Books "Sword of the Jedi" trilogy would be over by now...

So, the cancelled "Sword of the Jedi" trilogy would be over by now.

What do you think would have happened in it?




Going by the promo cover, and the title...


...it would have focused on Jaina fighting the Lost Tribe, who continued to terrorize Coruscant, even after the Jedi leave?



I wonder if we'll ever get an official answer to what was supposed to happen in it, and other cancelled novels, like "Blood Oath", with Zekk and the Hapans:

 

Nothing fun or worthwhile, I suspect. I've never understood why so many people mourned the demise of this trilogy specifically, given how bad its predecessors were.

 

>An ancient Sith threat surfaces
>Mandalorians get involved for some reason because why not
>Turns out there is some sort of even more ancient threat
>Torture scene
>Daala
>More torture
>"Remember that one time when *original trilogy scene*"
>Waru returns with a vengeance
>???
>Profit
>#GiveUsLegends

 

Don't forget that by the end of it, we still wouldn't have confirmation that Jaina would be the mother of Roan Fel's dad and/or founder of the Imperial Knights.

 

Didn't Christie Golden herself say that she didn't even have a basic plot lined out when it was cancelled? So, even she doesn't know what would've happened.

 

If Escape From Dagu is any indication, it could never as been as good in reality as it became in people's heads as soon as it was canceled.

 

That was the Shaak Ti book, yeah? What, was there an actual copy and people didn't like it?

 

No, there was no more than we had for SotJ--but people still kept bringing it up.

 

Oh, I get what you're saying. So people basically idolize the unreleased books because they would've been the best SW fiction since Traitor, when really there was no evidence as to how good they ever would've been.

 

Well, except that with Escape From Dagu we don't have loads and loads of evidence that is at least highly suggestive it wouldn't have been good at all.

 

I thought there was a basically finished draft of Escape from Dagu, but it was just never published because Del Rey thought people would hate it, which led to Yoda: Dark Rendezvous filling the slot in the publishing schedule at the last minute. Escape from Dagu also seems to be an all too frequent example of William C. Dietz's unfortunate record of writing a fair number of poorly received books, which included Halo: The Flood, the novelization of Halo that apparently only really followed the campaign without adding much else, and Mass Effect: Deception, which Mass Effect fans hated, with the Dark Forces novellas being an exception to the apparent trend.

 

There was a rumour on the Official Site forums way back when (and maybe Sue said something about it but I dunno) that Dagu was cancelled because Shatterpoint didn't sell as well as they hoped. Like "If a novel about Mace isn't bringing in the bucks, a novel about a random background Jedi like Shaak Ti has no hope. It's Yoda or bust folks." It was probably nothing more than a rumour though when you consider that two novels were released around the same time with Barriss Offee as the only recognizable character in them. Sure, M*A*S*H is still like the most popular TV show ever, but that wasn't really part of the duology's marketing. Also I doubt there's that much overlap in the demographics.

Anyway. Back on topic. What Vthuil said. "Three strikes and you're out" has something to it, you know.

 

I want to know more about the Knightfall trilogy and the Kemp duology.

 

Ahh the Kemp duology... now THAT is the most overhyped thing ever.

 

Everyone wants to know more about the Kemp duology. I am starting to doubt it was actually a thing.

 

Announced in 2010 and not a peep at all since. 4 years before the reboot and the 2 years since.

 

We do know quite a bit about Knightfall, considering. The people who were doing the Unofficial NJO Homepage collected quite a bit of info about its plot summary from various sources, and the Readers' Companion went on to say similar things about the plot. Luceno also revealed a bit in an interview once about a post-Agents of Chaos storyline that was dropped.

Mandorla is a cancelled book to which I was really looking forward. It was a novel about Nomi and Vima fricking Sunrider, legal issues be damned. Redemption made Vima into a great character. Always wanted to see more of her.

 

Things were bad, so they'll always be bad?

 

Three astoundingly terrible SW novels to an author's name don't exactly inspire confidence in a fourth fifth and sixth.

 

Heck, the entire era it's in is full of disasters - with the only halfway decent things to come out of it being side stories. Expecting a radical improvement without an equally radical change in direction - which the title Sword of the Jedi doesn't really suggest, to me - seems rather fanciful.

 

Haha, yeah, the title is a pretty apt microcosm for how directionless everything after Legacy of the Force was. "Sword of the Jedi" never actually meant anything, but they kept latching onto it when they realized that they had nothing for Jaina to do. Sue even said in an interview that her killing Jacen at the end of LOTF was the fulfillment of the "Sword of the Jedi" prophecy. Bada-bing, prophecy fulfilled. Time to move on and actually develop her character. But nope, of course they didn't do that.

(Sue said 'The end was one of the most difficult decisions the group had to make. There was a lot of discussion – some wanted Jacen redeemed, some felt there was no redemption possible; he had to die. Jaina had to fulfill her prophesy as “Sword of the Jedi” – another hard call.' Think about that --- they chose to kill off the character they had been spending ten years developing as the most important character in the post-Bantam EU --- so that Jaina could fulfill her prophecy. Not going forward with her from there and continuing to fumble around with "She's the Sword of the Jedi!" reduces Jacen's death to a total and pointless waste.)

She, Jag, Han and Leia were all written aimlessly and without any real stories or arcs or anything for most of Fate of the Jedi, yet they still ate up a lot of page time in every book. Hell, FOTJ's first few books were written before the planning team had figured any of the series out beyond a basic "Luke and Ben go on an Odyssey and visit Force-using sects" idea. But what did they actually learn from those sects in the first few books? Nothing. They left the Baran Do Sages with nothing. They left the Aing-Tii with nothing. Every single storyline in the first few books was just time-killing until Abeloth showed up and things started going somewhere. Abeloth was a cool idea, but as the series progressed (using that word very generously) it became increasingly clear that they hadn't figured her out at all beyond that basic cool idea. Then some episodes of The Clone Wars that seemed like they could kinda be vaguely related to her came along, and the planning team finally had a life raft in a sea of poor planning.

The slavery subplot was added midway through the series because of readers telling Sue on the Official Site forums that the books were too short and too light on story. The first five or six books all featured identical plotlines set on Coruscant that featured the same damn scene of a young Jedi going crazy and then being subdued by his or her fellows. Abyss and Backlash each had a Mandalorian attack on the Jedi Temple that were no different from each other. It was so, so, so directionless, meandering, time-killing, and pointless for the first seven books. I'll forever be amazed at how terribly that series was planned and executed. It was an all-around embarrassment, and Allston's follow-up X-Wing book was very aptly titled as the death of the EU ended up being a real mercy kill.

 

But Christie already wrote a fourth, not that it has scored well either.

Were they that bad though? Or was it just the the overall narrative of that series that was difficult to manage? Like most authors I wonder if Christie might have done better not being confined by that setting and story arc. I honestly don't think anyone could have made the Sithlings and Abeloth interesting. It was doomed from the beginning in my opinion.

I admit the amount of spelling errors in her one book were on a silly level, but I have to think that is at least in part on the editors.

 

I thought JJM did quite well with the Lost Tribe short stories. But then, those are prequels to FOTJ - and set a long way back at that.