"Filoni is better than JarJar, Ruin, or any of the current Disney writers, and is about at Traviss level since he lacks a mando fetish."
There, I have now made every post you have or will make on this topic.
Basically, yes. As I've said before, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Filoni's childish attempts to explain away Order 66 with a brain chip aside, his writing is mostly kid-friendly stuff punctuated with the odd flash of violence, but compared to the Sequel writers and Karen Traviss, he's fresh air.
Still nowhere near James Luceno or Tom Veitch's level, let alone Drew Karpyshyn, but I'll take what I can get.
Cad Bane is not that great. However, as an anti-hero who's goals sometimes run counter, but not directly counter, to Team Orange Jailbait and as a bounty hunter has a baked-in reason to fight the main cast but leave them alive if he wins - he is allowed to exhibit moments of competency boarding on average intelligence. This makes him their greatest threat faced in TCW besides the main cast's own personality flaws.
People forget the fact that he used to get captured more than once in the past like the average Scooby-Doo villain. Both the Jedi Holocron/Children arc and the Undercover Kenobi arc ended with him being hauled away like some bad guy from some typical 90s cartoon show.
But, if he's up against Not!Boss, he might as well be damn near unbeatable. Especially since the Bad Batch got nerfed horribly after Crosshair walked away.
And yet he repeatedly demonstrates his lack of understanding of it, or utilization of it beyond a pure surface level. Best possible scenario, you have his attempts to bring in Revan or Delta Squad or the Black Sun for a meaningless cameo, something he routinely does even now with Blando and Bad Batch. He does fuck all with them in terms of narrative importance or referencing any wider aspects of the lore they originate from.
Worst case scenario, you have what he did with Thrawn: take a cold-blooded and calculating tactician and make him a weekly Skeletor villain with the efficiency of an inept Imperial Deck Officer, who's also burying a murderous angry rage that he has to obstruct with mountains of composure. All things that do not resemble the Thrawn of the actual books, both EU and canon.
A "fan of aspects" is putting his relation with the EU quite generously. He knows fuck all about the EU, and only incorporates it at a shallow, surface level, when he isn't dicking it over to satisfy whatever narrative compulsions he has with his Orange Jailbait and space wolves.
That's the point. He only knows about the parts of the EU that he likes. The rest, he couldn't give less of a shit about. What we do know is that he likes KOTOR and Republic Commando, but the rest, he couldn't care less about.
Most of the EU fans have actually read the material that they're open to changing. And every interview with Filoni suggests his only experience with the EU is purely on a surface level.
Whenever he's actively questioned about the EU, he almost never goes into the specifics
You're going to be very disappointed by this, but not every fan of something from the EU reads everything about the EU and likes the whole thing. Some people like some parts of it, others like only a few things while dismissing the rest as drivel. Some even barely know a thing about other parts of the EU that they're not fans of.
The Mando-fans for instance will love everything Karen Traviss writes, as well as any piece of EU fiction that centers around non-Jedi defeating the Jedi, or stuff that's critical about the Jedi. But show them a part of the Expanded Universe that portrays the Jedi as being good at their jobs, or worse, a piece of the EU where Force powers are way too much for muggles to handle, and they complain that it's a "Jedi Power Fantasy" that doesn't line up with what the movies do. If you give them the reins to a Star Wars show, they will retcon the more parts of Star Wars where you have OP Jedi and Sith, and they will rewrite the Jedi to be selfish assholes easily taken down by Mandalorians and Bounty Hunters, even though the default characterization of the Jedi are self-sacrificing lemmings, and a Mando or Bounty Hunter who can fight, let alone kill Jedi, is very rare.
I know a good number of KOTOR/SWTOR fans who only like THAT particular part of the Expanded Universe and think the rest is not worth their time, or that the rest of it is a mess. When I talk to SWTOR/KOTOR fans on occasion, and try to talk to them about other parts of the EU, some of them don't even know what I'm talking about, or barely even care.
And even I'm guilty of it. My own version of SW Legends canon has a big, black void in between the end of the Vong Wars and Star Wars Legends. I refuse to see Legacy of the Force as anything but Luke Skywalker having a bad dream before he wakes up and has another session of Force Mind Meld Sex with Mara Jade. As bad as TCW is, it still got the gist of Lucas' moral tint for Star Wars right, as opposed to turning things into a 40K-esque "both sides are assholes" bullshit that was better done in Lucas' Prequels. And I'm not alone in this-most EU fans who have followed the adventures of characters like Jacen Solo and Mara Jade despise LOTF and swore off reading SW novels after that series came out.
Except Hayen Blackman and the writers of The Force Unleashed (which Lucas had only a cursory involvement with, btw) changed the EU in service of telling an actual story. They didn't bulldoze over existing material just to have a meaningless cameo, or rearrange characters to service some weekly cartoon formula a la Thrawn in Rebels. Force Unleashed existed mostly to bridge the gap between Ep. III and IV, something that was made a conscious goal behind every aspect of development: from the aesthetics shifting across the game, to the levels visited by the player (and how they evolve with more Imperial influence), as well as establishing the gathering and roles of various key members of the Rebellion.
I'm far from a fan of The Force Unleashed, but I will happily concede that the team involved had a wider narrative purpose behind all of the EU retconning and rearrangement of lore elements. They had a story to tell, and actual narrative intentions. Filoni just threw in Delta Squad and the Black Sun because he needed cameo fodder, and included Thrawn because he'd already exhausted Tarkin and Vader as villains to knock around in his retarded Saturday morning cartoon routine.
