Star Wars Griefing Thread (SPOILERS) - Safety off

[Male Idiot]

That was the breaking point for some readers. It's why a lot of book fans were initially OK with the canon wipe Disney proposed, whereas the fans of the comics and video games were less enthusiastic about the canon wipe.

Yeah you got to mess up bad for people to want to trash it all, just to get rid of your bad writing. I recall the Sith girl had different personalities in each book. It was ridiculous, Luke, like a porno.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Yeah you got to mess up bad for people to want to trash it all, just to get rid of your bad writing. I recall the Sith girl had different personalities in each book. It was ridiculous, Luke, like a porno.

A lot of the book fans were calling for at least some form of minor reboot before Disney came along, because of how NJO and LOTF pissed off so many book fans who grew up loving Mara Jade and Jacen Solo. Some of these guys learned how to read with those books, only to see Jacen become evil with less reasons than Anakin, and for Mara Jade to get stuffed in the fridge like she's some forgettable love interest for a third-rate comic book hero.

Like I said, it was getting derivative; if you've read comics around that time period, you'd see similar disturbing trends. The inch towards grimdark or grey morality. Heroes becoming evil on the fly. Female love interests that got killed off for shock value. If you paid attention to media outside of Star Wars, you'd know.

 

[el bandito loco]

I didn't mind Jacen's shit in LotF (granted I'm in middle or high school reading these as they release so I was the age this edgy shit I was reading appealed to) in retrospect I definitely understand the hate for it, and at the time I did but didn't care. but I will never forgive them for offing Mara that was full retard. they could have had him kill anyone else besides his sister, parents, Luke and his wife and kid and it would have been fine with me. But Mara jade? Fuck you.

I grew up fighting kids in the school library over who got to read volumes of junior and young Jedi Knights and the jedi apprentice books, so I felt like I grew up with Jacen Solo too but I never minded the fall to the dark side really, it could have been done better, sure. I felt that at the time but I was always kinda shrugging it off as well, it's in his blood one of the solo/skywalker kids has gotta do it.

all that said, it was the wrong direction to go. Fate of the Jedi was better but it being built on the back of that and incorporating the overrated bullshit that is Filoni-Wars coupled with the fact it was Luke & Ben wandering around minus Mara and it's not a coherent series made the EU end with a mediocre at best final big series. I was excited to see where it went following crucible but we never got it.

I like legacy but I never personally really wanted the franchise to go back to any similar to the OT set up. I kinda wanted at least after Luke's gone any Empires of any sort to finally be done and over with. What would that have looked like? I don't know.

At the time I sort of had what I have now with canon is that post sequel trilogy and post legacy, why would I give a fuck about anything before it because I know where it ends up. At least legacy I enjoy but in canon, why would I possibly give a shit about Mando & their Filoni-Ashokaverse remake of Thrawn? Even if I liked either of those things which I don't, I don't care it ends with TFA I will never have any investment in any of that.

 

[ArthuriusMartyrius]

Jacen becoming evil was retarded but him killing off Mara Jade was one of the silver linings to that shitshow. She was becoming an absolutely insufferable character in the years leading up to it and I know I was by far not the only one to think that she had worn out her welcome as a character in the SW fandom. Especially when they started pushing her over the movie OGs like Han and Leia and how nothing measures up to Luke and Mara's TRU WUV. Yeah right, go fuck yourself Star Wars EU writers and take your third-rate book OC with you.

I'm not a Bad Batch watcher so forgive my lateness but apparently Ventress was like actually, functionally dead before now? Then Filoni waved his magic wand around and made her alive again because he cannot part with his OCs.

Ventress' history goes roughly like this (though pardon me, my memory might be a little hazy here):

1) Original version from the 2003 series, she is an assassin trained by Count Dooku and then killed by Anakin which leads to him being promoted to Jedi Knight.

2) But then it turns out that she isn't dead and ends up being one of Dooku's three henchmen along with General Grievous and Durge. She still isn't particularly high-up and the most prominent moment that I remember is her and Durge getting wrecked simultaneously by Grievous as part of a test that Dooku arranged for the latter.

3) She eventually grows disillusioned with the Separatist/Republic conflict and fucks off to the Unknown Regions in the middle of a battle, never to be seen or heard from again.

4) Nu-canon post-TCW tweaks her story so that she is betrayed and abandoned by Dooku but eventually comes crawling back to him after realizing that she has effectively nothing else worth living for. Much like previous canon, she grows disillusioned with the conflict and leaves in the middle of a battle to parts unknown.

