I think the setting should have called it at the Hand of Thrawn duology. A nice natural end to the titular Star Wars where everyone's favorite characters are at a good happy point. Pellaeon gets to be big man Empire man, Han and Leia have their boring kids and each other, Luke is at the head of a new Jedi Order not hell bent on recreating all the mistakes of the past.
I hear old-ass Bantam Fags in the EU Community parrot this sentiment a lot, and my response is the same to all the NJO Purists who think it all should have ended after
Unifying Force: You and everyone else who thinks this are welcome to think the line should have been drawn wherever you please, but you are either out of your mind or clinically unstable if you think that Lucasfilm Publishing was going to retire the Post-Endor Period
eight years into holding the book license. That is a patently ridiculous expectation to have, and you don't really have anyone but yourselves to blame for being disappointed. I'm a fan of the X-Men, and even
I'm not retarded enough to think Marvel could have or even
should have retired the comics after Claremont left, despite the quality being rocky at best in the aftermath of his departure.
You'll also have to forgive me if I find the idea of everything ending with
Vision of the Future. I mean, THAT's where we cut off further adventures with the OT Trio and their kids? In that early Bantam Phase were there was dick for continuity, a wellspring of one-off monster-of-the-week adventures with no narrative throughline, and Luke's Jedi Order severed at permanent infancy without every flourishing into anything interesting? And don't even get me started on the decades of narrative potential lost at ending the Solo Kid's adventures at
age nine, before they grow into adolescents and adults and actually become interesting, the exploits for which are easily my favorite part of Star Wars by far--movies, books, what have you. What you describe as a "nice ending" sounds more like ending Star Trek TNG at fucking Season 1
---severing all future narrative potential, and never evolving into the story it was meant to be. That sounds eight different shades of unappealing.
It's an interesting thing to consider, sure, but this is definitely one of those fan-brewed ideas I'm nearly weak-kneed in relief never actually happened.
The Vong is just... Chewie gets killed by the moon,
He gets killed by the atmospheric disruption of the moon colliding with the planet, not the moon itself. It's the inferno and ash that literally atomizes his body...it's
physically impossible for the moon to have killed him.
But even then, you haven't told me what's bad about Chewbacca dying yet. Going out honorably by protecting Han's family and fulfilling his life debt to him certainly beats him playing Uber Driver for Daisy Ridley. In fact, his death actually has such a narrative impact, rattles the main characters so much, that it catapults both Han and his son Anakin on their respective narrative trajectories throughout the series.
Assuming you read that far, at least.
Humanoid robots? In
my Star Wars? Say it ain't so.
That literally never happens. Page and paragraph citation, please.
The New Republic is worthless and gets swept aside for the New New Republic.
The New Republic's Leaders are worthless--mostly because of people like Borsk Fey'lya. Which is exactly what they're like during the
entire Bantam era of publishing. The
Hand of Thrawn novels you were just praising literally has this as a plot point, showcasing how far from optimal leadership the New Republic actually is.
Not to mention that the Galactic Alliance that's formed during the Vong War actually includes factions Fey'lya and others refused to accomodate, like the Imperial Remnant, ensuring the Alliance is stronger than ever in the books to follow.
Which is a downgrade, because...?
You didn't mention the Dark Nest, and maybe that's because even you have to admit that it was very very bad.
Dark Nest is the very first set of books I ever covered on this thread, actually, and no, it "wasn't so bad I couldn't possibly mention it." It's not even mostly bad. If anything,
Dark Nest suffers from feeling like anime filler...inconsequential, generic, low-stakes. Kind of like a lot of the one-off series from the 90's like
Black Fleet and the
Callista Trilogy, actually. That golden era you think should've been the end of all things Luke, Han and Leia (thank God it wasn't).
Most of the series' other weaknesses come from very subpar prose on Denning's part, bad attempts at comedy, an unwelcome focus back on the old heroes instead of their children (though I suspect that would be a positive for you, since you think the latter are oh-so-boring), and that the Gorog Hive Mind don't make for a particularly interesting villain.
All of the "bad" things I constantly hear from fans about the series boil down to personal hang-ups regarding "Muh Gray Jedi" being rightfully jettisoned from the saga (and quite organically via the story, I would add), and a bunch of shit that never happened and is nonetheless spread around by autists in the fandom who attempt to misconstrue the Post-NJO works as unreadable at any cost...even factual accuracy.
Which isn't unprecedented amongst Star Wars fans. Just ask the mongoloids who made
The People v George Lucas.
I didn't read more after about half of the first book
The more I read your post, I think you neglected to read a lot more than just
Dark Nest, to be frank.
Galactic Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo was tiring and I hate how they made Jaina Boba's bitch.
You mean when she Force Slams him into a wall for trying to be snarky with her? Or when she flatly tells him there are lines she won't cross in her preparation to fight Jacen? Or when she ultimately helps Luke backstab the Mandos later on in the same book?
