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I wonder what the likeness deals they have with the main actors are like now? Do they only own what they looked like during the OT and ST, or do they have the time in between as well now? Deepfake Luke has in Mando and BOBF is close enough to OT Luke and Hamill is involved so it’s not really an issue.
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Dec 5, 2022 22:26
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For Luke at least they have the flashbacks in The Last Jedi to use as a guide, which some of the inter-trilogy stuff like Shadow of the Sith and The Rise of Kylo Ren have taken advantage of: Leia was also briefly featured in that comic, and although this scene takes place around the same time as the Bloodlines novel (which used photos of Carrie Fisher from Episode 7), they seem to be illustrating her based on Original Trilogy Leia and adding some lines to her face:  Han hasn't really been featured in many stories set far enough between the trilogies to have a lot of images of him during that time yet, but there is this one from a story set 10 years before Episode 7, which looks like they put his Episode 7 hair onto an Original Trilogy face. At the very least, they're not pulling stills from Hollywood Homicide or anything.  Overall, I'm not sure they would necessarily want to use photos of the actors from between the trilogies. Harrison Ford has stayed camera-ready for decades, but the diet and exercise regimes that Disney made Hamill and Fisher go on suggests that they were unhappy with how those two had aged. Ghostbusters Afterlife had a similar problem, where the they mostly just added liver spots and wrinkles to a CGI model of 1984 Harold Ramis rather than accurately representing what he actually looked like as an older man.
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Dec 6, 2022 08:18
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There’s also the issue that the OT actors are basically playing characters that should be around 10 years younger than what they actually are. Hamill at 63 was playing a character of 53.
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Dec 6, 2022 15:49
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Harrison Ford in Indy 5 proving you can play someone 25 years younger than they are. Well, maybe "prove" is too strong a word. An attempt is made.
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Dec 6, 2022 16:14
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We’ll see how well that works in motion. I saw the fight scene from The Irishman and it sets a low low bar.
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Dec 6, 2022 16:15
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Casimir Radon posted:We’ll see how well that works in motion. I saw the fight scene from The Irishman and it sets a low low bar. Yeah, both the Irishman and Captain Marvel proved one major limitation of the de-aging technology is that these old guys still have to be the ones running around. I remember both Robert De Niro and Sam Jackson, in both those respective movies, looked great standing still. But the moment they had to run or fight, it was clear they were old guys with young face masks on. I don't know how you get beyond that, other than putting the young face mask on a different actor, which probably makes the de-aging look worse, since you're doing something totally different then.
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Dec 6, 2022 16:35
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ninjahedgehog posted:My one annoyance with the 90s EU covers is that they only had the rights to Mark Hamill etc.'s appearances as of 1983, so they weren't allowed to age them up or even alter their outfits too much even if the book took place decades after RotJ. It's pretty lol, but kinda heartwarming, that Leia still wears the dress the Ewoks made her 30+ years later I think this also extended to the video games so like 19 years after Jedi you still have Luke looking like he did at the end of Jedi giving out orders to Kyle Katarn (who by dint of being an EU character was allowed to change) and the rest of the Jedi Academy.