Yoda was thrown in Force Unleashed II for the sake of fanservice cameo, and Shaak Ti barely played a role outside of being another Jedi boss for Starkiller to kill. Boba Fett was also thrown in Force Unleashed II for the sake of a cameo, and the comic actually had to expand his role in it. Both the Filoniverse and Force Unleashed followed the formula of "once it's successful, let's cram as much cameos as we can." Mandalorian Season 1 and the Force Unleashed mostly worked with its original characters, then the second season of the Mandalorian as well as the second Force Unleashed game began bringing in more OT character cameos for fanservice. The only difference is, the Filoniverse is succeeding where TFU failed, so they're going to do more cameos left and right to get the normies wet.
And of course, Filoni's doing cameos because that's what the fans want. Sad to say this, but yes, a lot of fans do like it when Ahsoka or Thrawn or some other cameo character is shoved in. Just look at what happened when Cad Bane sauntered on the Bad Batch show. He was supposed to be DEAD, and yet almost none of the fans condemn the choice to retcon those unfinished Boba Fett episodes and bring him back, instead, they're getting wet. They also get wet whenever Rex, Ahsoka, or Thrawn waltzes in on the scene in Rebels or get mentioned in the Mandalorian, so again, outside of Filoni's desire to make his characters into the equals of Han, Luke, and Leia, (or maybe even to make his characters surpass those old heroes) it's pure fanservice to bring those characters in.
Filoni sticking his OCs everywhere is the Star Wars equivalent of anime shows sticking in sexy girls with big anime tits and butts to drawn in more fans. The authors like it, and the fans like it. If you think Filoni putting his OCs in on everything is excessive now, wait until Disney makes a dozen more shows based on such cameos. The Sequels were a bust for them, but based on how normies react to cameos on Dave Filoni shows, they've found their Star Wars gold mine, and they're going to milk it dry.
Oh, and funny thing about Lucas and The Force Unleashed...evidently, he no longer saw it as part of his vision or a project he was proud of, as by the time Red Fly Studios were developing their Darth Maul game, they were instructed never to bring up Force Unleashed or Starkiller to George when speaking to him.
Not exactly the behavior associated with someone proud of how the game turned out.
Lucas is a contrarian. One moment, he gives personal thanks to the guy who wrote Dark Empire and gives it his thumbs-up, the next, he says that ROTJ was the be-all, end-all for the Sith and that Palpatine didn't come back. He originally wrote in favor of the EU, saying that it was a wonderful legacy of the franchise and that his movies were just a tiny glimpse into the SW universe, then he turns around and says that the movies are the final word on everything Star Wars, damn everything else.
But what matters is that he and his crew, Haden Blackman included, MADE that change. And to be fair, I agree with you, it was a change with a good narrative behind it, and I actually prefer it as an origin story to the Rebel Alliance over Tarkin just landing a ship over some random yahoos.
But that was barely the only change. As I said, they retconned a lot of things from the old EU, from Boba Fett's backstory to which side the clones were in the Clone Wars.
I've already conceded both Lucas and his daughter's role in altering the EU. I was mainly contesting the notion that Filoni is some fan of the EU...which he's not. He's a poser including cameos for brownie points and wrecklessly bulldozing over canon he didn't make...some thing he still does, even now, with Bad Batch (which I noticed you've conveniently danced around in your ceaseless attempts to defend Filoni no matter what). You used the literal words "EU fanboy" to describe Filoni, and now you've backpedaled to claiming that he's a "fan of aspects of the EU".
As I said, he's a fan of some things from the EU, he doesn't like the whole thing. Which is actually, rather average for many EU fans. KOTOR fans, Mando fans, and old school fans are typically just fans of one part of the SWEU, until the internet culture became mainstream and people began reading up on large swathes of the EU online. And even then, I run across fans of EU works that don't know the rest of the EU outside of their forte. My position as a Sith/Empire fan made me more eager to consume EU material outside of one area or niche, since the Sith and the Empire are damn near everywhere, from the Old Republic era to the Legacy Era, but I've met many people who fanboy over some books or games........and completely ignore the rest of the EU or sometimes even say that Disney was right to kibosh the whole thing.
It seems to me like it's far easier for you to lay the blame on other people than admit when Filoni makes an autistic choice that, at the hands of any other creator at Disney/LFL, would be rightfully lambasted as the narrative impulses of a hack.
You can always do the easy thing and just admit that you're so desperate to justify your enjoyment of TCW by acting as a human body shield to deflect any criticism flung Filoni's way. You'd come off as far more intellectually honest if you did.
Er, no. Filoni is just indulging himself by putting his OCs everywhere, sure, but that's what many fans of TCW and the more recent SW media would like. They've been wanting this for a long while-more episodes with characters they grew up liking. It's a gold mine for Disney, and every time one of Filoni's OCs show up, be it Bo-Katan, Cad Bane, or Ahsoka Tano, people flip and lose their shit. Which means more money for Disney.
And yes, I enjoy TCW. Granted, I don't see everything in it as canon, especially the chip stuff, but it's a good way to kill an afternoon. And I'm not saying that Filoni shouldn't be criticized-I just don't see him as the heir of Satan the way you people talk about him. He's a guy who works on kids' cartoons, and he has a very childish way of looking at things, but given the current audience of Star Wars now, that's probably more profitable for Disney to put someone with a kid's mind in charge. Especially since they do profit whenever his OCs show up. That, and he's hardly the only one retconning EU materials, since even Lucas and other authors partook of such a sport. It's just that, with the success of Filoniverse works, Filoni is going to have a free hand to retcon whatever he wants, because it does bring the normies in and it does make the profit margins flow.
