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Yeah, Tyers also wrote Balance Point (also a low point for NJO) where Mara learns that she’s pregnant, and Tyers had an interview where she talked about how it was important to have a scene where Mara reflects that abortion is wrong.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 11:15 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 06:08 |
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Aren't the Ssi-Ruuk capped by the Vong later on? Even if that was probably "here's something you vaguely recognize for Impact."
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 14:14 |
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Dawgstar posted:Aren't the Ssi-Ruuk capped by the Vong later on? Even if that was probably "here's something you vaguely recognize for Impact." Sorta. In the Force Heretic books, they attack Bakura again and are eventually stopped by Balura’s defenses and the Jedi, along with the subservient P'w'eck species revolting. IIRC, this was all or heavily manipulated by some Vong agent with an ooglith masquer, and leaves the Ssi-Ruuk heavily beaten up, but it’s not clear what happens to them after that in the NJO. Those were the same books where they discover that the Yevetha were basically exterminated by the Vong while other events in the NJO were going on.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 15:40 |
i think maybe my fundamental inability to take the vong seriously comes back to how they call all of their poo poo things like "ooglith masquer"
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 15:51 |
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Jazerus posted:i think maybe my fundamental inability to take the vong seriously comes back to how they call all of their poo poo things like "ooglith masquer" I'm going to stab you with my coufee
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 16:02 |
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Jazerus posted:i think maybe my fundamental inability to take the vong seriously comes back to how they call all of their poo poo things like "ooglith masquer" Back when I read the NJO I hadn’t read The Truce at Bakura or The Black Fleet Crisis so I thought I must really be missing out. Yeah, not so much.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 16:33 |
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Casimir Radon posted:What’s funny is Luke’s love interest gets killed off two real world years later, 1993 to 1995, in Showdown at Centerpoint. Though it’s 14 years of in universe time, 4ABY to 18ABY. “Hmmm, this character didn’t really work out. Bakura isn’t a place we ever really need to see again but let’s whack her just to be sure.” That's the fate of a lot of Luke's love interests. The man is cursed.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 19:45 |
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OhFunny posted:That's the fate of a lot of Luke's love interests. The man is cursed.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 20:10 |
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Casimir Radon posted:
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 20:15 |
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Probably closer to 90%. The only decent post NJO books I can think of are Mercy Kill and Millennium Falcon.
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# ? Jun 26, 2023 21:27 |
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Casimir Radon posted:Back when I read the NJO I hadn’t read The Truce at Bakura or The Black Fleet Crisis so I thought I must really be missing out. Yeah, not so much. Black Fleet is one of the EU things I have absolutely no knowledge of save, I guess, there was a Black Fleet and a crisis.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 01:50 |
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Dawgstar posted:Black Fleet is one of the EU things I have absolutely no knowledge of save, I guess, there was a Black Fleet and a crisis. Basically an alien species, the Yavetha (that had blades in their arms somehow) managed to seize control of the Imperial Black Fleet, which included a Super Star Destroyer. They were inherently mysoginistic and xenophobic, so they butted heads with the Republic. Some suggestions that Luke's mom was an alien and her people were absolute pacifists. Biggest thing that I can remember about it is that it actually delved pretty hard into the Military aspect of the setting. And also made up a whole bunch of starships for the explicit purpose of fitting them into an actual space military. To the point that an ancient let's read thread thought that the Author had been in the military and was inserting all his old soldier buddies into the book. Also I think this is the first time Lowbacca appears, and the Millennium Falcon got "rebuilt" in a way that would scream "overpowered" in a video game. It could lay mines, had a bunch of guns, a stealth system, etc etc etc. Complete with like a four page run down of the Space Ship Shop Manager going over it like the car you just had him drop a new engine in.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 02:44 |
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All I remember about those books is that the last one ended with the bad guy stuck in hyperspace forever... somehow? It's an early contender in the sequel trilogy's tendency to just rewrite the rules of hyperspace on the fly.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 02:48 |