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Dec 6, 2022 16:38
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thrawn527 posted:I don't know how you get beyond that, other than putting the young face mask on a different actor, which probably makes the de-aging look worse, since you're doing something totally different then. They're fairly similar, but the methodology is different. Putting an actor's face on a stunt double's body has been pretty common for at least two decades, and usually involves making a 3D Model of the actor's head that's lit and rendered like any other CG asset. This is what they did in Rogue One, The Irishman, and Luke in The Mandalorian. The second method, which is a bit more more recent, is more of a 2D thing. There's still some 3D tracking going on, but rather than rendering a model, it involves painting detail onto the 2D image, sort of like clone stamping from one person's face onto another. Lola is the company that does the vast majority of this work, and they've done all of Marvel's de-aging going all the way back to X-Men 3. Not all of Lola's work is so extreme, though. If you ever see them listed in the credits of a movie, most likely what they did was digital touchups to the actors. Some actors even have contracts that specifically require movies to hire the studio to give them digital plastic surgery on every movie. The third method, which is super new, is deepfakes. They used this method on Luke in The Book of Boba Fett, and maybe Indiana Jones (some places have mentioned Lucasfilm creating software to scan archival footage of Ford from the other movies, which sounds deepfakey). Which method is best largely depends on which situation it's being used for, though I could see deepfakes quickly taking over once the technology is more established and there are more people trained in it. The big problem with deepfakes is that there's no humanity behind it. A computer can match and replicate face shapes, but it doesn't know what emotion is associated with those shapes. While 3D rendering can look pretty janky sometimes, and the Lola solution is only really applicable in specific situations, both of those still require a human artist to interpret the emotion of the actor's performance and help translate it to the final image. Respeecher, which they used for Luke's voice in the Disney+ shows, has some of the same limitations. I've played around with it a little bit, and while it's great at mimicking the baseline speech sound of another person, it can't handle nuance and intent. For example, if you used it to replicate Mark Hamill's voice it would give you Mark Hamill's normal speaking voice, but if you tried to imitate Mark Hamill's performance as the Joker, it would still give you Mark Hamill's normal speaking voice.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:20
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Robot Style posted:They're fairly similar, but the methodology is different. Putting an actor's face on a stunt double's body has been pretty common for at least two decades, and usually involves making a 3D Model of the actor's head that's lit and rendered like any other CG asset. This is what they did in Rogue One, The Irishman, and Luke in The Mandalorian. This whole post is excellent, and thank you for it, but are you saying that they used a different actor the body for Robert De Niro's young scenes in The Irishman? I had heard otherwise, and if so, then I don't understand why the young actor moved like old man De Niro.
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Dec 6, 2022 22:15
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The body was DeNiro, but the head they used was a 3D model of his younger self.
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Dec 7, 2022 02:45
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Robot Style posted:The body was DeNiro, but the head they used was a 3D model of his younger self. Oh, I was confused because you said "putting an actor's face on a stunt double's body". I guess in this case De Niro was also the stunt double.
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Dec 7, 2022 15:40
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So some of you may know that my life has undergone some radical shakeups since I started posting here on SA. In the last year and change in particular I got a divorce, transed my gender, and started dating people I actually enjoy spending lots of time with. Which means I had a giant pile of books on my bedside table I was falling behind on. Gone are the days of reading a new SW book the same day Amazon drops it off. I'm lucky if I even get around to starting it in the same fiscal quarter. But lately the pendulm of free time activities has swung and got me back into reading books, and hey there's this big pile of Star Wars ones right there for me! So, in no particular order at all, here are some thoughts about recent-ish star wars book releases! Padawan - Young Obi-Wan is an interesting POV character for a book. Obi-Wan has always been depicted as fairly confident and competent, so it takes a certain degree of care to write a young and extra-fallible version of the character that doesn't feel either out of character or cartoonishly overdone. Padawan succeeds for the most part on this front, but I'm a bit mixed on the book as a whole. This is another one of those "let's do a concept that Legends did, but in a slightly different format" type things -- like Wedge leading Phantom Squadron in Canon versus Wraith Squadron in Legends. We've already GOT books about Obi-Wan's tumultuous early days with Qui-Gon, in the form of the 20 book Jedi Apprentice series from the early 00s. This version gets to be more connected to the story as a whole, and mention people like Dooku, by virtue of not being written before AotC and Clone Wars and such, but everything is being done in a single volume (and aimed at a slightly older age bracket) than those old Scholastic books. However...the bones of "Obi-Wan finds a community of kids around his own age that give him a compelling reason to want to leave the Jedi order, including some early-pubescent crushes" is lifted DIRECTLY from a pair of Jedi Apprentic books -- things are different enough that it doesn't feel like a complete rehash, but similar enough that I feel like somewhere in the process the comparison was noticed and leaned into. Also, the final "reveal" that Qui-Gon literally just overslept and missed Obi-Wan's call feels excessively juvenile. That's a Scooby-Doo revelation right there. On the whole, I didn't dislike this book, its competenetly written, and for someone who doesn't have a bunch of emotional baggage tied up with the Jedi Apprentice series, it'll probably read a little better. I meant this post to include like 3 more books but oops I wrote 2500 characters about Padawan instead. I'll follow this up later today with thoughts on at least Shadow of the Sith and The Princess and the Scoundrel
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Jan 2, 2023 17:04
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I can’t imagine how hard the road has been, but I’m real happy for you, jivjov.