I'm no fan of the way Jaina is made to play second fiddle to a bunch of Mando Drama in
Revelation, but she was far from a subservient tool for Boba or any of the Mandos. He was a means to an end, and he's treated as such in the final book.
Jacen kills Mara Jade because we gotta, man, the Vong killed Chewie so we gotta do something similar.
Chewbacca's death and Mara's death are not even remotely the same in tone, intent or purpose. Chewie died because the writers were forbidden from killing off anyone else to kickstart the events of NJO, which was crucial in establishing that the stakes of the conflict were very real, and not something that would be resolved by book's end like a whole host of the formulaic Bantam Era books from the 90's that preceeded it. That was entirely necessary, and the right call. And as I've stated, it served to be the emotional means for which other characters embarked on journeys of redemption and self-reflection, with it being the bedrock for exploring a bitter falling out between Han and his son, Han and Leia, and ultimately being the tragic seed for Anakin's self-blame and desperate need throughout the rest of the series to set things right.
Mara's death is used to show how Jacen is willing to sever ties with even the
one person who was consitently defending him up till that point. Where his relationship with Luke, his parents, and his sister were strained, and everyone was expressing doubt and suspicion for him, Mara defends him at every opportunity--playing devil's advocate after having made plenty of sketchy decisions in her previous life as Emperor's Hand. When she dies, it's the cruelest cut; the ultimate low blow. The statement from the authors that Jacen has crossed a personal line that ensures even Luke can't redeem him, and there's no happy ending for him in sight. The death also marks an arrival at full-circle for Mara...having entered the EU continuity as a self-serving mercenary filled with bitter hatred, she goes out selflessly fighting to protect her own son, in a final act of fierce protective determination. A cause worth dying for, one she didn't have upon first being introduced/
Both deaths are used for completely different things, kickstart completely different character trajectories, and serve for completely different narrative utilities. They go out with purpose and emotional impact, as opposed to how Han, Luke and Leia are killed off in the ST, where their deaths have the emotional weight and narrative impact of an underwater fart.
Killing them "just 'cause we gotta", indeed.
Then Luke and Son's adventures in wild space with the space devil sounded uninteresting in the extreme when I was young and fatigued from Jacen's edgy phase.
"It is bad. I know, because I haven't read it."
Fabulous. You know, I don't rag on or write long angry screeds about any current canon books I haven't read. That way, if I get something wrong, I won't look hilariously misinformed and espousing retarded opinions I know nothing about.
I mean, who would go around the Star Wars Thread doing
that?
I hear it gets better, that the Traviss books are the best part of it, but at this point I don't really care.
Traviss didn't write for
Fate of the Jedi, or "the space devil series".
And then I think we can at least reach common ground on the Legacy era.
How can we? You haven't read half of it, and misremember the rest.
As for the grey Jedi stuff, I don't care if the fanbase was cringe about it, they don't matter. Luke's later insistence on just straight up reforming Yoda's Order is dull and I always saw him striking out and going his own way as the final end of the big source of the star wars, religious infighting.
That's precisely what Luke does. He allows Jedi to marry, for fuck's sake. He just doesn't commit to an idealogy where there's room for Dark Side practicing in tandem with Jedi Teachings.
Probably because the rate of people being corrupted to the Dark Side and turning evil is really high. Almost like the Dark Side is routinely characterized as cancerous and robbing people of personal autonomy, or something.
God, I wonder if anyone ever made six movies about that....
I enjoy Star Wars on my terms and I get that maybe the pruning I do seems extreme, but my problems with the stuff after my chosen stop point has more to do with my personal taste than inherent quality of the writing.
I'd also question your ability to give me a trustworthy assessment of the quality of either NJO and LOTF's writing, given how much you've gotten wrong in a single post.
Usually. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the Vong, I just don't like it.
You haven't told me why don't like them yet, but okay. I'm curious to know.
I know plenty on this thread like
@The Gangster Computer who harbor very open misgivings about not just the Vong, but that book series and its successor. The difference is that he gives informed reasoning, and demonstrates he's actually
read the shit he's talking about.
Something that helps tremendously in discussions like these
Maybe I was a little too hard on some of the other stuff
Not hard. Just wrong.
but lots of people don't like Darth Caedus and I really didn't enjoy those storylines when I was a kid.
Lots of people not liking something is not a metric of quality. You know what a lot of did people like, unabashedly, when it came out? ...The Force Awakens. So much so that people were heralding Jar Jar Abrams as "the man who saved Star Wars from Lucas and his yucky prequels."
Majority opinion is often eight different shades of ass, especially where the EU is concerned. A routine theme of my coverage, in fact. Everything I was warned would be terrible ended up being great...
Legacy of the Force, especially.
