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Casimir Radon posted:I want to like THR but it’s been a bit of a slog. I’ve read 2 adult novels, a YA one, and a junior one I got by accident. Don't forget all the short stories in the Star Wars Insider magazine And two separate comic series And the spinoff comics ...aren't multimedia projects fun?
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Mar 18, 2023 02:30
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Vinylshadow posted:Don't forget all the short stories in the Star Wars Insider magazine With THR they went and introduced the Drengir in a YA novel despite that it’s supposed to be a major plot point.
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Mar 18, 2023 02:39
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Casimir Radon posted:SW can be pretty bad about it. Grevious was introduced in the original TCW series and then they kind of act like you’re supposed to know who he is when he shows up in ROTS. And even if you read everything, they're still basically defeated offscreen between comic issues, which makes it feel like the books introduced them, then promptly forget about them
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Mar 18, 2023 02:47
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Michael Reaves (Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, MedStar, Coruscant Nights) has died. 
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Mar 23, 2023 16:29
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Awww drat shame -- I liked a lot of his Star Wars work for sure
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Mar 23, 2023 16:42
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Lord Hydronium posted:Michael Reaves (Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, MedStar, Coruscant Nights) has died. That sucks. I really enjoyed Shadow Hunter. Until this moment I also thought these books were all self-contained, but they're actually pretty connected? -------- Oh, I forgot to post my final thoughts on the first Darth Bane book. I really disliked it. It stomped all over the Jedi Vs. Sith comic. It is a perfect example of how over explanation diminishes characters and events. Bane in the comic comes off as someone who has a deeper mystical understanding of the Dark Side than the other Sith. Who are using it merely as another arsenal in their war. He feels like someone who has traveled far and wide in search of Dark Side knowledge and has been a Sith Lord and Darth for quite some time. The Brotherhood know this and respect/fear him due to this. This is why he has the weight to persuade them to do some things his way. Bane in the book has only been a Sith Lord for about two weeks and has learned everything that that gives him an edge over the other Sith from Darth Revan. I dislike the connecting of these characters. Darth Revan, who led an army of Dark Jedi against the Republic, is a bad choice to say one master to embody power; a student to crave it. Bane should of laid down his Rule of Two independent of the suggestion of a prior Sith Lord. A clean break from the past is what he's suppose to do. I think the book would have been better if it didn't spend so much time at the Sith Academy. It's a boring slog where Bane is so much better than everyone, has a moment of crisis where he loses his groove, than bounces back. This is over a two year time span. He should of bounced outta there sooner and traveled and made a name for himself beyond, "top student".
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Mar 25, 2023 00:00
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Drew Karpyshin should stick to writing video games because the Bane novels really feel like video game writing and the constant references to Revan don't help. The more Revan is used and referenced the less interesting his character becomes.
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Mar 25, 2023 00:16
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Lord Hydronium posted:Michael Reaves (Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, MedStar, Coruscant Nights) has died.
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Mar 25, 2023 01:01
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The final Coruscant nights book has a major continuity goof that makes the mechanics of the climax completely senseless -- he was still doing great work doing stories but the details were noticeable enough to be brought up in interviews
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Mar 25, 2023 05:26
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I just finished the NJO as a conclusion to an absurdly long reread of much of the old EU that took three loving years. It was the first time I’d done the entire series start to finish, as I knew the overall plot but hadn’t read all 19 books, and I gotta say, I generally liked it overall. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think it ultimately came together okay enough for my dumb Star Wars loving brain. I have no interest in doing any of the stuff set after it anytime soon (Except a reread of Mercy Kill, cause Aaron Allston + Wraiths is always good).