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Jan 2, 2023 17:21
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jivjov posted:Also, the final "reveal" that Qui-Gon literally just overslept and missed Obi-Wan's call feels excessively juvenile. Would you expect anything less from him though? Also congrats on finding yourself, and I hope it all goes well for you!
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Jan 2, 2023 18:20
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Vinylshadow posted:Would you expect anything less from him though? I was honestly more of a fan of Obi-Wan's own supposition that Qui-Gon had gotten waylaid discussing Dooku's decision to leave the Jedi. "Yes, padawan, I was walking the gardens all night speaking with my old master, the Count" plays better to my mind than "I did that thing and then just overslept" -- Obi-Wan even mentions in prose that he left the call open for a minute or two specifically so if Qui-Gon was sleeping, the chime would rouse him. Not a deal breaker by any means, just...its the moment I remembered that the Disney-Lucasfilm Press books are written for tweens and teens. thrawn527 posted:I can’t imagine how hard the road has been, but I’m real happy for you, jivjov. And thank you both for the well-wishes and such!
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Jan 2, 2023 19:20
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The last few years I slowly realized that my passion for Star Wars has kind of passed on. I think the big tipping point was late 2019/early 2020 when there were the few punches of the big EU leadup to TROS being really inconsequential stories that you could tell they weren't really interested in (I dare anyone to try to remember the plot to Force Collector or Allegiance); then TROS itself; then the insulting Rise of Kylo Ren comic; and then the start of the pandemic. Since then, I think the only Star Wars things that have come out I've gotten were the Art of TROS book and Squadrons, and the latter might have been through a Playstation deal. There have been things since that seem interesting, like the entire High Republic series is something that I would have really been into a few years ago, and Shadows of the Sith seems like the kind of new-EU post-ROTJ book I wanted since 2015, but I just can't work up the interest any more. Though I do still watch the live-action TV stuff on Disney+, and even really enjoyed Andor and Mandalorian. Anyway, it does feel a bit sad that Star Wars EU stuff doesn't give me the same kind of enjoyment any more that it had since the 90s, but I still do appreciate having this thread to pop into and chat about the EU and enjoy the memories!
