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thrawn527 posted:That was one of the few things I liked about The New Rebellion. It's been literally over 25 years so apologies if I'm getting this wrong, but I remember Brakkis being built up as this big badass, and when he's taken out, they take off his mask and he's just some kid. Like, the message of the book is that the war is still taking in these kids, on both sides, and chewing them up. Sometimes they become heroes like Luke. Sometimes they're just loving killed and end up footnotes in history. Because war sucks, and is usually fought by kids. It almost feels anti-climactic, but I remember it working.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:52
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Casimir Radon posted:That was Kueller. He’s the mask guy who dies at the end. Brakiss was involved somehow, pulling his strings or something. Brakiss got blowed up in a YJK book after some royal guards conned him into thinking Palps was still alive. Oh. Well poo poo. Yup, like I said, apologies if I'm getting this wrong. Like I just did.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:07
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I can keep most of the Bantam stuff straight in my head but I braindumped a ton of the NJO. Every once in a while I’ll go down the rabbit hole on Wookiepedia and get weird Déjà vu. It’s all so strange and at one point about 20 years I knew what all of it meant.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:49
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Casimir Radon posted:Children of the Jedi has a device that allows force users to control droids. Which is one of the dumber things the EU had to offer.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:05
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Arquinsiel posted:Dumber than the little buzzer stick Luke has in ANH? Yes, being able to mind trick a droid is pretty dumb.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:11
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I should have thought that through better before hitting post. I was trying to convey the idea that inventing force powers to replace simple tools that we know people have access to is extremely old EU silly and I completely fluffed it.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:17
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The Wookiepedia article makes it out to be slightly less dumb than I remember it being. Still awful, but not as bad as I remember. We’ll see when I reread it.quote:The subelectronic converter was a brain implant invented by Imperial designer Nasdra Magrody that enabled Force-sensitive subjects to control droids remotely. One known recipient was Irek Ismaren, who used the implant to control the Eye of Palpatine.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:21
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It feels like with the level of cybernetics at play in Star Wars that it's really not necessary to use the force at all there but I guess EU gonna EU 
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Jan 10, 2023 23:13
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Was drunken texting and learned my phone's autocorrect still has "Ghent" in it. I really am EU pilled
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Jan 11, 2023 09:00
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Brakiss dies in the Young Jedi Knights series when a space station blows up. The New Rebellion was released after that happened, but its story is earlier in the timeline. Edit: I somehow missed a bunch of posts.
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Jan 11, 2023 11:48
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jivjov posted:Was drunken texting and learned my phone's autocorrect still has "Ghent" in it. I really am EU pilled
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Jan 11, 2023 16:05
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2023 is gonna be the year I actually read a Star War book. Gonna start with Lost Stars and then Thrawn, and see where it goes from there.
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Jan 11, 2023 16:53
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Dagon Ghent kinda sucks and I never liked that quest on Onderon.
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Jan 11, 2023 17:30
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Count Thrashula posted:2023 is gonna be the year I actually read a Star War book. Gonna start with Lost Stars and then Thrawn, and see where it goes from there. Lost Stars came out in the lead-up to The Force Awakens, was very popular at the time, and at least anecdotally seems to have held up as one of the better-received books from the Disney era, going on eight years on now. So good choice there. The author, Claudia Gray, followed it up with Bloodline, which I'd also recommend, especially if you are curious about how they try to make the politics leading into the sequel era make sense. Thrawn I feel like is very mid-level by Zahn's overall standards, but probably the best of his Disney-era output. But even though I don't think the book is bad, it's one of the few times I would recommend the comic adaptation over an original book. I think the comic did a good job condensing the story where it was needed and the visuals added a lot to it.
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Jan 11, 2023 17:34
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Chairman Capone posted:Lost Stars came out in the lead-up to The Force Awakens, was very popular at the time, and at least anecdotally seems to have held up as one of the better-received books from the Disney era, going on eight years on now. So good choice there. The author, Claudia Gray, followed it up with Bloodline, which I'd also recommend, especially if you are curious about how they try to make the politics leading into the sequel era make sense. Thanks for this! I'm mostly just running down the list of most-recommended books. I've seen all the movies, but that's about it. I'm coming over from being a huge Black Library/40k nerd, and I'm looking for lots of good political and dramatic intrigue (a la the Horus Heresy).