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Mar 26, 2023 01:09
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fartknocker posted:I just finished the NJO as a conclusion to an absurdly long reread of much of the old EU that took three loving years. It was the first time I’d done the entire series start to finish, as I knew the overall plot but hadn’t read all 19 books, and I gotta say, I generally liked it overall. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think it ultimately came together okay enough for my dumb Star Wars loving brain. Yeah, Mercy Kill is what I consider the end point of the entire EU. Also, man, which books still hold up from NJO, and which are as trash as I think. Pretty sure Traitor is still gold standard, and of course the Allston duology
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Mar 26, 2023 03:37
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I burned through the NJO in about a year when I was in high school. Not real healthy in hindsight. Sometimes I’ll do a deep Wookiepedia dive and run across a bunch of stuff I largely forgot from almost 20 years ago, and it’ll be an “Oh yeah” moment. So much of the NJO was weird stuff that was way out of left field, and never referenced again. I’ll likely never revisit the whole thing. It’s just way too many books, and it’s very bleak most of the way through. I’d consider rereading the Allston doulogy. I hadn’t read any of the Wraith books at the time so I might have been a bit lost.
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Mar 26, 2023 03:51
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For all the mistakes it contains and for literally stopping halfway through the bugnest orgy I'm happy that the New Essential Chronology exists as a way to summarize most of the old EU into an in-universe timeline. It really helps smooth over rough edges in some of the less than decent novels that have come out over the years.
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Mar 26, 2023 06:17
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I really enjoyed the NJO. Like yeah, parts of it are really dumb and overly long, but I liked the overall vibe of it.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:00
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bunnyofdoom posted:Also, man, which books still hold up from NJO, and which are as trash as I think. Pretty sure Traitor is still gold standard, and of course the Allston duology Yeah, the Allston pair are up there for me. Coincidentally, those were the first NJO books I read 20~ years ago, so diving into those with no context was a loving trip back then. I thought the initial three books were a solid start, but Vector Prime really does hit you with a lot of “Chewie’s dead and he ain’t coming back” in the final quarter of it. The Dark Tide books I think do a good job further setting the Yuuzhan Vong as something different, Stackpole can do solid battle stuff, and the series hasn’t battered you over the head yet with Vong torture stuff. Star by Star has a ton of big moments in the series and I liked it, and while I thought Traitor starts slow, it really gets rolling along. I thought the final five books, the Force Heretic trilogy, The Final Prophecy, and The Unifying Force, we’re mostly good too and brought it all to a satisfying enough ending. The Agents of Chaos pair early on were a bit of a meh overall, and Balance Point was probably the one that dragged the most to me. A few of the early books having Han off drunk or just not involved felt a bit odd. Also, Lando is absent for what feels like half the series with little mention of what he’s doing at points. Keep in mind, I don’t think anything in the NJO gets nearly as bad as some of the stuff that comes before it. The Callista trilogy was probably the toughest that I actually powered through from start to finish, just about tied with the Black Fleet Crisis books which are barely less annoying overall. The Crystal Star and The New Rebellion I both bailed on after a few chapters, and I skipped the entire Corellian trilogy after only like 15~ pages in the first book (Cause at that point, I was 2~ years in and badly wanted to get to the Hand of Thrawn books).
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Mar 26, 2023 22:27
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The NJO had a lot of stupid moments, but overall it really managed to sell the whole conflict as an actual galaxy-spanning crisis rather than some villain-of-the-week that the main cast defeats during a weekend trip.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:28
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Yeah, I don't think there are any outright "bad" (by Star Wars EU standards) books in the NJO, but there are a few that are on the lower end compared to the rest of the series. Balance Point, Dark Journey, Force Heretic, and Final Prophecy were all a bit more of a slog and/or could have kind of been condensed into other stories. On the other hand, Traitor, The Unifying Force, and even Destiny's Way I'd say are all-timers. And this may be unpopular but I honestly really like Vector Prime also, I think it served as an intro to a new status quo and new, truly alien alien enemies pretty well. I never really liked Star by Star, though. That's the one book in the series that's always praised that was a real tough nut to crack for me. Especially years later when it became patient zero of so much of Troy Denning's later EU bullshit.
