I’ve been reading some EU Star Wars books + playing KOTOR.
Is it me or is the EU genuinely superior? I actually am pissed off that so many EU games/books were retconned out of the timeline and replaced with gay corposlop bullshit.
Star Wars EU had so many better ideas than Disney slop it’s not even funny. The timeline was fleshed out for 20,000+ years, the arcs were amazing, the authors worked with Lucas to keep it streamlined. The video games hit their zenith between 1999-2008, augmenting the expanded universe of Star Wars. Disney has effectively managed to kill off Star Wars in five years and besides maybe Andor, there’s no new Star Wars medium that people are excited for.
Probably one of the greatest evils Disney has done was shut down LucasArts and canceling Star Wars: 1313. The moment the EU canon was eliminated in 2014 was the moment that Lucas’s vision of his franchise died.
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What we could’ve had…
I laughed my ass off when people started claiming that Andor was the first time Star Wars did mature storytelling.
One of the first books I read from the SWEU was Dark Lord: Rise of Darth Vader, which dealt with a lot of the politics and military action that happened RIGHT AFTER Revenge of the Sith. Of biggest note is Palpatine trying to justify what happened in Order 66, tiptoeing around the questions the Senate brings up, making suggestions and implications that allowed him to justify what he did, while also not giving the Senate enough information on how the war ended, just to keep them reliant on him.
Palpatine has to deal with the Senate, he has to deal with Vader having a crisis of faith, he has to deal with the news of Jedi remnants and clones disobeying orders, and he deals with each one realistically. Like a politician would.
Andor was not the first time they did realistic/mature politics. The first book I read from the SWEU did the same fucking thing.
Hell, ROTS managed to rebound from AOTC and was actually 2005’s biggest hit.
The prequels also had their openings increased by film, so clearly fans still loved SW even if the prequels were a bit awkward.
My point exactly. Prequel mania was strong as fuck, and the way the SW fans ate up all the merch and all the marketing was proof of it. And they competed with genuinely great film series such as the LOTR and Harry Potter films. They came out when Hollywood had a higher quality ceiling, so competing with them was no easy task, let alone overshadowing them.
Deep down, I think RLM is jealous of the fact that their beloved Star Trek, even at its best, was behind Star Wars in cultural relevancy, even when compared to the Prequels. No amount of Picard making grandiose speeches can compete with Darth Maul lighting up his double-blade for the first time, for instance. Hell, even Anakin's whining about sand is more memorable.
The problem is, they're having Maul struggle against Ahsoka's sloppy seconds. The right thing to have done is NOT have Marrok and the Crow die to Ahsoka. Or if they do die to her, have it so that it's after a long, grueling fight that Ahsoka nearly dies from, a la Anakin vs. Obi-Wan on Mustafar. The problem is, they already castrated these particular Inquisitors off the bat by having Ahsoka easily dispose of them, so when Maul start struggling against them, he looks like a chump.
What should've happened is Maul making fools of them; show us the difference between the education of an Inquisitor, and the education of a full-blown Sith Lord. Don't just have a few flashbacks of kid Maul, have it so that Maul goes through flashbacks of his entire training process, then he surmises what the Inquisitors learned by fighting them. Sidious gave him the full Sith education course, these morons just got put through a neutered version of Dark Side boot camp. Sidious taught him the ins and outs of each lightsaber form, these yahoos use Mary Poppins helicopter-sabers because they're not skilled enough to twirl with a double-bladed lightsaber the old-fashioned way.
The result should be the Sith equivalent of Omni-Man looking at jet fighters and mocking them, saying something like "look what they need to mimic my power!" in front of the Jedi Padawan. Then he kicks the shit out of the Inquisitors, to the point where the Jedi Padawan is greatly impressed, and that's where their relationship starts. I mean, this was something we all expected out of him in this show, especially since we did see Maul kill the shit out of the Inquisitors in Rebels, so him struggling against them here makes little sense.
Meanwhile, as the Inquisitors are distracted by Maul and the Jedi, the Zabraks and Mandalorians who are part of Maul's gang would spend that time plundering some supply depot used by the Imperials to store their equipment, so the gang can sell that shit on the black market. They make a mint selling Stormtrooper costumes and LAAT gunships to rich offworld aristocrats who want to undermine Imperial operations. You can even have a young Saw Gerrera buy Imperial gear and weapons from Maul's gang, which would create a bond of continuity with other SW animated shows, and it would explain why Saw has TK trooper gear in the Bad Batch cartoon; you can have it so that Maul's people sold that shit to him. Saw and Maul having a mutual hatred of the Empire would make them very good business partners for the years to come.
At this point, you have the Empire slowly spreading, slowly making life harder for many people who wish to stick to their local customs and power structures, so Maul can make a killing selling to them what they need to fight back, and stealing that shit from the Empire would be both extremely profitable, AND a slap on Palpatine's face, which would give Maul the satisfaction he needs after Palpatine killed his mother and brother. Maul and his crew could also act as expensive mercenaries, so that rich, anti-Imperial aristocrats like Mon Mothma and Bail Organa can pay him to inflict severe damage on Imperial installations, something which Maul would likely do on his own, but his men would obviously love getting paid well to do it.
That way, you can have Maul be shown as someone who is very skilled in terms of the worldly aspects of running a criminal syndicate, while him slapping around Inquisitors makes him also look strong in the spiritual aspect of the Dark Side. His Mandalorian servants are loyal as a result of all the money they're bringing in by selling stolen Imperial gear and taking jobs destroying Imperial installations, and him slapping around Inquisitors would attract Jedi who are considering a different path after the Order went kaput. That's the kind of shit you need to sell a Maul TV show; make him supremely competent at running a crime organization and being a Sith; that way, the fans are invested, and the Empire would have to bring out the big guns like Vader to bring him down and reduce him to the hobo that we see in Rebels.
