I'm prefacing this by admitting I like most of Karen Travis' EU books. Mississippi Mourning gives a pretty good breakdown of her here.
I get the feeling that KT, like Kathleen Kennedy doesn't actually like SW per se. She likes an aspect of SW specifically Mando's and their culture and eventually because her focus was on her wants and preferences and not the well being of the overall whole it shows up in her work. Unlike KK I dont think KT hates SW. But that's the line.
First off, I appreciate the kind words. It's nice to know that I'm wearing my thumbs numb over these novella-sized posts, and someone actually reads them.
But specifically to the bolded, I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that Traviss actively compromises a story to cater to her Mando preference. She definitely shoehorns that aspect in, no question, but I don't believe that it actively took away from the drama and narrative weight of the other characters. You could remove the entire Boba Fett sub-plot from
Bloodlines, and all of the Jacen and Solo/Skywalker Family stuff would still be just as nuanced and well-told. Traviss wrote those portions as well or better than the Mando bits, with none of it feeling like she was sleep-walking through it just to get to the portions of the plot she cared more about.
For all of her tendencies, Traviss retained a sense of creative and professional restraint, and gave her all to the primary, Jedi-focused part of the storyline, which I'm immensely thankful for.
Glad to read your review and looking forward to the next ones. Not to spoil anything but iirc some of your complaints may get remedied either in this series or the next.
As I keep saying, I'm only two books in, so please regard any mountains of hyperbole I project through my posts as unfilitered and half-informed early impressions. I'm certain that my complaints will be addressed in later books...it's just that I had similar complaints whilst reading
Dark Nest, and they were never remedied by the end.
Of course, we have three authors to depend on instead of just one spear-heading the story arc, so I'm certain that improvement is far likelier this time around.
Disney's decision to make all EU works non canon killed a lot of interest in the franchise from the more hardcore fanbase
Which has a staggering irony, because as an avid Star Wars fan with no history with the EU (for the most part), Disney's decision to jetison that continuity created a very easy solution to my utter revulsion to
The Farce Awakens by having an entire timeline's worth of comics and novels that would give me the creativity I sought, thus ushering me to decades of stories that were fresh and new to my inexperienced eyes, making me into a bigger and more rabid Star Wars fan than ever.
So, thank you Disney...thank you for making films and Nu-Canon material so incomprehensibly shit that I was forced to mine through a goldmine of superior stories, and revitalizing my interest in the franchise.
God, we talking first SW games?
LEGO Star Wars was my first. Yes, I'm part of
that generation. From there it was KOTOR II,
Battlefront II, and eventually I worked my way to
this motherfucker right here.
This, ladies and Kiwi's, was my gateway drug into Star Wars games.
Empire At War, KOTOR,
Battlefront 1, Jedi Outcast, Republic and a two-week subscription to Star Wars Galaxies. In a time before Steam and GOG.com existed, and I was a dinky little kid with a low-end PC and strapped for allowance, this was a fucking Godsend...$30 at my local Circuit City.
Greatest summer of gaming, that was.
I would guess that this was a conscious reference to the Battlefront II mission, since Traviss worked closely, and was quite friendly with, LucasArts continuity editor Ryan Kaufman, who was also the content coordinator for the original Battlefront game (she also had a pronounced habit, contrary to her internet reputation, of working in obscure bits of lore into her books, like Djinn Altis, an obscure Clone Wars-era rogue Jedi whose prior footprint consisted of being name-dropped a couple of times in the Bantam era).
If that's true, it's really fucking cool. Things like that are part of why I like the EU so much, because now I'm going to form a stronger connection to that level in
Battlefront II whenever I replay it. It's like coming off of
Shadows of the Empire, and having that squarely on the mind when re-watching ESB, knowing that when Vader talks to the Emperor via hologram outside of the asteroid field, Prince Xizor is listening in and already formulating his big scheme to outshine Vader.
