- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
It's been literally three years since I read Vector Prime, but I vaguely remember Leia already starting the book on a sour note by feeling a twinge of jealousy at how close Mara and Jaina are, due to the former training the latter and developing a seemingly closer mother-daughter relationship, as opposed to Leia and her daughter's constant feuding. I don't know if maybe her disposition with Wurth Skidder is just another casualty of that bad mood or what, but I'm not about to declare anything definitive. Even if that were true, though, it's not really in-character for Leia to lose her cool and act unprofessional, especially in a position of military authority...not when she commanded cells of the Rebel Alliance for 15 years. So, yeah...I'm confused too.
I will say, though, I did like how a major theme throughout a lot of NJO is Leia and her daughter butting heads. That felt realistic to me, not just because the Bantam books go out of their way to show that Jaina's more of a Daddy's Girl, and also
when you consider how much personal upbringing time Leia had missed by having Jaina separated with Winter for protection against various Imperial Threats as a little girl. That would've created some distance between them. But then NJO takes some time to let their mother-daughter relationship flourish some more as the war becomes grimmer, and culminates in a really sweet moment in Balance Point.
The Solo Family moments, bitter and heartwarming, were always a highlight of NJO, at least to me.
It's not a bitter reminder if you never watched Ep. 8 and 9, which I didn't. Whenever I hear or read the phrase Jedi Master Luke or Luke's Jedi Order, ^that image is what springs to my mind. I never witness a poorly-handled, wildly-out-of-character Jake Skywalker in any tangible medium, so that version will never be imprinted on my mental image of him.
Feels fucking great.
This is an interesting criticism about the Yuuzhan Vong that I've never encountered before. What exactly do you mean when you say the books too long to flesh them out? Do you mean their culture or hierarchy took too long to establish, or the explanation for why they were immune to the Force?
Because I was under the impression that their immunity was intended to be the ultimate mystery that NJO was built on as a story arc, the reason for the Jedi to question themselves and for Jacen Solo's journey of self-reflection.
100% legitimate criticism. I personally like how unstoppable and threatening the Vong were characterized, but even I thought the books went a little overboard in plenty of respects. It also threw the logistics into flux, considering they'd be unstoppable in one book and owned like fucking losers another book---yeah, you could argue that unorthodox and out-of-the-box tactics on behalf of people like Kyp Durron and Lando Calarissian can be attributed to those spikes of success, but it would often make the supposed incomprehensible technology and methods of the Vong feel too quickly undermined for the sake of plot convenience.
Out of curiosity, whose death felt unneeded or forced? Chewbacca's almost always the one everyone picks, for some reason, so it'd be real fucking refreshing to hear someone else's.
The only area where we really part ways is Coruscant. That to me felt like one of the moments where the authors were driving home how this conflict wasn't just another throwaway incident like the Black Fleet Crisis or the various other monster-of-the-week Imperial incidents from the Bantam Era. I think the authors were making a profound effort to characterize the Yuuzhan Vong Crusade as the next great war of the galaxy, the next conflict to follow the Clone Wars and the Galactic Civil War. Sure, it was emotionally rattling and bleak to watch Coruscant fall to such a miserable state, but almost Battlestar Galactica level of despair, of "no hope"....I hadn't seen that in Star Wars before, not even at the end of Revenge Of The Sith. The stakes have never been higher. When you have such a massive plunge in morale among the main characters at the sight of their ravaged homeworld, with the streets of Coruscant lined with the impaled, mutilated corpses of innocent civilians, you realize that the characters aren't facing the usual threat of conquest or dictatorship...they're staring their extinction dead in the face, in all of its cold, unrelenting terror. Things like watching Coruscant fall, and the fact that the galaxy's still recovering from it 11 years later, really made the Vong Invasion feel like it had weight and consequence. The fact that the characters are so desperate to prevent something like that happening ever again as late as LOTF is proof of that.
However, I say all of this as someone who's a sucker for misery porn in their storytelling is something I revel in because I feel pushing characters to the fringes of hopelessness makes their ultimate victory so much more satisfying. In fact, I'm enjoying the Berserk-levels of crippling depression in LOTF for the exact same reason. I guess that maybe way so much of the post-Bantam EU resonates with me where it doesn't with so many other people.
Well, that, and because I don't have Karen Traviss and Troy Denning at the top of my shitlist.