5) Nu-canon tweaks her story again so that instead of abandoning the Separatists for a second time, she dies. From what I recall, she actually got two deaths, one not-so-heroic and one heroic one saving innocents.

6) Now she's alive again, I guess.

Asajj Ventress is kind of the inverse of General Grievous - Grievous used to be the most prominent secondary antagonist among the Separatist faction after Dooku while Ventress was just some third-rate wannabe Sith that Dooku used for lower-priority missions, now she's by far more prominent than Grievous while the good General is effectively a joke.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

My point of view is that Mara Jade deserved better than getting killed off in a conflict nobody wants to remember. If there was a time to kill her off, it would've been during the Vong War's last battles, having the bad guy kill her or having her sacrifice herself in some form to give the Jedi an opening to end the war would've been worthwhile. Either that, or I'd just slowly retire her and she spends the rest of her days like Jocasta Nu, rummaging through a New Jedi Library and teaching kids while Luke runs the Temple and the Order like Yoda did. Maybe she goes off on a final adventure as Timothy Zahn planned, and you can have her and Luke go off on a mystic quest and kill Abeloth or fight the Lost Tribe of the Sith while the rest of the galaxy worries about another war. Having the two of them suddenly be made absent would be the perfect time for Lumiya or Thrackan Sal-Solo to start plotting some new conflict to weaken the galactic order.

As for Jacen going evil, it's even worse than Anakin Skywalker going evil. As sloppy as some parts of Anakin's fall was managed, at least there were solid reasons. Anakin had a rough childhood as a slave, the Jedi didn't trust him, his mentor constantly berated him, he wanted more power to prevent those he loved from suffering, Palpatine is his only real father-figure giving him pep talks and advice that he feels comfortable with, and he is increasingly frustrated with the political order of the Republic and already favors a centralized government where problems can be solved swiftly. The seeds of a disgruntled, power-hungry space fascist were already there, just waiting to grow. The man we know as Darth Vader was already within Anakin as early as Episode 2, and he just blossomed down the line as Anakin's problems mounted.

Jacen, on the other hand, had every advantage gift-wrapped and given to him. He was the son of royalty/war hero celebrities to whom the rulers of his age had to bow and scrape to. The Jedi of his time were open and understanding, and the grand master is his uncle, who would do anything for him. He had all the power he needs, to the point where he became one with the Light Side and vaporized the Vong leader with a show of power that neither Palpatine nor Yoda could ever equal in the height of their strength. The new galactic order has him as one of its most trusted agents; both former Rebels and Imperials from the OT era would look upon him as a respected authority.

For him to suddenly fall, go full Space Fascist, and kill his aunt makes no sense whatsoever. At that point, he should've surrendered his will to the Living Force and just become an ambassador of peace, and instead of going full autismo and doing evil things to keep the peace, he would've just accepted that war is part of human/sapient nature and just do his best to pick up the pieces and heal. Jacen should've become the SW equivalent of Saint Francis or Mahatma Ghandi and sought peace for everyone. When the Second Galactic Civil War breaks out, he shouldn't be the Galactic Alliance's Heinrich Himmler, he should be the guy calling for both sides to lay down their arms and talk. Hell, if he was going to die in that war, he should've died in the midst of the first battle, as both sides begin firing upon each other and he's perforated by shots fired by both sides. That would poetically show the lights getting blown out as a new era of darkness starts with a new galactic war that threatens to turn brother against brother once more.

For him to just fall like that, in an even shittier remake of his grandfather's fall, was tired, sloppy, and did not match up with what the NJO novels showed about him when the Vong Saga ended. Sure, I'm more than happy calling the NJO novels derivative and sloppy, but they are at least part of the canon, and future books should've honored the setup that Jacen had by the end of that story, not someone who will veer into the Darkness for stupid reasons, but as a literal beacon of Light that would guide the galaxy to a better future.

For later books to suddenly throw that into the trash and make Jacen into an even shittier copy of his granddad who kills his aunt just reeks of the same tired comic book nonsense where good guys go bad for stupid reasons and love interests get shoved in the fridge for the sake of cheap drama. Not to mention it makes the SWEU seem bipolar about characters and it explains why more than a few of the book fans were calling for a canon wipe before the Mouse bought the franchise. Especially when these books were stupidly borrowing tropes from comics that regularly have retcons and canon wipes because the writers wrote themselves into a corner.