It makes the universe feel bigger and more enriched...as opposed to what it is now under Disney: suffocatingly-small and sapped dry.
I found it a rather pleasant leavening of the unremitting gloom of the main story, personally. Seeing Boba reconnect with his estranged family made for an interesting contrast with Han's family starting to fall apart, and contributed a certain additional poignancy to the proceedings, given that the EU had long established that Fett and Solo had a subdued but long-running grudge/rivalry where each would in turn get the upper-hand over the other (sometimes several times in the space of one text, as in A.C. Crispin's Han Solo Trilogy). It felt in many ways, to me, like a long-form call-back to the end of Daniel Keyes-Moran's short story "Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett" which concludes with an aging Fett and Solo facing off one last time, each uncertain of whether to pull the trigger or just walk away.
Each to their own. Some of the moments of levity between Fett and his granddaughter landed for me, but a lot of it didn't. Some parts of the big investigation of Taun We and his vengeful daughter kind of dragged ass, or at least didn't grab me like the main plot did. I suppose it's because I haven't really delved into a lot of the Boba Fett content of the Bantam era, or most of the works you referenced. It's possible that I would probably have a larger appreciation for it if I did.
As you said, Fett and the Mandalorians are going to be playing an expanded part in this series, so there was some narrative necessity to bringing the readers up to speed on what they were/had been up to in recent years. Maybe it would have been better if Del Rey had given Traviss a standalone book to explore everything that had happened with the Mandalorians as a whole since the Clone Wars, but that never happened for whatever reason, so all of the plot threads that Traviss had set up regarding events in motion on Mandalore over the course of the Republic Commando series (particular the Mandalorian clans starting to regroup and consolidate under Fenn Shysa's leadership for the first time in centuries) had to be addressed within the bounds of LOTF.
I really think the bolded would've been the optimal solution. Del Rey is no stranger to having supplementary books between story arcs that deal with vital information (they had
Rogue Planet act as a spin-off info dump for NJO, for instance). I feel like if they had enabled Traviss that luxury, she wouldn't have felt pressed to cram twenty years' worth of narrative catchup as well as
Republic Commando plot threads into the second entry of an already high-stakes story arc.
I believe FOTJ also did something similar with its Lost Tribe Of The Sith being expanded in spin-off material, but I obviously haven't gotten there yet.
I didn't get that. The prologue was pretty matter-of-fact, and relatively terse, reflecting Fett's established character tics while bringing the reader up-to-speed on his immediate preoccupations for the purposes of the LOTF series (to whit: he's getting old, his body is starting to break down, he needs to figure out who's going to be the next Mand'alor and he's more and more starting to wonder whatever became of his estranged offspring
Meh. I found it a try-hard slog to read...but it was short, at least. It got the job done narratively, I just didn't like how the prose was handled, myself.
Interesting. Do you think Traviss was consciously/deliberately playing on parallels with the War of Northern Aggression?
It wouldn't be outlandish, considering that
Star Wars has taken elements of real-world conflicts before. We see the Galactic Alliance do a lot of sketchy, unconstituitional things to mitigate the civil unrest on Coruscant, as well as to literally linger like a guillotine over Corellian orbit to ensure they don't misbehave. You could draw parallels to any number of nations in history throwing their weight around in a similar fashion, but it's the Corellians' attitude and response to this treatment that rings true of the American Civil War. Remember, that Alliston very consciously characterized the Corellians as haughty and prideful, determined to be independent of an aggressive foreign power...which is pretty much the way the way the South saw itself against everything North of Virginia by the late 1800's. Han's bitter monologue at the family table in
Betrayal mirrors this quite profoundly, and then in Traviss' book we see the same attitude play out in street riots and tense confrontations in space.
If NJO's Round Robin Interview is anything to go by, collaborating EU authors usually decide on the general feel of the main conflict pretty early on. I have to believe that the three authors for LOTF at reached a similar agreement on
its conflict and how it would feel.