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Mar 26, 2023 23:42
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It's been ages since I last read it, but I have good memories of Star by Star. It kind of predates Denning's slide into everything terrible about the post-NJO EU, so maybe I can just disassociate it effectively. I agree that it can be a bit of a slog, but part of that might just be because it's absolute whopper of a book, size-wise, and also because the main narrative in it, the Myrkr mission, is intended to come across as a harrowing journey where the objective seems to slip ever further out of reach as they go.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:13
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I think the books following NJO also helped it in retrospect. Dark Nest trilogy was awful, LotF was such a mess of conflicting authors and FotJ was a boring slog.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:35
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NJO is great; it was one of the most ambitious things the old EU did, and one that I think it pulled off successfully. I did a full read of it about two years ago and posted some of my thoughts in this thread, although for various reasons I don't think I ever made a post on The Unifying Force (it's good). Its biggest problem isn't even its own fault, which is that the later books utterly failed to do anything with the new status quo it created. Vector Prime is pretty weak writing-wise and Balance Point is slow, but the only books in the NJO I think are outright bad are Force Heretic. Just a dull repetitive slog that tried to stretch about two to three plot points in total across each book. Which is a shame, because a) that close to the end of the series you really want to be building momentum rather than killing it, and b) the premise (exploring the Unknown Regions, meeting the Imperials and Chiss, and looking for a living planet) should be extremely cool. The Final Prophecy is fortunately much better as a lead-in to the conclusion. And at its peak, the NJO has some of the best books in the EU. I also want to shout out to Destiny's Way, which I feel never gets talked about compared to the other hardcovers, but ought to be. And of course Traitor, TUF, Allston's duology, Keyes' duology, etc.
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Mar 27, 2023 01:25
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Best part of Force Heretic is them sweeping away some of the dumber stuff in EU, like killing off the Yevetha and Ssi-Ruuk, and watching Nom Anor continually fall upward by complete accident.
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Mar 27, 2023 02:43
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I hadn’t read the The Truce at Bakura or The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy at that point so I imagined it all being a lot more substantial than it actually was.
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Mar 27, 2023 02:55
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Forbidden Planet had a bunch of those Clone Wars Adventures digest books for 99p each, so I grabbed one of each that they had. I'm pretty sure I already own at least some of them, but for that price why not? They were released concurrently with Tartakovsky's Clone Wars show, and in the same broad art style, so things don't really match up all that well. They are... definitely comics. It's weird to see how incredibly mean-spirited the Jedi are in them. It's also where HOPE Squad comes from, and that's the most  poo poo.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:18
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The scene that comes first to my mind from Vector Prime is the Solo Twins watching in awe as Han and Chewie maneuver through an asteroid field in an unwieldy Tie Bomber. They're shocked they can do it without the Force (guess they didn't believe the stories that they've done this before). What made it stand out to me is it is a comedic bit, as Han and Chewie are panicking in the cockpit, like they dodge out of the way of one asteroid because Chewie throws his hands over his eyes and unintentionally changes course.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:34
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Maybe it's when it came out in my life (Vector Prime came out October of 1999, so the beginning of 11th grade for me, prime lovely teenager me), but NJO is what killed me reading Star Wars books. I never even finished the series. I think I made it 3 years in, to like the 3rd hardcover? But I couldn't tell you much about what that book was, because I was checked out by then. And then I just gave up. I read a handful of big name books that came out, like when Zahn wrote Scoundrels, but NJO just broke me of the "I must read every Star Wars book" cycle. I didn't really come back until the Disney buy out because I figured I'd try again with a fresh start. I didn't even find out how NJO ended until I read descriptions online years later. But I didn't really care that much by then. edit: I should say, I liked some of it. Vector Prime is legit good. The Stackpole books are alright, and did a decent job of setting a threatening tone for the villains. I actually like the Agents of Chaos Duology that I've seen a lot of people rag on, I think Luceno wrote a great "broken Han Solo". But somewhere along the line I just couldn't anymore. And I want to say I should give it another go, but I know I'm not going to. thrawn527 fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 22:15
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fartknocker posted:I just finished the NJO as a conclusion to an absurdly long reread of much of the old EU that took three loving years. It was the first time I’d done the entire series start to finish, as I knew the overall plot but hadn’t read all 19 books, and I gotta say, I generally liked it overall. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think it ultimately came together okay enough for my dumb Star Wars loving brain. Hahahaha no poo poo? I’m halfway thru the last book
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Mar 29, 2023 07:42
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Wave 8 of the Essential Legends reprints were announced. I, Jedi; Republic Commando: True Colors; Courtship of Princess Leia (which seems a bit late to tie into their new version of the book); and Old Republic: Annihilation.