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Jan 2, 2023 20:00
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Yo, who wants some thoughts on Shadow of the Sith? SotS is a book that feels like it was absolutely commissioned with the mandate "Make TRoS make more sense, and feel less hodgepodge and disconnected". We've been seeing a lot of TRoS Apologia lately -- specifically the Darth Vader comic run where Ochi of Bestoon is a sidekick and Vader discovers the Sith Eternal facilities on Exegol. It 100% is Brand Synergy doing some damage control. Gotta say though, SotS doesn't do a half-bad job of it. One flashback sequence alone did more to humanize Lando As A Dad Who Lost His Daughter than everything else surrounding that reveal in TRoS did. Sadly, that story thread has to end on a downer note because it hasn't been resolved by the time TRoS comes around. That's a problem I have with a bunch of this book...I acutally find myself really liking a lot of the setup, only to be disappointed to remember that the resolution isn't coming in a sequel by the same author, but was dealt with in my least favorite of all live action Star Wars projects. Another "wow how did you string these two portrayals together" moment was Ochi of Bestoon himself. There's a cute moment where another Established Character General Pryde, if you're curious makes fun of the 'always introducing himself with "of Bestoon"' thing, and a bit of an actual explanation is given for why an apprently famed bounty hunter/jedi killer ended up falling in a hole and dying. Its...pretty clear that the author struggled with coming up with something to explain that away..but it once again kinda salvages something that's comically bad from Episode IX. Oh, and the magical sith dagger gets some love...i still hate the loving Goonies-rear end reveal of what the dagger is FOR, but i'm not even gonna spoiler this bit cause its really important to derive ANY enjoyment outta that useless relic...the magical dagger is ACTUALLY magic, the runes and the shape and everything is a result of sith blood magic. And while I wish /any of that/ had been featured in the movie this novel is desperately trying to explain....at least there is an explanation here. On the more Meh end of the spectrum....Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master. I'm not sure if there was a mandate from on high or the author just didn't want to impose his will too much on Luke...but Luke feels barely like a character in this one. I could almost see this as intentional -- part of the way Luke was hardly ever addressed in the Between Trilogies gap from 2015 through about 2021...but to pull that off, the book would have needed to have been told entirely in Lando's POV or something. As it stands, Lando gets all these internal thoughts about how Luke seems so different and mystical now...and then we get Luke's POV and he's just kinda....bland and boring. I'd even prefer Legends EU Luke where he's almost a Superman expy over this. There's one chapter at the start of the book and one at the end set on Ossus at his temple, with some interactions with Teen Ben Solo!!! (yea turns out I'm a huge Reylo. Figured that one out before I figured out I was a girl, honestly shocking) that give a bare hint into some characterization but its just so scant. Luke is worried about being a good teacher, and we the audience are in on the joke that he completely fucks it up. But when we don't actually get to see and experience his attempts at running the temple, it honestly ends up feeling a bit bad, that we're seeing this scared man worry about how he's gonna ruin everything when we already know where this ends. I would have rather an entire STORY about his fears than this little coda. Something else I've bene loving about recent Star Wars has been Weird Tech Stuff. I'll have more words about that if I ever do longform High Republic thoughts...but there's an entire setpiece planet in SotS that is undergoing a fatal radiation storm at all times, from the leaking reactor of a crashed and melting down ship. The radiation is harvested and collected by a character who was originally introduced in one of the side chapters in the Aftermath trilogy and is now a main in this book to sell for rare medical and manufacturing purposes. Star Wars tech very often feels more like sleek magic than being like actual technology, so its fun to see something like this depicted in SW. Speaking of side characters from old books...this book also has a goodly handful of other Remember This references. They mostly all land and make sense without being a 'Member Berry harvest...but the density is a bit much. Doofy archeologist Beaumont Kin is around for a bit, Shriv, fan favorite Duro from Battlefront 2, shows up for a sequence dealing with Then we get to the elephant in the room, the entire inciting incident for the book that I've bene dancing around while typing all this up. Rey and her parents. God I hate it. So much. This book only really /exists/ to explain away things like "Why is Ochi's ship on Passana, what was Lando talking about when he said he and Luke were tracking him (sidebar spoiler, toward the end of this novel, Lando gets the mask and armor he's wearing as a disguise on Passana in TRoS, and it turns out he's just spent a decade plus hanging out there on a hunch. He thinks he and Luke missed something (and he's right!!!) but based on the text of this book, he just spends ages in the desert accomplishing nothing until Rey