the black fleet crisis was basically a proto-vong invasion except with a different brand of outside-the-republic weirdos
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 03:01 |
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The black fleet crisis was Chewbacca’s finest hour. Unfortunately, it also was the only good thing about that series.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 04:30 |
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That wasn’t Lowbacca, it was Chewie’s son Lumpawaroo. AKA Lumpy. Originally seen in the Holiday Special. Lowbacca doesn’t show up into the first YJK book. There’s a few major problems with the trilogy. Number one is that the Luke’s mom plot line is a bait and switch, and has only gotten more obvious since ‘96. Once TPM came out everyone knew Amidala was Luke and Leia’s mom. Number two is that there are three major plots mashed together and none of them have much to do with each other. Han, Leia, Chewie, and some other New Republic characters fight the Yevetha. Luke is off looking for his fake mom. Lando, Lobot, R2, and 3PO get stuck on a ghost ship. Everyone is given something to do but none of it works together. Three is the writing is just weird. The thing I usually bring up is this character created for the trilogy is an alien who is the sole survivor of the Yevetha genociding his people. Ackbar drops pretty much everything else he’s doing to bully New Republic Starfighter Command into hand waving him into a fighter squadron so he can take revenge. It comes across like funny space grandpa fights the space DMV and wins.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 05:15 |
the plus side of black fleet crisis is that it's the only chance anyone can have to let that lando/lobot romance into their heart
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 06:22 |
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I sort of appreciate the boldness of, rather than trying to shoe-horn everyone into the same story, Black Fleet Crisis just decides "Nah, Lando's off having his own completely unrelated adventure" and never even bothers trying to tie it into the main plot. Main problem with The Black Fleet Crisis is that it's pure mil-sci-fi cliche, down to writing Leia as the useless civilian leader who won't make the Hard Choices Necessary. And the Yevetha being written as so one-dimensionally evil that characters are saying maybe they deserved what the Empire did to them feels like apologia for colonialism - gotta keep the boot to the neck of these savages or they'll just start killing everyone.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 07:15 |
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Casimir Radon posted:Calista disappearing for 31 years only to be killed by Abeloth sure feels like a dick move that served no purpose. Abeloth also kills Akanah Pell. Luke's love interest from The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 09:45 |
I bailed on the Legends EU midway through Legacy of the Jedi, and only have the vaguest understanding that Abeloth was some kind of Eldritch Force Horror, but all this makes them sound like just another lover of Luke's, just with a big jealousy problem.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 10:43 |
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Slashrat posted:I bailed on the Legends EU midway through Legacy of the Jedi, and only have the vaguest understanding that Abeloth was some kind of Eldritch Force Horror, but all this makes them sound like just another lover of Luke's, just with a big jealousy problem. ....Not wholly inaccurate, all things considered, given she was the (step)"Mother" to the Father, Son, and Daughter of Mortis, and wanted to make Luke the new Father, with Ben and Vestara as the Son and Daughter
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 10:58 |
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Awful. Re: Black Fleet, what was interesting about it was that it was about the politics of the US and interventionism in the 1990s. How do you deal with Kosovo or whatever, but in space, and the people doing the genocide are uh conveniently...not human. Interesting isn't the same as good! If those books had come out ten years later I suspect the Yevetha would've been written, or at least read, as those drat terrorists. They even sort of do a reverse 9/11 where they take off from Coruscant without permission, instead of landing on the WTC without permission.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 14:23 |
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Rochallor posted:All I remember about those books is that the last one ended with the bad guy stuck in hyperspace forever... somehow? It's an early contender in the sequel trilogy's tendency to just rewrite the rules of hyperspace on the fly.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 15:18 |