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Jan 11, 2023 18:02
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Count Thrashula posted:Thanks for this! If you're into political stuff, I think you're mostly going to find good examples from the old pre-Disney expanded universe. Probably the best example is Cloak of Deception by James Luceno, which is the lead-in to The Phantom Menace and really fleshes out the political situation going into there with the Senate factions and the undermining of Chancellor Valorum and just why the taxation issue was so big. Near the end of the pre-Disney era, Luceno also wrote Darth Plagueis which expands on the Old Republic's politics in the decades going up to Phantom Menace, but that builds so much on the existing Expanded Universe it wouldn't be my first suggestion for a newcomer. The Black Fleet Trilogy really shows off a lot of the New Republic from the old continuity, but is pretty divisive for some of its plotlines (one of the big plotlines for example is Luke searching for his mother, but since it was written before the prequels you already know it's going nowhere). I would say that its depiction of Luke kind of works as backstory for the Luke of the sequel movies, though. But the Leia and Han storyline goes heavy into just how a democratic New Republic can function in a military crisis of its own (the trilogy also is clearly influenced by 1990s stuff like the Balkan crises and how the US can function in the post-Soviet era). Destiny's Way from the New Jedi Order series is another good political-heavy book but like with Plagueis, you can't really jump directly into this, especially given it's in the middle of an explicit series. Obviously the original Thrawn Trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn follow-up duology by Zahn also showcase a lot of New Republic political intrigue, and honestly the Thrawn Trilogy as the major starting point of the old EU, as well as something which has continued to influence the Disney TV shows, is a good place to really start. TLDR - Cloak of Deception and the original Thrawn Trilogy are also things you might be interested in.
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Jan 11, 2023 18:24
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Lost Stars probably holds up just fine. It wasn’t all tangled up with nu-canon poo poo that would make me reevaluate it now that we know the sequels were garbage. It should stand just fine on its own. Thrawn is fine. Not groundbreaking or anything, but fine Zahn filler. His Ascendency Trilogy is a lot better. Edit: Black Fleet Crisis is an interesting one. The Luke plot is going to be a big wet fart for pretty much everyone, and the Lando plot doesn’t really go anywhere either. Neither has anything to do with the Han and Leia plot. So you have 3 different plot lines going, and none of them have anything to do with each other, but they slammed them all together anyway. I tried to reread it several years ago and got hung up early in the second book. There’s this alien guy whose species was genocided by the Yevetha, making him sole survivor. He wants to be a New Republic pilot to avenge his people. So Ackbar drops everything else he’s doing to bully the military into letting this guy into pilot training. That was way too dumb for me to continue. Casimir Radon fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 18:27
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Arquinsiel posted:The World Between Worlds and Mortis are easily confused for each other because they are both terrible and do not fit into the WWII dogfights in space story.
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Jan 14, 2023 09:43
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Finally got around to reading Ronin. I don't have the spoons for a big long effort post but drat that book whipped rear end and I kinda hope we get more stories in that particular fragment of the star wars universe. Wild how just changing a coupld things her and there can make the entire universe feel fresh and different.
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Jan 19, 2023 10:26
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Isn’t there supposed to be a Ronin comic?
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Jan 19, 2023 13:40
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There is. It's a one-shot that happens before the events of the episode and is pretty inconsequential. I could have seen the comic and the episode fitting into the mainline canon somehow if they wanted to, but the novel is so far off from it that you can change the few names of things that they haven't already changed and you'd never know it was related. I think I'm pretty much done with that little sub-line at this point.