and co stumble into his old mystery.), what the hell did "sold you to protect you" mean? And none of those things get good answers. We get more awful technobabble about Rey's Son-Of-Sheev dad, who we find out is not a direct clone of ol palpy, but a genettically engineered body that was grown to hopefully house the Emperor's spirit, we get weird lip service to how he escaped exegol and started a family...but it all feels vageuly embarassing, like the author was told to answer those questions in prose, but personally had no investment in what the answers ended up being. I'm once again angry on Rian Johnson's behalf that his choice to make Rey the child of nobody in particular got so sloppily retconned after the fact. Imagine if Yoda told Luke in Return of the Jedi "yeah, Vader was lying through his teeth, he's not actually your dad". A character lying or being mistaken isn't ACTUALLY a retcon, but when the emotional context of the scene gets lost by the reveal...yeah its a retcon. Remember when we all made fun of those Alleganice/Choices of One moments where Luke and Mara are in the same room but can't get a good look at each other because of what happens in the future? Same thing here. Establishing that Rey and her parents (Dathan and Miramir) were a mere handful of yards away from Luke and Lando more than once...it just reeks of being too cheeky. They didn't actually meet! Luke and Rey's introduction in TLJ isn't being undercut by them having met a decade prior! Ugh. Once again, I feel like the author handled it well, but it feels like a boardroom decision. I honeslty enjoyed this book more than I expected to, it reminded me in a lot of ways of the old Legends books I grew up on...but its inherent links to a film I have very strong negative opinions about means this isn't one I see myself revisiting any time soon.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:11
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Chairman Capone posted:The last few years I slowly realized that my passion for Star Wars has kind of passed on. I think the big tipping point was late 2019/early 2020 when there were the few punches of the big EU leadup to TROS being really inconsequential stories that you could tell they weren't really interested in (I dare anyone to try to remember the plot to Force Collector or Allegiance); then TROS itself; then the insulting Rise of Kylo Ren comic; and then the start of the pandemic. Oooh, this got posted while I was typing way too many words about Shadow of the Sith. I really want someone more into media analysis than I am to really dig into why the new EU feels so different from the old EU. To my inexpert mind, I think there are a couple big reasons:
And sometimes I have the same fear, that the thing I've put so much love and stuff into no longer holds interest for me.....but then I write a couple thousand words about a pretty mid novel, and feel better.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:23
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jivjov posted:Oooh, this got posted while I was typing way too many words about Shadow of the Sith. I really want someone more into media analysis than I am to really dig into why the new EU feels so different from the old EU. To my inexpert mind, I think there are a couple big reasons: First, I want to say thanks for your long write-ups about Padawan and Shadow of the Sith - they both looked like spiritual sequels to Jedi Apprentice/typical 90s Bantam post-ROTJ novels and were interesting to me on those points, and I will be very interested in your take on Princess and the Scoundrel as that's probably the closest we'll get to a direct 1:1 remake of a single Legends novel. But for me and what's different with Star Wars now versus when I was a kid in the 90s is without a doubt the fact that I'm an adult now, and not only that but even compared to a few years ago my work and home lives are a ton busier than they used to be. It's not just Star Wars that I'm moving beyond, I basically stopped reading comics and read very little fiction of any sort any more. Even with TV watching, I've fallen behind on a lot of shows. So I definitely think those are big parts. If I had happened to get laid off during the pandemic and had nothing to do for a few months, I probably would have been glad for some of the new Star Wars stuff to take up the time. I also think the fact that the EU isn't the "Official Continuing Story" any more plays a big part of it also. Obviously there was stuff that was off-limits for the prequel movies prior to 2005, but with the prospect of never-ending TV shows and live-action movies (and despite canon-equality claims, it is clear that TV and movies take precedence) it feels like there's a hesitancy to do anything "big" at any era with any character in printed medium because in ten years some Disney+ miniseries might want to cover that. So it feels even more constrained in a way. I also think the behind the scenes people at Lucasfilm are taking a different type of approach that's less based on quantification and more set on "anything can be true, from a certain point of view" approach, which I don't necessarily feel is bad but I do think is different from what the EU guardians at least ostensibly tried to do before the Disney purchase, which comes across in things as basic as not wanting to do an official chronology for the mess that is the Clone Wars show and which I think is also tied into the above desire not to constrain any future TV/movie production. I also think the old EU at its heart had the DNA of military science fiction (Zahn, Stackpole, Allston, I'm sure others had that as their backbone) while the new EU seems more steeped in the tropes of what I'm just going to call "the YA literature genre," which I know isn't technically a genre, but the sort of tropes and storytelling and plotting that has become standard across YA lit in the last twenty years seems more of a kind with the new EU. I'm sure there are other differences but those are what feel like the standouts to me.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:59
