This will probably put me in the minority on this sub, but when it comes to TCW Arcs, my favorite was the whole Asajj's Return To Dathomir/Resurrection Of Darth Maul Arc, all through his duel with Sidious. It's blind, reckless fan-service that's justified on very thin narrative excuses, not many of which are well-written or well thought-out. But I still enjoyed it tremendously, and I liked the relentless characterization of Maul and the brutal relationship with his brother Savage, as well as their confrontations with the likes of Obi-Wan.
Weakest would be all of the initial Death Watch stuff, mostly because I fucking hate Satine, and think she's a poor substitute for Obi-Wan's
real love interest, Siri Tachi. Thankfully, the
Kenobi novel from 2014 reconciles both so that TCW and
Jedi Apprentice can co-exist, which I definitely appreciate.
Oh, believe me, I'm aware. I've heard nothing but anger and vitriol against LOTF online, and I can definitely sympathize with people who were turned off by the story.
I don't agree, and I think many of the reasons people cite for it being bad are either unfounded or based on justifications that aren't supported by either LOTF or its preceding arcs, but that's another matter.
Certainly, but remember that most of the galactic inhabitants have witnessed the cost of standing by and doing nothing in the wake of tyrannical behavior. Many of the people participating in the LOTF conflict are veterans of the Rebel Alliance--they above all others embody the unwillingness to stand idly by while a totalitarian threat begins to bubble and froth within their midst.
Of course they think that full-scale war should be averted, but not at the expense of not fighting to do the right thing against governmental practices that ring too familiar of Imperial totalitarianism. That kind of mentality is how you get shit like a brainless Mon Mothma in Nu-Canon deciding to completely de-militarize in a stupid fucking attempt to eliminate all future conflicts. It's retarded and out-of-character. You know what isn't? A former Rebel like Wedge Antilles growing disenfranchised with a Galactic Alliance that seems unwilling to compromise and more than willing to throw its militant weight around, before he and his fellow Corellians decide to fight back. Same goes for people on the GFFA side, who see the Corellian Antics as a needless and stupid interruption of the relative peace the galaxy has enjoyed since end of the Vong War. I don't think anyone fought against the Yuuzhan Vong just to see their freedoms or safety threatened by tyrannical Coruscanti/upstart Corellians. People tend to take arms against each other beyond just exterminating foreign menaces, they also clash when it comes to values that can threaten peacetime...which can really escalate when neither side is willing to compromise as a result of paranoia of the other.
Almost like
another war fought in real life for very similar reasons, which LOTF references and creates allegories for on a near-regular basis.
Maybe if the warmongers were Sith or Yuuzhan Vong or Imperial Remnant terrorist madmen. But they're not---they're allies, comrades, in many cases, family. This isn't a dispute between a squabble of politicians on each side. The kind of civil unrest brought about by both sides' lack of compromise and overcompensation in the face of each other drags
everyone on Corellia and Coruscant into the fray.
People like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo certainly don't want to wage a war with each other, but will be compelled to if their principles are being challenged and their respective homeworlds are threatened. With the numbers on both sides, it's a bigger surprise that a larger conflict on the scale of what we've seen before hasn't broken out already.
A lot of that has to do with Coruscant, and their frightening measures to keep the conflict contained between themselves and Corellia. Again, we aren't dealing with a conflict on the scale of what came before. It's a smaller one by design, because the respective sides are bending over backwards to keep it from spilling to the wider galaxy. It's exactly what the Killik Crisis was in terms of size and factions involved, and in terms of threatening to plunge the rest of the galaxy into the same war.
But it hasn't, and judging by the conflict being wrapped up in a year (same length as the Killik Crisis), I doubt it'll reach very far by the end of my reading.
I read much of it as paranoia of another war starting, not fatigue. And I'm absolutely certain you would find people on both sides who would be motivated to fight a Last Stand Conflict just to make their efforts during the previous war worth it. After all, what would be the point of defeating the Vong and sacrificing trillions of lives, if the resulting peace is just another dictatorship under a new Empire?
