A&A The Official Jason Fry Discussion Thread

No love for Anzat? They're sentient Assassin Bugs! AKA the coolest insects in town. Soup's on, friends.

 

Thanks HT. Very kind!

 

You're welcome! Say, do you have a favorite retcon or inconsistency explanation you've done?

 

Always great to be able to read behind the scenes notes...even if they bum you out for what could have been. I'm always a sucker for Old Clones in the GCW era, so hopefully the Story Group isn't restricting that to just Rex and company!

 

Here's the third installment (of four total) of notes on Edge of the Galaxy -- in this one, prejudice in a made-up galaxy starts to collide with real-world history. Interesting dilemma for a writer, or at least I thought so.

Re HT's question: truth be told, I'm not a huge fan of retcons. I prefer straight storytelling/invention, and retcons are spackle and tape after something's gone wrong. If you're sticking to Star Wars "non-fiction fiction," I suppose I'm proud of the places where the explanations weren't the expected thing. The opera notes for the Hydian Way (Essential Atlas) and the idea for the taking of Kuat (Essential Guide to Warefare) were fun to write and I hope a little different to read.

Re old clones, the Rebels team just didn't want "Lost Commanders" to be scooped by a tie-in to the show, which I totally understood. If anything, I'm surprised there haven't been more "old clone" tales. Surprised in a good way, though -- the EU had an occasional bad habit of every new story jumping on the latest thing from the movies and beating it half to death. Anyway, Edge of the Galaxy was a much better book without Rattle because it led to a more interesting Merei. So I don't regret that one at all.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

 

I'm kind of curious if the "Bad Batch" concept of Clonetrooper spec-ops was rolled into the new Stormtrooper team we're seeing in the current Star Wars ongoing?

 

Jason, I got a chuckle out of your note about snow on Lothal. IIRC, didn't we eventually see snow in the hidden temple episodes? Or am I misremembering?

--Adm. Nick

 

Yup, snow indicating the temple was on one of the polar regions.

 

Honestly one of my least favorite things about the old EU/Legends was that it had a bad habit of giving pretty much every incidental character the heroes run into in the movies some kind of really grand backstory or significance, even when it was pretty implausible. For instance: both the ANH and ROTJ bands are big celebrities despite us seeing them play in really seedy places. Jabba's not just a crime lord, he's the biggest one in the entire galaxy, so much that the underworld experiences a succession crisis after his death (and for that matter, Panaka's statement that the Hutts are gangsters being taken to mean "Literally all Hutts are big-time gangsters"). That one specific Ewok village had an entire cartoon's worth of weird stuff happen to them. Many of the Cantina patrons and Jabba's guests were unsung heroes or villains of something-or-other. Those specific six bounty hunters in ESB are the best ones of all in this galaxy of quadrillions of people. I can sort of forgive the last one given how big the job was the Empire was offering, but the others...

 

Oh God yes. And like half the bounty hunters turned out to have hearts of gold, while IG-88 ... no, not going back there.

I talked about this in one of the essays I did for Classic Paint by Numbers. The cantina's full of Force sensitives, ancient vampires, twins who aren't twins but are impersonating agents involved with the Death Star, secret rebels, famous musicians, fugitive mass murderers, on-the-lam surgeons, etc. etc. etc.

I mean, I've been in my share of dive bars and most day drinkers' stories are a) not that interesting and b) pretty depressingly similar.

 

I dunno... it was taken to some pretty absurd extremes, but in principle I kind of like the "everyone has a story" thing.

 

Meanwhile Maz Kanata is one of the most famous pirates in the galaxy who runs one of the most famous cantinas in the galaxy who also has a mysterious connection to the Jedi and is friends with Han and Chewie, whose patrons include a Resistance spy, the First Order spy who got Vader's helmet for Kylo Ren, the best big game hunter in the galaxy, the most feared pirate in the galaxy who also happens to have a clone trooper who served under Anakin in his crew and who also stole ships for the Resistance, a guy who happened to also be in Mos Eisley Cantina back when Han met Luke 30 years and half the galaxy ago, a bouncer droid who also has a mysterious connection to the Jedi... and that's solely from I think four sources which came out within the first few months alone of the movie.