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The Princess and the Scoundrel -- well, this should be a WHOLE LOT SHORTER than my thoughts on Shadow of the Sith, for better or worse. When this one got announced, I feared the worst. The gimmick of this one is that its a tie-in to the Disney World Star Wars Hotel Experience-- the hotel itself is decorated up like a star cruiser, complete with screens instead of windows and the like, and as part of the experience you take a shuttle (bus) down to the surface of Batuu (the Galaxy's Edge theme park) for a shopping day. When Galaxy's Edge first opened up, we got some real DIRE books tying in to it, including Black Spire. Which was resoundly mocked for the frequent textual descriptions of storefronts that mimic the ones you can go spend IRL money at at Disney! When the brief for this book ended up being "Han and Leia have a honeymoon on the Halcyon, I was afraid we were in for more of the same. Especially in the wake of an even-weaker-than-expected comic miniseries also set on board the same crusie liner. Thankfully, this book is way better than that. While there is a chunk of text devoted to describing this cool hotel area that you can go stay in for the low low price of five thousand dollars, this book ends up actually being a book too - We get some early seeds of what later becomes the plot of Bloodline, with the book opening on Endor, the morning after the battle, and Luke tells Leia all about their dear dead dad. Luke being willing to buy into total redemption and happy ghost Anakin while Leia stuggles with "this guy tortured me and then stood there and held me back while my planet was blown up" is a beat that was done already in Legends, but is done well enough here in Canon as well. We also get to see Han propsing to Leia, their wedding ceremony with the Ewoks (much better than the repeated false starts Legends had to depict what with there being like 3 different depictions of the wedding), and their decision to go off on a cruise ship. The conceit is that it becomes political grandstanding. Leia Organa rubbing elbows with the rich folks on the Halcyon is meant to indicate to a war-torn galaxy that the emperor really is dead and that this brand new New Republic can afford to do lesiure activites. Han is, of course, gumpy about his new wife being called away on diplomatic duties when they should be spending all their time in their bunk. Its not a particularly surprising story, but its enjoyable and well told We once again get some cool Tech Stuff with an old imperial mining platform that has basically been retrofitted into a superweapon on an ice planet which forms the bulk of the actual action. While this is still Star Wars and of course commercial as hell, this at least didn't feel like a literal Advertisement like Black Spire.
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Jan 2, 2023 21:03
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jivjov posted:The Princess and the Scoundrel -- well, this should be a WHOLE LOT SHORTER than my thoughts on Shadow of the Sith, for better or worse. Thank you for this write up. I bolded exactly what I was worried about. Maybe I'll check it out, now.
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Jan 2, 2023 21:18
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Lando spends 11 years on Pasana and never once thought "Maybe I should go look through that ship that's just sitting there, with that old droid we literally found and tossed aside because it wasn't charged. There's no way to charge a droid in a galaxy that literally has more droids than living things in it nosiree. I am very smart."
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Jan 2, 2023 21:19
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Vinylshadow posted:Lando spends 11 years on Pasana and never once thought "Maybe I should go look through that ship that's just sitting there, with that old droid we literally found and tossed aside because it wasn't charged. There's no way to charge a droid in a galaxy that literally has more droids than living things in it nosiree. I am very smart." I really really wish they hadn't left the implication that he spends the entire intervening time there. "Hey maybe I missed something" is fine but 11 years??? Ugh. thrawn527 posted:Thank you for this write up. I bolded exactly what I was worried about. Maybe I'll check it out, now. Probably shoulda put this in my post proper, but this one definitely feels like Old Bantam once they make planetfall -- it's retro in a fun way
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Jan 2, 2023 21:24
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jivjov posted:Probably shoulda put this in my post proper, but this one definitely feels like Old Bantam once they make planetfall -- it's retro in a fun way Whoa whoa, once you've made the sale, stop selling.
