A&A The Official Jason Fry Discussion Thread

Happy Life Day everybody! Here's hoping your red velour pullovers are comfy, your softcore holo-porn is static-free and your cooking instructions are for the two-armed.

 

That was actually a disappointment for me, since the spoilers and leaked concept art made me think this would be a galaxy run down by 30 years of continual warfare after ROTJ, then they did the opposite and all the wreckage was from one battle site only. It's not Coruscant anno Dark Empire...

 

Eh, the grass is always greener. I remember hearing a lot of complaining back in the day about how the heroes never accomplished anything, stumbling from one crisis to the next. Now at least there's a calm before the new storm, and it's a legitimately new storm.

 

Speaking of which, it snowed here in Tokyo for the first time in 54 years in November. I'm happy the story group are talking together. I love the Bane novels, but didn't Mace invent Vaapad.

 

Say Jason, had another question about retcons and arc-welding. This is something I've wondered a couple years now, if you know: did the Legends writers know the reboot was coming? I ask because I noticed that the last few years of Legends resolved A LOT of longstanding mysteries: the identities of the Celestials were revealed, Coruscant being the homeworld of humans was outright confirmed at long last, that cockroach Cronal was finally killed off, and Cal Omas got his long-awaited picture, among other things. This honestly felt, to me, like the writers trying to give at least some semblance of closure before Legends for the axe, and there was a year and a half or so between the Disney buyout and the reboot proper so there was definitely time to prepare. Are any of my hypotheses correct?

 

Fourth and final installment of notes for Edge of the Galaxy -- thanks to everybody for following along!

 

I didn't know, and don't think anyone else did either -- there were some interesting projects announced after the acquisition that got shelved post-reboot. LFL took a while to figure out what they wanted to do, for which I don't blame them. That said, I wasn't surprised that they decided what they did. I was interviewed about the reboot about a week after it happened -- here's what I had to say.

 

Thank you, Jason! So all that resolution happening at once really was just coincidence? Impressive!

 

So this was fun -- the official site asked me to write about one of my favorite Star Wars scenes. I chose one from Episode I with just a single word of dialogue. For the curious, here's my full list of favorite scenes.

 

In terms of scenes with limited/no dialogue but pure movie magic, this shot/scene from ROTJ gets me every time.



The various Rebel fighters all charging ahead, the menacing Death Star in the background, and the verdant moon of Endor. All from the vantage of Ackbar, sitting high on the command bridge of Home One.

I love this shot for a lot of reasons, but especially because it is a beautiful fusion of VFX models, matte paintings, and actual actors all blended together seamlessly. GORGEOUS.

--Adm. Nick

 

And one of the last scenes in ROTJ with B-wings in it!

 

Jason, another question if you don't mind. As awesome as Warfare is, any reason there isn't much KOTOR-era stuff in it? The relevant section is largely devoted to the Mandalorians with only passing mentions of Revan et al. Was it because TOR was (and still is) ongoing and you didn't want to step on any toes?

 

It'll be nice when we get some new Qui-Gon stories. He's definitely a favorite from the prequels, which is saying something!

 

Jason why wasn't there something about the Nagai-Toff conflict? I was disappointed that wasn't talked about in Warfare.

 

Aren't they talked about on pages 187&188 "Invaders from Beyond"?

 

There was a ridiculously detailed Hyperspace article about the Nagai-Tof war. If you haven't read it, there you have all the detail you are you looking for and then more.

 

Do you have a link?

 

Wait......what if it is not really gone? That's right

Spoiler

Hyperspace is Snoke!!!!!

 

If Wookieepedia is doing their job the way they usually do it, then the Hyperspace article will usually be used as a source for the Nagai-Tof War article with an Internet Archive link, but unfortunately that information isn't available on Internet Archive.

 

Couldn't they just re-print them on the official blog?

 

Most are awfully big for a blog post, and regardless I doubt there's a lot of interest in reformatting and posting old Legends material when they went to the trouble of taking down nearly all Legends pages when they did the last redesign.

 

Of course they could make both Hyperspace and Adventure Journal material available again in some new way, but the powers that be don't really seem to care about the EU at this point, especially because of the EU purge from several years before the "Legends" announcement that jSarek is alluding to, so I wouldn't really expect much of anything on that front. I really want to be wrong about all of this, but the films, films, and more films direction under Kennedy just screams that the EU is dead and isn't coming back.

 

Not stepping on toes was part of it -- you definitely have to be careful with ongoing storylines.

Another issue was that with the Warfare MS waaaaay too long (which is how the Author's Cut came to exist), a lot of stuff needed to be cut, and chapters that were tied to the movies or Clone Wars were a higher priority to stay -- as I think I've written elsewhere, for a book to succeed a casual fan has to be able to pick it up, flip through it and recognize some old favorites.

Third factor: while Revan's a great story, it's a very individual one. In guidebooks like Warfare, the danger with those is that you wind up just reiterating the story. There weren't a huge number of obvious blanks to fill in from this era when thinking of bigger things to explore and connections to be made. You can probably think of ideas I didn't, but to be blunt, this period wasn't one of my favorites from the EU, so I was more interested in focusing my efforts elsewhere. Authors don't have a ton of leeway in books like this, so you grab what you can.

As for the Nagai-Tofs, as noted we did cover them in Warfare, but fair to say this material became an afterthought in the EU between Bakura, Thrawn and the NJO, all of which are essentially variants of the same "alien invasion" storyline. Making it fit never worked terribly well in the old continuity, so I gave it a section and moved on. I am glad that War Portrait: Bey got a place in the Author's Cut, though -- that was a fun piece with a long, long road to publication.

(BTW, if you haven't seen it, that section of the Author's Cut presents the original Warfare outline, with notes about what happened to the proposed sections.)

Hope that's some vague help.