Fending off a foreign enemy means nothing if you have totalitarianism waiting for you back on the homefront, ready to spill over into your home and steal your family and friends away. Not to mention that many Corellians are being wrongfully rounded up and even executed back on Coruscant by the Galactic Alliance Guard, treated as a collective hostile threat.
I don't think it is irrational to expect the Corellians, the planet that spawns hot-headed pilots and stalwart fleet heroes, to gladly fight a war to live peacefully in the society they pushed the Vong off of to liberate.
From my readings, it seems like Corellia already had a bone to pick with the New Republic after their rights as a planetary entity were essentially shafted in the aftermath of ROTJ, largely ignored so that Coruscant and the other Core Worlds could get their shit in order. This is what leads to the fiasco in the Corellian Trilogy of novels, because the boiling resentment from the Corellians for the NR's perceived abandonment of them is what allows opportunists like Thrackan Sal-Solo to take over. The issue you deal with is that Thrackan-Sal and the angry, militant sentiments he raised within the Corellian populace aren't really resolved after the Corellian Trilogy ends. It's sort of left open, like a quite a few of the monster-of-the-week threats that characterized the Bantam Era of publishing. I don't find it wholly unrealistic that someone as opportunistic as Thrackan-Sal would seize an instance where the galaxy is freshly-healed and paranoid of any threats that could instigate a new war, and use it to his advantage.
He tried once already during NJO, but the ensuing war around them and Anakin Solo cutting off access to Centerpoint Station rendered those plans useless.
So, yeah...25,000 uninterrupted years of Coruscant and Corellia skipping through the daisies with each other? Maybe
before the post-Endor period, but not after. There's a history of tension between the two thanks to Thrackan-Sal and in spite of the efforts of Luke & Co. to heal things between them.
What happens in LOTF isn't at all unprecedented, and is in fact logical considering who's doing the pushing. And it's not like the Corellians or the GFFA are being painted as reasonable in the conflict: they're
both digging their heels in the ground, and are living up to the ugly accusations leveled at them.
Well, for one thing, you have petty upstarts already filling the Corellian and Coruscanti ranks. LOTF
Betrayal shows youths on both sides who dismiss the input of actual veterans of the previous wars--mostly because they themselves were too young to have fought in them--in blind commitment to their causes. We see this with the soldier Wedge encounters in that book, as well as the young boys Ben Skywalker encounter in
Bloodlines. So there's no shortage of the demographic you're clamoring for. More to the point, though, I think the memory of the Empire or the Vong being fresh in the memories of the veterans makes perfect sense as a launch point for paranoia of a domestic threat in the form of Corellia or Coruscant. Not to borrow yet another American Civil War analogy, but a reason why so many Generals on both sides were compelled to fight was because most of them had seen the horrors of war fought in Mexico or Indian Territory, and wanted to keep that shit far away from their homes and family. The primary motivation of most of the loudest members of each respective planetary cause in LOTF is to protect their homeworlds and loved ones from an opposing neighbor who won't back down, and is threatening to drag the whole galaxy to war. And this sense of obligation to one's home and family--to the point of feverish delusion and unwillingness to compromise--is much of what fueled the American Civil War on both sides as well; people buying into the infectious patriotism and demonizing of the enemy faction only to race off to war, and regret it immediately...something that's already starting to happen in LOTF.
I also don't think it would take fifty years for the detrimental effects of Vergere's teachings on Jacen to fully manifest. He's characterized as far too certain of his own wisdom and prowess to reach the humility of an aged master...and the warning signs have already manifested thanks to
Dark Nest. It would be fucking farcical for Jacen to start exhibiting extreme Force-wielder tendencies bordering on callous during
Dark Nest, and then just have that side of his character go nowhere for fifty years, only to materialize in his 70's or some shit. That wouldn't make a lick of sense, and only raise questions as to why in all that time, nothing ever came of his developments during
Dark Nest.
Unless you're someone who believes Jacen going Dark to begin with is implausible, a sentiment I've already voiced my contention with several times on this thread, seeing as I have yet to hear a good argument for it.
What, and skip thirty years of growth and family interaction for Ben Skywalker and his parents, as well as the experiences that led him to choosing the "path of least violence" mentality in the first place?