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Jan 2, 2023 21:35
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I haven’t really touched any new SW in a while. I have SOTS on Audible but quit listening early on because something else came up and it hadn’t hooked me by that point. TROS damage control isn’t something I’m real interested in. That movie sapped a ton of my enthusiasm for SW and Mando starting around the same time is the only thing that really rescued it. I should probably grab The Princess and the Scoundrel. Old Bantam is still something I can get into. Nice to hear it’s more than just an ad for a seriously overpriced theme park experience. Also new episodes of The Bad Batch start up in a couple days.
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Jan 2, 2023 21:55
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Yeah if SotS didn't grab you from the jump and you're not a completionist like me, just skip it. The Wook article is enough for that one IMO
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Jan 2, 2023 22:03
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Chipping in on the subject of 'Burned out on Star Wars EU', my interest faded during the Legacy of the Jedi series when it became clear that it was turning into the Troy Denning Literary Universe with a small cast of rotating guest authors trying to fit their own stories into the slots they were given. Still, I'd take that over what the sequel trilogy has turned the distant post-RotJ canon into. That whole mess has effectively poisoned the well for me, and I prefer learning as little about what happens beyond what I know already, just so I more easily avoid the feelings of disappointment I get from thinking about it. If Disney doesn't want to jettison the sequel trilogy entirely and have a do-over, I hope they just quarantine it and focus their post-RotJ stories on the first couple of years after Endor, like the Mandalorian, or the distant future where events will have ceased to hold any relevance. Beyond all that though, my biggest lingering hope for the new SW canon is that Disney will one day properly delve into the ancient past of the setting and go crazy with the aesthetics. I always loved the sword-and-sandals fantasy meets space travel aesthetic of the Fall of the Sith Empire comic covers. Slashrat fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 22:25
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The High Republic isn't quite as distant as you want, I think, but I've been really enjoying the vibe of that era -- when I catch up with the handful of HR books I have unread ill probably do another Big Effort Post about them And speaking from the perspective of someone who really did enjoy the start of the sequel trilogy....the EU around it has been very dire. Even now that the trilogy is done, there just hasn't been.....anything! set in that era. Rey, Poe, and Finn are fun characters, why is the Poe Dameron comic series the only real longform forray we've gotten into that era outside the films? (The less said about Free Fall the happier I'll be)
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Jan 2, 2023 22:39
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Having just finished phase 1 of the High Republic novels last week, I’m a bit torn. I’ve only read a few of the comics and it does feel like they hit their stated goal of making it a real cross-medium project in the vein of Shadows of the Empire. Ultimately the novels are good, but it feels like if you’re not also catching at least the mainline comic, and possibly the audio novel, then you end up missing about 25% of the story. I plan to carry on with phase 2, but I’m left wishing we might have gotten a bit more time to explore the state of things in phase 1, and not had to deal with a lot of “See High Republic #12 True Believers!” in the novels. I think they’re worth a read, it’s probably been the most freeing Star Wars prose has had in a very long while. I also have to give the authors and Lucasfilm crew props for how decently plotted and connected everything is. I got the Art of High Republic book and they seem to have met often and really focused on literally sketching out how they want it to look and feel. Teek fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jan 3, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 00:01
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My biggest complaint about High Republic phase 1 is the fact that Starlight Beacon barely felt like a cool location. The short stories in Star Wars Insider are helping this out, the published collection of 6 of the stories plus interviews with the 5 phase 1 authors just came out fairly recently. I wish I could have read these as they were coming out -- I feel like I would have cared more about the space station
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Jan 3, 2023 00:29
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I got about halfway through The Rising Storm and kind of lost steam. There’s the big attack on the fair or whatever it’s supposed to be and you see it from multiple POV characters, and it just goes on and on. Doing that is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’ll probably go back to it eventually. The Acolyte tv show is supposed to be set in the HR era, or close to it.