Not to mention how Jakku is the new Tatooine in terms of everyone and everything having a connection to it.

 

Me too -- but if every story is extraordinary, none of them are.

DSB, that was pretty hilarious. Cap tipped.

 

DSB, you better watch out, the Twitter police will come for you if you so much as hint at a female character being flawed in any way, shape or form.

 

Who's DSB?

 

To be clear, I don't have anything against Maz Kanata in particular. I think it's ridiculous that the only woman of color in the movie who also happens to be an Oscar winner was hidden behind CGI; I rolled my eyes at her "I don't have time to tell you how I got Luke's lightsaber, the plot is moving too fast!" line; and I think the way the movie immediately, completely forgets her as soon as she hands the saber to Finn is laughably bad (especially for a movie nominated for an Oscar for editing). But none of that is the character herself, just how the character is used. I just have a bug in my bonnet whenever I see the old EU being trashed over stuff that the new continuity stuff is just as guilty of, but which people ignore because of... hmm... ?

 

I figured she just had a Bespin connection, nothing too mystical.

 

Yeah, Maz is set up from the start as the extraordinary mistress of an extraordinary place. That works or doesn't according to taste, but at least it's a different starting point than the Mos Eisley cantina, which is presented as just a rathole where pilots can be found.

What made me laugh was the parallel between the patrons. You're right -- there's definitely some of the old tendency for every story to be fabulous and interconnected popping up again. I suppose that's hard to resist when filling in blanks.

That reminds me: I wrote about this on my Tumblr a while back, comparing backstory to the old horror writer's dilemma of whether or not to open the closed door.

 

Just love that the story group is having discussions about planetary weather patterns, pretty cool.

 

I DID find Trinto just happening to be there excessive, yeah. Though was that the exact same mask from back in '77? If so that's pretty impressive it's survived this long.

 

Myself as well. I really like the feeling it gives that the galaxy is full of adventure, rather than the heroes' stories being the only ones that matter.

....Though admittedly I would like to write a scene in a standard fantasy tavern where it turns out everyone there is a chosen one trying to save the world, an exiled prince or princess, last of a lost order, so on and etc. And maybe like one person who is there because he is making his merchant rounds or is going to go to his cousin's wedding.

 

I enjoyed even a lot of the old, bad EU. But I am happy the clutter has been removed, and the new continuity has been pretty diligent about keep the best of the old.

As an example, the old EU was pretty fond of, "Old crippled Emo Vader." It seemed like he was simply a relic of the old order, a useful bludgeon but nothing else. It hit the absolute bottom of the barrel with the Force Unleashed story arc. In the old EU, it seemed like any Bounty Hunter or force user with a rep was out to challenge him and did better than they should. Compare that to Kanan and crew running for their lives, let go because they led Vader right to Phoenix Home.

And we see a version of that play out in the new Vader comic series, and get absolutely turned on its head. He does start out as something of a relic, and then he finds out Luke is his son, and then he gets mad. He becomes the rogue lieutenant scheming to take it all for himself we see in Empire. Vader the moping brute is dead. He's dangerous, smart, and takes his shameful defeat at Yavin IV and reduces his scheming enemies to ruin.

The worst thing any EU can do is undercut the themes of the main source material itself. I'm all for big events, but most will admit, post ROTJ of the old EU was one crisis careening into the next with never any "time" for simpler, smaller adventures. The Vong were new, and then we went headlong back into Darth Jacen.

I'm glad the Force Awakens has essentially created a "cold war" buffer era where smaller stories can play out, and it seems even this new conflict between the First Order and Resistance, while important, is not necessarily the apocalyptic clash we saw in the first trilogy.

The battle of light and dark may be forever, but it's nice to see some variations on the theme.