I don't mean to come off as facetious, but I'll take a hard pass on that in favor of what we got. I much prefer Ben being stuck under Jacen's influence, and struggling with his own instincts and agency that his parents are trying to make him realize. That's a journey I actually want to see...not a pay-off whose journey is completely denied to me as a reader.
Again, everything in the bolded reeks suspiciously of the kind of nonsensical idealism and implausibility we see in the Nu-Canon with the New Republic disarming and clambering desperately for a "ban war" solution of the most absurd kind.
Just because the Vong are defeated and the Imperial Remnant are "our friends now" doesn't mean all the old wounds from previous, disenfranchised worlds have been healed.
Dark Nest and LOTF explore examples of that, but the latter doing it infinitely better than the former, and actually dealing with the long-term effects of NJO.
More importantly, a huge theme of LOTF is the family drama that spawns from divisions of principle and homeworld loyalty. I think having that split between the OT Heroes and their offsprings holds more emotional weight and narrative potential than just older versions of Jacen, Jaina and Ben slapfighting with each other. Sure, LOTF has that, but it has the clashing with the older generation as well, which is the root of what makes half of the character interactions in LOTF so compelling. It's where Ben and Jacen are diverging from the morals of their respective families that give the story half of its emotional weight, and usher in some of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the series. We've seen this family grow together and endure hardship together...I don't think you could achieve the same effect by hard-cutting to some distant future with the Solo/Skywalker children feuding as geezers with decades of emotional experience we haven't witnessed as readers.
In fact, that just resembles the ST even more, considering how much of the hollow and stale "family drama" is reliant on off-screen years of family development we haven't seen, and are only told about.
I appreciate you hiding most of this under the spoiler tag, but with a brief glossing over, I can see it's mostly the plot beats that I hear constant complaining about everywhere LOTF is mentioned online, so most of these I'm already aware of. I can't comment on them, of course, but I still have to see if their execution and handling in the actual story warrants the anger directed at them.
Because on premise alone, I don't have a problem with any of the plot points you've highlighted, so long as they're well-executed and given the same care/reverence as every other major plot aspect of LOTF. And I'll say that one of them, being Jacen's Dark Side Descent, is not only the highlight of LOTF by my estimate, but something that was extremely well-justified in the story and phenomenally executed, for reasons I feel a lot of people who hate LOTF either don't consider or ignore completely.
Mara's death and Jaina's tutelage under the Mando's are another matter which I'll have to observe in context to properly assess.
I'm not going to read ahead, but I'm more curious as to what forgiveness or absolving the GFFA seeks for its actions as well. This wasn't just an instance of Corellia going haywire...the GFFA played a role in stoking the flames of conflict with controversial actions of their own.
As for what you're stating, I'll have to see in FOTJ if the galaxy really does take this whole incident lying down, with zero consequences. I know Jacen's actions certainly aren't steamrolled into nonchalant insignificance. From what I hear, his actions and his contributions to the conflict are referenced constantly throughout FOTJ, so it being an inconsequential footnote in the way that
Dark Nest was seems unlikely.
Glimpsing at the reasons you've provided, I can say that I not only vehemently disagree with this, but also that I don't find any compelling evidence in what you've written to feel this way, either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you how to feel---I just find that the reasons you've cited for its "unimportance" to be not supported by anything in the pages of LOTF itself.
If LOTF was a passing footnote in galactic history, a filler jaunt in the vein of
Dark Nest happens or affects the characters to any large degree
, I would emphatically agree with you. But LOTF does too much with the core cast, especially the Solo Children---the chief narrative ornaments for the EU for over two decades---and the strain on their family relations and ideals to be considered a small event of little consequence. And in my opinion, it's all well-earned and handled with exceptional nuance in the confines of the premise the authors have created.
This of course, is all pointless squabbling on my part, because regardless of any reservations you or I have with LOTF, we can agree on two things: it at least
led somewhere desirable in terms of narrative nuance in the form of the Legacy comics, and for whatever flaws it may possess, it's heads and shoulders above Disney's efforts to attempt a similar premise in their terrible ST films.
And who knows? I still have 6 more books and all of FOTJ to get through, so I could easily come back to this thread in full agreement of everything you've said. We'll have to wait and see.