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Jan 3, 2023 00:47
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Yeah, Acolyte is set "toward the end of" the high republic era, so right around the time the republic stops doing fairs and beacons like in the high republic and becomes aging and decrepit decadence like the start of the prequels
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Jan 3, 2023 01:36
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jivjov posted:And speaking from the perspective of someone who really did enjoy the start of the sequel trilogy....the EU around it has been very dire. Even now that the trilogy is done, there just hasn't been.....anything! set in that era. Rey, Poe, and Finn are fun characters, why is the Poe Dameron comic series the only real longform forray we've gotten into that era outside the films? (The less said about Free Fall the happier I'll be) Part of the issue with that, I think, is the fact that Episodes VII and VIII take place back to back, and then, as you've already alluded to, Episode IX was such a disaster that it requires total renovation to even write anything around. (and I'm in agreement with Casimir Radon that it's not even worth doing, just declare it non-canon, the final scene of VIII works oddly well as a conclusion anyway.) I was pretty ambivalent about the EU getting erased because at the time it was in such a piss-poor state it felt like a mercy killing, but the showing of the novels in the Disney era has been about as equally bad, just in a boring way. At least the Dark Nest trilogy had the decency to be a multi-car pileup instead of chugging along at 20 miles under the speed limit.
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Jan 3, 2023 02:37
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There are a few spoilers out about the plot of The Acolyte as well as some leaked set pictures a lot of alien Jedi including a Wookie and combined with the fact that it’s being done by the person who did Russian Doll I’m cautiously optimistic. More so than I am for Ashoka, honestly.
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Jan 3, 2023 02:59
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Reading the current High Republic comics the story being set on Jedha with a whole pile of different force traditions being dicks at each other and a Jedi barely keeping a lid on his temper has really interesting implications for how we got to the Republic of the prequel trilogy era where if you gots the force you goes to the Jedi and that's all there is. Nice callback with the Sorcerors of Tund showing up, even if the one we saw in the original Lando novels wasn't actually a Sorceror of Tund and was more just some weird alien pretending to be one for "reasons". Chairman Capone posted:(I dare anyone to try to remember the plot to Force Collector or Allegiance)
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Jan 3, 2023 15:18
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And the author had to rewrite a scene or two cause he accidentally copied a plot point from TRoS (hidden storeroom in the wreckage of the DSII)
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Jan 3, 2023 16:36
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jivjov posted:And the author had to rewrite a scene or two cause he accidentally copied a plot point from TRoS (hidden storeroom in the wreckage of the DSII) Meanwhile Luke finds a
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Jan 3, 2023 17:09
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Vinylshadow posted:Meanwhile Luke finds a So basically, the Emperor knew about Ahch-To, and didn't send a star destroyer to just freaking purge it and all the Jedi stuff there? Or loot it?
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Jan 3, 2023 17:48
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bunnyofdoom posted:So basically, the Emperor knew about Ahch-To, and didn't send a star destroyer to just freaking purge it and all the Jedi stuff there? Or loot it? It might've already been purged/looted, hence why the compass was in storage Given Palps' interest in reaching the World Between Worlds, I wouldn't be surprised if he thought the compass itself was a key to a gateway, but when it just led to another temple (and only that temple, as each compass was tuned to a specific point in hyperspace) he stored it away
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Jan 3, 2023 18:03
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Vinylshadow posted:It might've already been purged/looted, hence why the compass was in storage But then in TLJ we see that, nope, the Tree Temple full of all the Jedi books is basically untouched?
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Jan 3, 2023 18:43
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