her recent experiences, perhaps not - all she knows is that she arrived to try and save people and her attempts are immediately shut down in favour of taking the home she fought to create. She doesn't order Arbeloa to choke-hold the officer, nor does she order his release. You can take this as bullying if you like, but given that she is facing the loss of her second home to force in as many weeks - something made quite clear by the speech she gives explaining the importance of the Heart and why she won't give it up - I think it's an emotional reaction that even if we do not find admirable, is certainly far from psychotic.

I think it's fairly clear that the NR officer wasn't operating on the assumption that Kaye wanted to give him the ship as he cuts off her attempts to talk to him about saving the hostages because he's more concerned with getting his troops into position to assume command. Kaye is refusing to cede control of what she has determined to be all that remains of Artorian sovereign territory, and frankly I don't blame her and I'm not sure that she's legally incorrect either.

Criticise the comic for simplistic characterisation of the New Republic if you want - I'm certainly comfortable with that as I noted in my post above. But I still think that the NR officer enters that conversation in an aggressive posture which Kaye responds to bluntly, I don't think he enters that conversation in a reasonable way, and then Kaye chooses to bully him.

Again as I tried to outline above, I honestly believe that there is a deliberate tension in the violence of the comic and how it's portrayed, particularly with regards to Kaye and her mother. The most violent thing Kaye has ever done was when she ripped the head off that stormtrooper which was played for the legitimate horror and fear and confusion it caused in Kaye.

Kaye is an angry kid, but I don't think her overriding desire to help people should be as easily dismissed as some sort of cover to make it "okay" to root for her. For a pair of heroes where right makes might, Kaye seems awfully angry that it was her mother's go-to reaction, and yet, when her mother does it anyway, despite temper tantrums apparently being Kaye's go-to reaction when she's told "no," she pretty much collapses and asks for a hug.

I see Kaye's leadership of her people as far more of a story about how she claims and maintains her authority, and what she seeks to do with it, than it is about some fourteen year old authority-sux delusion. If we accept Kaye has a right to lead, then her behaviour, while perhaps not as verbally diplomatic as it might be, is hardly psychopathic. She removes someone who is undercutting her authority in a way she believes will endanger lives, and while it's a little snarky, she specifies that he be restrained but not harmed. When she takes a shaped prisoner into custody and a soldier responds to her comment about curing her with the idea that a bullet in her head would "cure" her, sure, she demonstrates her displeasure by telling him he's now volunteered to take her back to the ship. Her addition that she's not that fussed if anything happens to him on the way is aggressive, yes, but it's also clearly a verbal jab, telling him she's not impressed with his attitude, I don't for a minute think she actually wants him to die. It's also like two pages before she tells all the scouts to be careful and not to engage the enemy and to gather information and come back safely. When she orders them to fire on the shaped prisoners, she takes time out to try and offer what psychological reassurance she can.

If we don't believe Kaye has the right to lead, then it looks a little different; if we read the story in a way that supports the assertion that she's incompetent; once again our disagreement on Ogden is likely to be a key issue here. But again I guess I'd point out that Kaye is trying to lead her people in her capacity as their, well, leader. Her father is dead, her brother isn't around, her mother is plugged into the ship, she's trying to step up as their de facto monarch. She's dealing with soldiers whose first response is to suggest they can "fix" her people by shooting them - people to whom she has a legal and ethical duty of care.

When she returned to the ship, after watching her mother nuke the Vong colony and after feeling her father die, I very much took the scene where she pointed a lightsaber at Ogden as a demonstration of how frayed her nerves were; how easily he was able to deliberately wind her up, how much she had lost and how exhausted she was. I didn't think it was meant to be admirable, although to an extent it was intended to be cathartic. Again, this is likely to vary on how well we think Ogden has been portrayed as a poor example of an NR officer and whether we assume Kaye's taking charge because she's narcissistic or because she's trying to lead her people in an atmosphere that means she must vigorously defend her right to do so or end up...shipped to be slaves on an Empire world.

I was serious when I said that I felt the relationship Nina and Kaye end up forging throughout Rescues and Revelations is one that completely accidentally and based on genuine love still ends up looking an awful lot like the relationship between a Sith Master and Apprentice. Nina is Vong not Sith, and the topic may be violence not the dark side, but I think there's supposed to be a clear line between Kaye's use of restraint and Nina's use of fists in chests and the horrifying moment Kaye accidentally crosses that line because of what her mother, physically, has done to her. Where that would have gone, if it was subversive or a straight parallel, I can't say, but I don't think it was accidental.

Again, just to reiterate, I do think that there's an unnecessary two-dimensionality to the NR, though I feel it's better expressed in the awful characterisation of Fey'lya than Ogden, whose commanding officer is written quite differently. I suspect this is the root of our difference of opinion. If you view the story through the spectrum of its failure with the NR (or through its failures in general), it becomes increasingly easy to see instances of strawmanning, to lose patience with what else might be going on, to see the NR's characterisation as a lazy set up for Kaye's heroism and then take a less than generous interpretation of her motivations.

But...I just...I don't agree with you. Which makes me sad, because I usually do agree with you. But I just don't see what you're describing here in the text.

 

I just recently purchased, and just finished reading the three INVASION tpb's ... and to my sheer shock horror, I here that the SOB's at Horse Excretement have cancelled the series? On such a cliffhanger, and SO many unanswered questions! Perhaps Del Rey could save the day and conclude the adventures of the Galfridians in novel form.

 

I opened this thread thinking it had been bumped because there was a new development.

 

There are no new Japanese covers, either!

 

We need Invasion: WARRRR!