 

[Male Idiot]

Mahatma Ghandi and sought peace for everyone.

He intensely disliked niggers.

 

[Overly Serious]

He intensely disliked niggers.

Wasn't one of his big early political efforts a fight for Black people's rights in South Africa? Or am I misremembering or misinformed about this by the Ben Kinglsey biopic?

Ah, I realise this is off topic so, um... I think the Acolyte is going to be bad.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

He intensely disliked niggers.

I suppose I should clear this up by saying that I'm talking about the idealized version of Ghandhi that people like Lucas and MLK Jr. loved, not the actual one who was talking of surrender to the Nazis while seeing blacks and Indians as separate in every way possible.

Ah, I realise this is off topic so, um... I think the Acolyte is going to be bad.

Preaching to the choir, although for me, I'll wait until the series comes out in full before I judge it myself.

 

[el bandito loco]

He intensely disliked niggers.

I had a history teacher in high school who Ghandi was his personal messiah and talked about him every day. There was this quiet kid who the teacher was always kinda picking on (I guess because he always had his head in his textbook and was never actively participating but maybe he was sleeping and a dumbass, who knows) anyways I always felt bad for him because he just seemed like he was being called out because he was quiet. anyways one day this kid I guess hit the breaking point and had enough and the teacher fucked with him then right after followed it up with some Ghandi shit and this kid who I had never heard speak in like 5 months loudly slammed his book down and yelled SHUT UP, GHANDI WAS A FAGGOT!!!!! PUSSIES LIKE HIM ARE WHY REAL MEN HAVE TO GO TO WAR!!! ill never forget that guy and I can't see Ghandi references without laughing to this day.

you know ironically looking at it as a whole I think my biggest problem with the EU is basically the opposite of what we have got in current media (outside of books which I haven't read) which is, how many fucking adventures do Luke Han & Leia need to go on? they have the busiest fucking lives of all time in the Bantam era. like god damn.

another unrelated thing but something that irritates me about the fandom. so I've noticed the last couple years people have been custom printing copies of unreleased books like lightsider, or collections of short stories we never got reprinted or whatever which is cool. anyways if you ask any of these people for copies of the formatted files to do this yourself, they get all gatekeepy and sorry I can't share. which whatever you can do it yourself, but ALL of these people have the exact same copies printed up. dude you're already pirating material why be a top secret boys club about it if you're advertising you've done this online already? I get legal issues and not wanting the company who custom prints books to stop doing it but obviously you're already sharing them between yourselves it's not like a huge influx of people are probably asking.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

you know ironically looking at it as a whole I think my biggest problem with the EU is basically the opposite of what we have got in current media (outside of books which I haven't read) which is, how many fucking adventures do Luke Han & Leia need to go on? they have the busiest fucking lives of all time in the Bantam era. like god damn.

Well, there's a lot of things they could've done in the timespan of 36 years, from 4 ABY to 40 ABY. And there's also the era before the Empire fell, from 0 ABY-4 ABY. Not to mention that from a real-world perspective, the market demand was there. So I don't begrudge them having a lot of stories with the main OT crew.

another unrelated thing but something that irritates me about the fandom. so I've noticed the last couple years people have been custom printing copies of unreleased books like lightsider, or collections of short stories we never got reprinted or whatever which is cool. anyways if you ask any of these people for copies of the formatted files to do this yourself, they get all gatekeepy and sorry I can't share. which whatever you can do it yourself, but ALL of these people have the exact same copies printed up. dude you're already pirating material why be a top secret boys club about it if you're advertising you've done this online already? I get legal issues and not wanting the company who custom prints books to stop doing it but obviously you're already sharing them between yourselves it's not like a huge influx of people are probably asking.

I'm sure there's sites with PDFs that you can pillage.

 

[el bandito loco]

Well, there's a lot of things they could've done in the timespan of 36 years, from 4 ABY to 40 ABY. And there's also the era before the Empire fell, from 0 ABY-4 ABY. Not to mention that from a real-world perspective, the market demand was there. So I don't begrudge them having a lot of stories with the main OT crew.


I'm sure there's sites with PDFs that you can pillage.