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Jan 19, 2023 15:42
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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: This isn't really a media analysis post like you wanted, but I've been thinking about the differences in how Lucasfilm and Disney handled the EU periods around the prequel and sequel eras while the films were still coming out. I'd like to specifically compare the media released between Episode II & III to that between Episode VIII & IX. As both these time periods received multimedia projects before their respective final films came out. First we have the Clone Wars multimedia project. Which had seven adult novels, over 30 issues of the Star Wars: Republic run comic plus some mini-series, various video games, and the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series. While Anakin and Obi-wan are present or the leads in a lot of this material. A ton of it is focused on side characters from the films or newly created characters. It does what EU media should do by flushing out the Clone Wars, introducing characters who will appear in III, (like General Grievous) and explains why this or that character who was in II aren't present in III (mostly Jedi Council members via death during the war), but remains strictly optional. The Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker fails in this regard. There is one adult novel, one young-adult novel (which is set pre-Episode VII), a few junior grade books, and one four issue comic mini-series. That one novel Resistance Reborn is largely focused on Poe and is about rebuilding the Resistance after its near annihilation in Episode VIII, but it alone is just not enough to paint a picture of what is happening in time between VII and IX. The Poe Dameron comic series would have been an excellent vehicle to explore this time period, but it strangely wrapped just after it passed VIII. This may be the fault of the One Canon policy and the 180ing of story elements between films. Since you can't have media exploring how Rey feels about her parents being nobodies who abandoned her because oops that's suddenly not what true! Finn, once again, gets totally shafted. As for your bullet points I disagree rather strongly with the first one. This might just be true for me, but the issue with the NuEU, and especially the gap between VI and VII, isn't so much that these stories aren't pushing the timeline forward. A new time line is fine. It's that events are now about how our Beloved Film Heroes gently caress Everything Up instead of having more adventures and succeeding. Leia becomes Chief of Staff of the New Republic in the old EU. She's marginalized by the New Republic in the new EU. Luke builds a New Jedi Order that endures in the old EU. His NJO is destroyed completely in the new EU. Han Solo is a celebrated war hero in the old EU. He's back to being a struggling smuggler in the new EU. Lando is a successful entrepreneur in the old EU. He wallows on a backwater desert world for decades in the new EU. This is what feels different about the old and new Star Wars Expanded Universe. The old one built on what Our Beloved Film Heroes did. The new one has to tear it all down to set the stage for Episode VII. And that feels really bad.
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Feb 1, 2023 22:58
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OhFunny posted:As for your bullet points I disagree rather strongly with the first one. This might just be true for me, but the issue with the NuEU, and especially the gap between VI and VII, isn't so much that these stories aren't pushing the timeline forward. A new time line is fine. It's that events are now about how our Beloved Film Heroes gently caress Everything Up instead of having more adventures and succeeding. Leia becomes Chief of Staff of the New Republic in the old EU. She's marginalized by the New Republic in the new EU. Luke builds a New Jedi Order that endures in the old EU. His NJO is destroyed completely in the new EU. Han Solo is a celebrated war hero in the old EU. He's back to being a struggling smuggler in the new EU. Lando is a successful entrepreneur in the old EU. He wallows on a backwater desert world for decades in the new EU. The old EU is a cavalcade of horrors so profound and absurd it reads like an Aristocrats joke though.
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Feb 1, 2023 23:36
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In some weird indictment of my brain, I dreamed last night that I was explaining the old EU to someone, and woke up with the horrible realization that the gap between the beginning of The New Jedi Order and now is longer than the gap between the release of A New Hope and the beginning of the New Jedi Order.
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Feb 2, 2023 00:44
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General Battuta posted:The old EU is a cavalcade of horrors so profound and absurd it reads like an Aristocrats joke though. It's easier to pretend the Vong didn't happen tho E: vvv its even easier to pretend all the poo poo after the Vong didn't happen too StashAugustine fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 2, 2023 |
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Feb 2, 2023 00:45
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The NJO is great, though.cptn_dr posted:In some weird indictment of my brain, I dreamed last night that I was explaining the old EU to someone, and woke up with the horrible realization that the gap between the beginning of The New Jedi Order and now is longer than the gap between the release of A New Hope and the beginning of the New Jedi Order.