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I'll go to bat, mostly, for Black Fleet. I think most of the separate storylines were good and might have been better received if they were each divided into a separate standalone novel, though I do think the Luke mother subplot was kind of inexplicable given the prequels were known to be on the horizon by then. I appreciate that the trilogy tried to do something different - the villains weren't the Empire or Dark Jedi, it moved away from everything just being the starfighters and Rebel cruisers from the movie, the characters were all given something different to do than just their usual frozen-in-ROTJ archetypes, it remembered Chewbacca had a family, it tried to take a grounded look (as grounded as Star Wars can be) at how the New Republic would actually function as a galactic government. I also think that Luke's character arc in the beginning of the first book kind of predicts how he would be taken in the sequel movies.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 15:32 |
iirc the lando and the ghost ship plot was actually supposed to be its own book, kind of like a post-RotJ followup to the old lando books. but they wouldn't give the author a contract to write a lando-only book, so he just wrote them a bunch of generic mil-sci-fi to involve the other characters and embedded his lando book inside of it
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 15:46 |
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OhFunny posted:Abeloth also kills Akanah Pell. Luke's love interest from The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. I suppose it might have been a mandate from Lucasfilm to do something with all the main characters even if they didn’t fit, and that’s how we got the unrelated plots in the same trilogy. It’s been a long time but I remember Chewie and son rescuing Han from the Yevetha was written kind of weird, and not helped by all but one Wookie in the entire galaxy being unable to speak basic. For Hand of Thrawn it’s funny that Zahn basically came the conclusion that Chewie is hard to write for, and everyone is sick to death of the Solo kids being kidnapped. So he dumped them all off on Kashyyyk for 98% of the doulogy.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 19:59 |
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Casimir Radon posted:For Hand of Thrawn it’s funny that Zahn basically came the conclusion that Chewie is hard to write for, and everyone is sick to death of the Solo kids being kidnapped. So he dumped them all off on Kashyyyk for 98% of the doulogy. I mean, the former is the reason that Chewie was decided on being the character to be killed off in Vector Prime. Although apparently when R. A. Salvatore took over Vector Prime, he was told that it had to be Chewie and only later learned that he could have changed it had he wanted to, and had he known that he would have killed off Lando. Which I don't think would have hit as hard, and also would have some different ramifications, shall we say....
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 20:50 |
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Another memorable thing about the Black Fleet Crisis is that it's one of the more likely times Luke lost his virginity. Or at least his post-Tattooine virginity, who knows what he got up to back home with Biggs and co. e: okay I'm probably wrong about this but, posts gratia posting General Battuta fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jun 27, 2023 |
# ? Jun 27, 2023 21:16 |
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"Y'ever wonder why they called him Wormie?"
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 21:24 |
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“Luke, bro. You should gently caress that big hole the desert.”
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 22:11 |
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Chairman Capone posted:I mean, the former is the reason that Chewie was decided on being the character to be killed off in Vector Prime. Although apparently when R. A. Salvatore took over Vector Prime, he was told that it had to be Chewie and only later learned that he could have changed it had he wanted to, and had he known that he would have killed off Lando. Which I don't think would have hit as hard, and also would have some different ramifications, shall we say.... I vaguely remember an interview that came out where they explicitly said the first decision they made for NJO was that Chewie was going to die. And then explicitly referred to him as the Solo family dog.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 22:24 |
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Calax posted:I vaguely remember an interview that came out where they explicitly said the first decision they made for NJO was that Chewie was going to die. And then explicitly referred to him as the Solo family dog. If you have the paperback of The Unifying Force, the NJO round robin interview in the back is really interesting reading on the making of the NJO. The Stradley bit is from that, along with a lot of stuff about Lucas' level of involvement and more. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jun 27, 2023 |