I don't really begrudge them either it's just wild from the in universe standpoint literally everything happens revolving around these siblings and ones husband. but children of the chosen one it's par for the course.

as for the latter, yes but no. they hide these specific works amongst themselves (most you can still find) but I'm talking about they have the pdfs formatted to specific size needed for these printings with professional looking covers with liners on dust jackets and back cover blurbs and shit so it looks like a real book and they're just weird about it.

the whole reason I bring any of this up is this one time I messaged a guy inquiring about his printing of some collection of EU short stories and E-books that never saw print and this dude responded to me with a pop-quiz of like 35 fucking EU questions and that I would get access to a discord if I typed out responses to this and they were satisfactory. First of all I'm not making a discord account to bootleg an unpublished book. secondly what an asshole.

I just told him never mind it's not that big of a deal to me, and even if I didn't know someone could Wookieepedia all of that shit if they chose. but really it just rubbed me entirely wrong because although I'm a fan and did want it for myself, what if I wanted to do it as a gift? My dad and uncle read all the EU stuff but neither were using the internet much or subscribed to hyperspace so all the ebooks and shit they would have no idea existed. how thoughtful of a gift would it be to be like here you go a custom professional looking collection of star wars you didn't know exists and can't find online without a lot of searching.

or if you're some woman (or man) who has a partner who loves star wars but you don't know shit about it and its like hey I checked your bookshelf you have none of this, you can't buy it. happy anniversary or whatever. but this dude presented a literal standardized test length thing to get access to a gay chat room instead of just saying I made this for myself I'd rather not share or here you go.

I asked some other guy who was super happy to share files for omnibus collections of the YA books and I asked if he knew the other dudes sharing these things around and he was like oh they're insufferable and essentially want people to either pay them, jerk them off, or treat this shit like it's their work when they didn't write the books obviously and 90% of the time they aren't the people who originally formatted these things themselves they're just hoarding them to act like a club lol

 

[GilaCutter]

Finally decided to pick up and actually read those hardcover 1970s Marvel Star Wars omnibi I picked up years ago. I always felt a little weird about buying them and then holding off on actually reading them for so long, probably because I felt like I enjoyed the prospect of reading them more than actually reading them. Didn't help that the comic starts off with an adaptation of the first film, which I've seen more times than I can count so I felt like it couldn't offer anything interesting.

Well I guess I couldn't have been more wrong, because unlike the adaptations of the other two movies which I actually had read as a kid, the first one is based on an earlier version of the script so it actually differs from the other adaptations in small but significant ways. The Biggs subplot and all the other famous deleted scenes are featured in the story. Some of the scenes are also shuffled around a little bit and there are some minor dialogue alterations which was interesting; for example, the (adoptive) father of Leia is named Bail Antilles, not Bail Organa. There are also some curiosities in the art side of things, like while most key players more or less look the part, some of the bit characters look nothing like their onscreen counterparts, like admiral Motti being older, fatter and balder.

There were a few bits in the comic I think worked really well in the format, like Luke finding his adoptive parents dead; instead of a gruesome shot of smouldering skeletons, we only get a narration box and Luke's reaction to what he sees, leaving the whole thing mostly to imagination. But the one scene I think comes across even better in the comic than in the movie is the cantina confrontation where Obi-Wan cuts walrus man (or whatever the hell his official name is) down to size; in addition to leaving the gore to imagination like above, there's also more emphasis on the other cantina patrons giving him plenty of space after the fact, as opposed to the film where they seem to merely shrug the whole thing off. He ends up coming across as a much more of a badass as a result.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

there's also more emphasis on the other cantina patrons giving him plenty of space after the fact, as opposed to the film where they seem to merely shrug the whole thing off. He ends up coming across as a much more of a badass as a result.

That gives off more of a Rorschach vibe to it. It's as if Kenobi's telling them ''I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me.'' But I suppose in the movie, they're implying such occurrences happen more often, hence why they shrugged it off. After all, Han kills another man in the same cantina in the same film, and people barely shot him a look. It's as Kenobi said, the town was a hive of scum and villainy.

 

[GilaCutter]

That gives off more of a Rorschach vibe to it. It's as if Kenobi's telling them ''I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me.'' But I suppose in the movie, they're implying such occurrences happen more often, hence why they shrugged it off. After all, Han kills another man in the same cantina in the same film, and people barely shot him a look. It's as Kenobi said, the town was a hive of scum and villainy.