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Mar 29, 2023 16:58
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Seems a bit weird that they’re doing I, Jedi without the academy trilogy first since they’re so tied in together. Kids will have to learn about the Gun of Command sooner or later. Knowing they’re getting into the weeds with some of the less quality books getting unabridged audiobooks is kind of nice. I’d like to be able to revisit some of the schlock on a long drive or something and not chew up my valuable reading time.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:13
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Chairman Capone posted:Wave 8 of the Essential Legends reprints were announced. I, Jedi; Republic Commando: True Colors; Courtship of Princess Leia (which seems a bit late to tie into their new version of the book); and Old Republic: Annihilation. Oh god, Corran is coming into the new canon, isn't he?
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Mar 29, 2023 17:23
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thrawn527 posted:Oh god, Corran is coming into the new canon, isn't he? There were already references to him in the Kenobi show 
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Mar 29, 2023 17:34
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fartknocker posted:There were already references to him in the Kenobi show I forgot most of what happened in that show. Direct references to Corran? Was it on the wall in the Underground Jedi Railroad?
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Mar 29, 2023 17:35
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iirc the little force sensitive kid that the fake jedi people smuggler is meeting when Obi-Wan finds him was supposed to be Corran. I can't remember if he's actually called out by name in the scene.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:38
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coming to streaming services in 2026 Disney's Star Wars: Horn
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Mar 29, 2023 17:43
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Yeah, the name isn’t said, but was shown as Corran in the credits. Also, IIRC, some of the graffiti they see later on translated directly to either Corran Horn or his Jedi-related grandfather or something like that. They also dropped a reference to Roganda Ismaren from Children of the Jedi 
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Mar 29, 2023 17:43
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fartknocker posted:Yeah, the name isn’t said, but was shown as Corran in the credits. Oh that's right. The kid.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:48
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fartknocker posted:Yeah, the name isn’t said, but was shown as Corran in the credits. Yeah, the little Jedi kid who they're smuggling to Corellia is identified as Corran in the credits, and Corran's EU Jedi grandpa is also one of the Jedi listed on the walls. Plett from Children of the Jedi is also there! From what I remember some set decorator probably just picked up a bunch of names from the Order 66 survivor list on Wookieepedia because the names included really obscure Jedi survivors from like one-off RPG books from the early 2000s.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:50
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Which of those Lando books was your favorite? Hard for me to choose, but I'd probably have to say my top 5 were... 1)  2)  3)  4)  5)  I loved the Indiana Jones feel of Lunarwilds. Voidwhispers of Oblibionia had a good spooky vibe that I loved.
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Mar 30, 2023 03:27
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Frostwings of Thallara was so obviously a metaphor for Reagan breaking the air traffic controller strike that it turned me off it completely.
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Mar 30, 2023 03:55
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Lunarwilds was cool until it turned out the "hidden power" of the lost civilization was just abolishing the age of consent. Probably could have used another draft.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:40
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Something is really freaking me out about how that face Animorphs from Billy Dee William's to Donald Glover's over the course of the covers
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Mar 31, 2023 01:24
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