# ? Jun 27, 2023 22:27 |
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Calax posted:I vaguely remember an interview that came out where they explicitly said the first decision they made for NJO was that Chewie was going to die. And then explicitly referred to him as the Solo family dog. The family dog bit was Randy Stradley, who I think was also the one who proposed that Chewie get killed off. But the development team behind the NJO were basically told it could be anyone but Luke. Originally someone else was going to write Vector Prime, but Salvatore was brought on relatively last minute to replace them (would love to learn who it originally was) and was told that Chewie was the one to die, but years later he learned that even then he could have gone with anyone and wished he had killed Lando off. He and Stackpole (who helped design the NJO) were at a convention in 2015 and talked about it, it later got aired on the Full of Sith podcast: https://www.jedinews.com/events/articles/full-sith-episode-cxxxv-killed-chewie/ I was going to link to the actual Full of Sith website but my browser is telling me it's a safety risk, haha. Man, that podcast really went downhill, it was a must listen to for a long time, and I feel like when TLJ came out they doubled down on the "nothing negative about the Disney era at any moment"* while also (perhaps relatedly) having a number of the co-hosts leave and by the time I stopped listening even sporadically in 2020 I think they had basically just reverted to reading fan emails all talking about whatever the latest Lucasfilm press release was. *To show that I'm not kidding they had an episode on how great Rise of Skywalker was and I think that may have been what broke them.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 22:34 |
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They should’ve killed Han out of respect for Harrison Ford’s wishes.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 22:42 |
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They're not wrong that Chewbacca is a lot harder to deal with when you're working primarily with the written word, I can see why the idea is attractive. It's the same reason that Disney killed off all the human OT characters and kept Chewie and the droids around; you can't (yet*****) totally replace live-action characters, but you can put another guy in a suit. I can't believe that there was talk of killing off Lando instead of Chewie, though. It's a) stereotypical, b) easier to tell stories where a character can talk to other characters, and c) it wouldn't even have as much punch since Chewbacca has been around since ANH.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 23:07 |
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Lando’s involvement in SW stories is pretty much always that he’s trying to run a new business and gets dragged into more Star Wars. Except she Corellian Trilogy where he is trying to find a wife and gets dragged into more Star Wars. Sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn’t.
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# ? Jun 27, 2023 23:36 |
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Casimir Radon posted:Lando’s involvement in SW stories is pretty much always that he’s trying to run a new business and gets dragged into more Star Wars. Except she Corellian Trilogy where he is trying to find a wife and gets dragged into more Star Wars. Sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn’t. It's one of those Heir to the Empire DNA strands, really. Zahn re-introduced Lando as being off doing his own thing, and there was a clear reason why Han & Leia and Luke came looking for him, and it was pretty well integrated to the plot too. Other Bantam era authors just basically copied that without too much effort put into the whole deal. You see the same with the cloaking shields and the cloning tech: a bunch of worse authors (and I'm not saying Zahn is a genius author, just one who knew what he was doing) just went "new Imperial supertech" and left it at that. The Hand of Thrawn duology has some interesting commentary on that what with the Imperial cloaked gunnery system they can't get to work.
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# ? Jun 28, 2023 09:26 |
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Vinylshadow posted:....Not wholly inaccurate, all things considered, given she was the (step)"Mother" to the Father, Son, and Daughter of Mortis, and wanted to make Luke the new Father, with Ben and Vestara as the Son and Daughter why does she look like oogie boogie if he was an ameboa and drawn by Dav Pilkey. General Battuta posted:Another memorable thing about the Black Fleet Crisis is that it's one of the more likely times Luke lost his virginity. Or at least his post-Tattooine virginity, who knows what he got up to back home with Biggs and co. he found great uncle cleegs porno collection.
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# ? Jun 28, 2023 14:39 |
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General Battuta posted:Another memorable thing about the Black Fleet Crisis is that it's one of the more likely times Luke lost his virginity. Or at least his post-Tattooine virginity, who knows what he got up to back home with Biggs and co. Peli wasn’t the only human to date a Jawa.
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# ? Jun 28, 2023 14:44 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 06:08 |
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Dapper_Swindler posted:why does she look like oogie boogie if he was an ameboa and drawn by Dav Pilkey. I've always wondered where that art comes from. I assume it's fanart. Reading her wiki entry she doesn't appear to have ever been drawn much because all the pictures are of other people.
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# ? Jun 28, 2023 15:45 |