That always bugged me a little bit. Jedi are supposed to be all but extinct, so you'd think a lightsaber slicing someone's arm off would get a bit more of a reaction out of people than somebody merely getting shot.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

That always bugged me a little bit. Jedi are supposed to be all but extinct, so you'd think a lightsaber slicing someone's arm off would get a bit more of a reaction out of people than somebody merely getting shot.

Although realistically, that action would be telling the local authorities, since Jedi are supposed to be illegal. Next guy to rat out a Jedi probably gets a million credits up front from the Empire. Five million if Vader finds out it's a guy named ''Ben Kenobi''.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

He intensely disliked niggers.

The two are mutually exclusive, so it makes sense.

 

[el bandito loco]

I felt like I enjoyed the prospect of reading them more than actually reading them

those comics in general are actually pretty good. I like how weird they get. star wars was just a movie at that point and so it's interesting to go back and read to see what they were doing when it was whatever the fuck they wanted to do then how they curve their story back into the movies for Empire & Jedi when they come around.

when I was a kid my dad had his old paperback collection of the Empire adaptation and Yoda is blue and doesn't really look like Yoda. when I read the whole series digitally a couple years ago I saw at some point they fixed that. which I thought kind of sucked. I get it for continuity purposes but really beyond Lumiya being dragged out for LotF years later the Marvel comics were always basically their own little pocket universe. part of what's interesting about them is how they visualized certain stuff or approached it differently.

people love to talk shit on the Rabbit guy but he's barely in the series really out of like 100 issues or whatever he's probably in 5/10.

 

[Male Idiot]

I always found it a small misstep in the OT that they Jedi/Clone wars felt ancient. Han's attitude, the cantina patrons surprise, Obiwan looking way older than 50.

It felt like more time has passed, even though it couldn't have, as Luke was in his twenties.

To put it in Murrika terms, it is as if the current year story was referencing 9/11 but people acted like it was 'Nam or even Normandy.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

I don't really begrudge them either it's just wild from the in universe standpoint literally everything happens revolving around these siblings and ones husband. but children of the chosen one it's par for the course.

Exactly. So it makes sense that the children of the saga's main character and their friends would have a lot of stories in the series. I mean, it's the same for many other series, whether they be sci-fi or fantasy.

That, and the main market for SWEU works are people who want to see more of the OT heroes, so it makes sense.

I asked some other guy who was super happy to share files for omnibus collections of the YA books and I asked if he knew the other dudes sharing these things around and he was like oh they're insufferable and essentially want people to either pay them, jerk them off, or treat this shit like it's their work when they didn't write the books obviously and 90% of the time they aren't the people who originally formatted these things themselves they're just hoarding them to act like a club lol

They'd get in massive trouble if Disney found out about them. Charging money for copyrighted work. Hell, you'd think they wouldn't have a problem just copying the files into your drive, considering that they sing the praises of these SWEU works and act like it was all better back in the old days. Best way to get that point across is to give free copies your friend who's asking for a piece of the action. It's not like it's going to cost you anything to click on the copy and paste commands.

I always found it a small misstep in the OT that they Jedi/Clone wars felt ancient. Han's attitude, the cantina patrons surprise, Obiwan looking way older than 50.

It felt like more time has passed, even though it couldn't have, as Luke was in his twenties.

To put it in Murrika terms, it is as if the current year story was referencing 9/11 but people acted like it was 'Nam or even Normandy.

To be fair, people today do act like 9/11 was a lifetime ago. If you tried to act like someone from that time, you'd be seen as crazy or backwards, as if you were a boomer from the 50s.

Some kid born on that day would be a man or a woman now. They could even have kids of their own who never saw the pre-9/11 America and all of its power and decadence. 90s 'Murica was a magical place. A time when people could afford to be naive hippies because their global order ruled the world.

So the OT characters acting like the Clone Wars/Jedi are ancient history is rather accurate to reality. Events from 20 years ago feels like ancient history to most people today, if they actually lived to see 9/11 happen in their life.

 

[Mac Monster]

Asajj Ventress is kind of the inverse of General Grievous - Grievous used to be the most prominent secondary antagonist among the Separatist faction after Dooku while Ventress was just some third-rate wannabe Sith that Dooku used for lower-priority missions, now she's by far more prominent than Grievous while the good General is effectively a joke.

Grievous has always had a great design and backstory, but the only time I felt he ever lived up to his potential was in the original clone wars cartoon. It's a shame that Filoni (and Lucas to a much lesser extent) turned him into such a joke.