He'll always have Star By Star... ❤
Damn right.
Star By Star's a phenomenal book, easily in my Top 5 NJO Entries. He also did
Tatooine Ghost, which I feel doesn't get a lot of credit or acknowledgement in EU circles, for some reason...I thought it was fantastic.
Yeah, it boils down to Han and Leia trying to hunt down a painting, but the scenes with Leia siphoning through Shmi Skywalker's journal, the scenes where she and Han uncover Anakin's childhood and his adult trek to rescue Shmi from the Sand People...that's the exactly the kind of creative opportunities to seize as more aspects of Star Wars become clear with the more films that are released, and Denning did.
He did something similar with the Skywalkers learning about Anakin's downfall in
Dark Nest, which was also great.
Having also read most of Traviss's EU books, I don't think that that's really a fair comparison. She definitely loves the Mandalorians and dislikes the (Prequel) Jedi, but there's quite a quantum leap from "particularly likes one aspect and particularly dislikes one aspect" to "actively hates SW and everything that it represents" as seems to be the case with Kennedy. Also, it's not as though EU authors favoring a particular character or faction was unknown prior to Traviss's induction into the writers' circle, as can be seen with Zahn and Thrawn/the Chiss, Michael Stackpole and Corran Horn/Rogue Squadron, John Ostrander and Quinlan Vos, or what have you.
This is a response to someone else's post, but I'm in full agreement here. I hear incessantly how Traviss likes to use her books as some kind of soapbox against the Jedi, when that doesn't seem to match the reality of the books themselves, at least the one I've read. You don't have chapters where a character is lecturing Luke Skywalker on why the Jedi are shit and don't work morally in a free society, functioning as a modern Marvel Comics-esque microphone to voice her stance without a shred of subtlety or nuance. The only intensely scathing perspective on the Jedi has either come from Jacen Solo (who's been highly critical of the Jedi Order's practices since NJO, with
Dark Nest and LOTF essentially building off of his Rogue Jedi status and beliefs...to make him evil), and the Manalorians...you know, the
exact people who would have an incredibly slanted and biased view against the Jedi. Boba Fett at one point calls the Jedi "pompous aristocrats who won the genetic lottery"...
of course a group of non-Force sensitives who prioritize honor through combat would have that kind of bias against the Jedi, especially when they take moral stances in society. And at no point does the story, or the other non-Mandalorian characters, validate or lionize them for having that perspective. If it did, I would've spent fourteen pages complaining about it in my summary, because of the inexplicable anti-Jedi boner waved about by the horde
horde of post-modern hipster twats that have poured into the fandom by way of the new movies, I've become increasingly fed up with everyone from fans to authors blaming the Jedi Order for every stray fart of misfortune in galactic history, attributing flaws and moral hypocrisies to them that Lucas never intended or advocated for. It's just as insufferable of every third asshole screeching about the Jedi being 'pacifists' or some shit.
And I'd also point out that last bit about you mentioned about authors favoring certain factions in their story...I'd like to voice my loud agreement with this, specifcally in regards to Timothy Zahn. I've refrained from bringing this up to avoid heat from other lorespergs, but this guy and his fucking boner for Thrawn and this Chiss has gotten ridiculous, especially in his new
Thrawn books. He literally retconned 'Skywalker' to mean 'wayfinder' in the Chiss language. It's such an eye-rolling attempt to elevate the importance of the Chiss in the Star Wars galaxy, which is already doubly annoying thanks to Zahn making Thrawn an infallible super-genius in the Nu-Canon who can outsmart everyone and everything, and is fifteen lightyears ahead of the known villains like Vader and Palpatine.
He's a cowboy hat and a pudgy smirk away from being the Filoni of the Nu-Canon books, with his exhaustive "pet character" antics, and he'll probably crank it to 10 with his new
Thrawn Ascendency novels.