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Feb 2, 2023 01:07
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OhFunny posted:This isn't really a media analysis post like you wanted, but I've been thinking about the differences in how Lucasfilm and Disney handled the EU periods around the prequel and sequel eras while the films were still coming out. i think whats funny is disney was pretty good at setting up a realtivly coherent cinematic project with marvel that went on for more then 10+ years and has had alot of hits and a clearly setting up big krang storyline like they did with thanos and etc while slowly retiring older characters for new ones or new models/etc. so its funny that they botched it with star wars until recently. like i like tfa but its an awful set up for the universe and the books dont help. TLJ has issues but tries to focus more on personal stuff but thats all undone by rise of skywalker. mando was good and has done good job at making connections and poo poo. andor and obi wan(least the last half) have great/ok expansions and ideas but its all before the sequels. I feel like disney knows the hosed up the sequels at least in the sense that the movies are all uneven as gently caress and do a poo poo job at making the universe work but they can't remake them or make sequels this soon because 1. none of the actors are coming back and 2. it works well enough as an "endpoint" in the timeline for now.
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Feb 2, 2023 02:47
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FWIW, all the PT had an extra year between releases (3 years versus 2), so they had some more room to roll out additional content in between movies. You can squeeze in more freeform releases, when you aren't immediately bumping into the release of the new movie due to the shorter development cycles. Basically the problems the movies already had by being released quickly without an overall plan, only exacerbated the issues SW was having releasing unified content.
Teek fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Feb 2, 2023 |
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Feb 2, 2023 15:46
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I’ll also throw in that prequel trilogy years also had a bunch of video games released in that timeframe. They were in a bunch of different genres and some were extremely popular like the original Battlefront games. And that was building off the 90s where you also had a lot of popular and well regarded releases, many of which heavily referenced or were tied into EU stuff. Compare that to the Disney era, where the releases are fewer and further between, and the one that probably got the most news was all the negative press about 2017’s Battlefront II’s initial plans for loot boxes. Things got sorta better with Squadrons and Jedi Fallen Order, and to be fair 2017 Battlefront II did turn out to be a really good game eventually, but I think that’s also an element with perceptions of the old EU vs NuEU.
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Feb 2, 2023 16:05
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I think at least for the first few years, a lot of the New EU stuff felt really isolated from each other. Battlefront II was one of the only New EU products that actually incorporated references to other New EU works (same with the TROS tie-in novel but who really remembers that). Maybe that's changed since, but it's something that really stuck out to me for that initial span of the Disney era. The other thing I thought was funny about the early Disney era was that the movies would occasionally have references to old EU stuff, but as far as I recall the only reference to the new EU in one of the Disney movies was the valachord reference in the Solo movie, and that was dwarfed with how many old-school EU references were in there. The Disney+ shows so far seem to work in a few more New EU references, particularly Cobb Vanth in Mandalorian and the Jedi: Fallen Order fortress in Kenobi, but even with them those are rarities compared to the old EU nods.
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Feb 2, 2023 16:27
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https://twitter.com/ek_johnston/status/1622642947786174464
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Feb 7, 2023 04:45
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stop trying to make qi'ra happen
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Feb 7, 2023 05:01
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I really liked her Ahsoka book, so I'll probably read this.
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Feb 7, 2023 15:17
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Horizon Burning posted:stop trying to make qi'ra happen I liked solo despite its issues and i think she was a fine character but the whole thing feels moot, we know how mauls story ends, i assume she takes over or somethinga after he dies.
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Feb 12, 2023 06:04
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Wasn't Qi'ra important in one of the big comic book story arcs? I might be misremembering what I heard.
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Feb 12, 2023 06:56
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Wasn't Qi'ra important in one of the big comic book story arcs? I might be misremembering what I heard. She's been in several, ever since they got into the post-ESB era; right now she's pretty much declared war on Palpatine and is currently getting her entire "hidden empire" wrecked while Vader's running around with a harem of Padme's handmaidens restoring his own version of order to a chaos-ridden galaxy
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Feb 12, 2023 07:45
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That sounds like a much dumber take on Shadows of the Empire for a post-ESB crime vs. Empire story.
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Feb 12, 2023 12:30
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Of course it is. There is no Dash Rendar. At least Q'ira doesn't emit date rape hormones
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Feb 12, 2023 16:11
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the idea of vader running around with padme's handmaidens is a fun one
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Feb 12, 2023 16:11
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The Vader parts of the storyline are pretty great. The rest of the Crimson Dawn involvement is boring as gently caress.
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Feb 12, 2023 17:13
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