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Yeah, Legacy was a bit silly but I still liked it. Legacy Vol II was shaping up to be pretty good, but it ended abruptly when Dark Horse lost the licence.
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Dec 23, 2020 23:05
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Rochallor posted:I think that's the difference between TLJ and NJO. TLJ is setting up potential plot points and conflicts for future movies, while NJO is designed as and should have been the end. I'm inclined to give a little bit of leeway to the post-NJO stuff (but only just a little, cause they really are that bad) because really, how are you supposed to follow that up? I actually really liked Legacy. Like yeah, it was pretty edge lord. But the characters were fun and I enjoyed a lot of the ideas it had. Gar Stazi was loving dope and I enjoyed him punking the Sith at every chance.
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Dec 23, 2020 23:39
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The Pellaeon is one of the best Star Destroyers and the Fel Empire was pretty neat.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:07
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Jazerus posted:the strangest thing about the later parts of the legends EU was how time, effectively, didn't pass for most characters. han and leia's kids, and everyone else of their generation, are perpetual teenagers in their thoughts and behavior, and scenes like that slipped through as though even the editors had forgotten that tahiri wasn't still a teen. not that it would be acceptable even if she was, but it would be moderately less awful. luke, han, and leia, meanwhile, seem to have taken an immortality serum around age 55 (at the latest) and are of course still bumping around adventuring and saving their silly kids There was an interview I remember reading over on TheForce.net from someone involved in the old Legends stuff--I don't recall if it was an author or a publishing person or what, but they addressed that very issue in a surprisingly frank manner. Han, Luke, and Leia--or Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padmé--sell books. Random characters that originated in the books didn't, even if they're descendants of those characters or something. The Big Three almost always had to be the leads, becuase that was how you got a book into the hands of someone who only looks at the cover or only reads the blurb. They got around it from time to time with a gimmick like "but this one has zombies!" (And even that had Han and Chewie show up) or something, but it was The Protag Show first and foremost. Big multibook series helped a bit--get them hooked in the first couple books and people come back to see the ending, but then when that series ends, they always had to do a bit of a time skip and some manner of reset to status quo. Anything that deviated from that mold had to have something justifying it. The republic commando books launched with a video game tie-in, for example. It's honestly a minor miracle how much the NJO was allowed to gently caress up the galaxy...but then there's a soft reboot going in to LotF where only the barest lipservice is paid to the Vongforming of Coruscant and the like
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Dec 24, 2020 00:54
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Yeah and they immediately killed the world brain.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:06
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Something that takes some internalizing is that the target audience is the bored browser of the shelves, or a grandparent looking for the title "Star Wars" to give as a gift, nothing more. Those of us who a dying for breadth and expansion of the universe are secondary at best when it comes to the marketing folks. The authors themselves are likely are more interested in stories like that...but when you're working in someone else's sandbox, you gotta take the story briefs you're given
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Dec 24, 2020 01:34
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jivjov posted:Something that takes some internalizing is that the target audience is the bored browser of the shelves, or a grandparent looking for the title "Star Wars" to give as a gift, nothing more. Those of us who a dying for breadth and expansion of the universe are secondary at best when it comes to the marketing folks. The authors themselves are likely are more interested in stories like that...but when you're working in someone else's sandbox, you gotta take the story briefs you're given Uh no, those authors deserve every ration of poo poo too.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:47
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jivjov posted:There was an interview I remember reading over on TheForce.net from someone involved in the old Legends stuff--I don't recall if it was an author or a publishing person or what, but they addressed that very issue in a surprisingly frank manner. Han, Luke, and Leia--or Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padmé--sell books. Random characters that originated in the books didn't, even if they're descendants of those characters or something. The Big Three almost always had to be the leads, becuase that was how you got a book into the hands of someone who only looks at the cover or only reads the blurb. They got around it from time to time with a gimmick like "but this one has zombies!" (And even that had Han and Chewie show up) or something, but it was The Protag Show first and foremost. Big multibook series helped a bit--get them hooked in the first couple books and people come back to see the ending, but then when that series ends, they always had to do a bit of a time skip and some manner of reset to status quo. That both makes a lot of sense, and really sucks.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:51
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Uh no, those authors deserve every ration of poo poo too. For franchise work, they often are handed and premise and have to write to it, and everything they do is subject to the whims of the license owner. Yes, they should strive to tell a good story, but I'm not gonna fault them for "always using the film characters" or "always setting things right around A New Hope" or whatever
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Dec 24, 2020 01:55
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Yeah and they immediately killed the world brain. Wait, what? God, I swear that half the Legends authors must have just loving hated Stover for showing them up; they couldn't wait to do this poo poo and to turn Vergere and Jacen into Sith. No nuance allowed!
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Dec 24, 2020 03:15
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jivjov posted:For franchise work, they often are handed and premise and have to write to it, and everything they do is subject to the whims of the license owner. Yes, they should strive to tell a good story, but I'm not gonna fault them for "always using the film characters" or "always setting things right around A New Hope" or whatever Troy Denning and Karen Traviss basically wrote their own tickets.
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Dec 24, 2020 04:12
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surf rock posted:Wait, what? God, I swear that half the Legends authors must have just loving hated Stover for showing them up; they couldn't wait to do this poo poo and to turn Vergere and Jacen into Sith. No nuance allowed! Vergere literally sacrificed her own life to save entire worlds and lives, Vong or not. And that's not even in a Stover book!
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Dec 24, 2020 04:14
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Vergere literally sacrificed her own life to save entire worlds and lives, Vong or not. And that's not even in a Stover book! Oh, fair point, I did think that Destiny's Way was pretty good and a better follow-up to Traitor than I'd expected.
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Dec 24, 2020 04:36
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They did later retcon Vergere into secretly having been a Sith all along though, basically labeling everything Traitor was about as evil.
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Dec 24, 2020 12:54
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Slashrat posted:They did later retcon Vergere into secretly having been a Sith all along though, basically labeling everything Traitor was about as evil. Someone somewhere got really really cranky about the Jedi moving away from a strict dichotomy of Good Or Evil, so Vergere middle way got not-so-quietly revised
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Dec 24, 2020 16:48
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For a long time, the debate over whether Vergere was dark or not was one of the big controversies on the Jedi Council Forums and other places where the books were discussed. Probably only second to the Traviss shitshow around the same time.
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Dec 24, 2020 18:49
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Man the JCF is such a mess of a forum. I know we give Jivjov poo poo a lot on SA but the nutjobs i encountered on JCF were loving insane.
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Dec 24, 2020 19:10
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I was at Barnes & Noble and saw two Halo books right next to each other, one by Traviss and one by Denning. I had a bit of a giggle.
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Dec 24, 2020 20:34
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Halo books are weird because they acknowledge that the UNSC is fascist as gently caress but its played entirely straight and every action the UNSC takes is somehow justified even in the postwar period when humanity and the Elites aren't at each other's throats. Traviss and Denning are a perfect fit. I read her Kilo 5 novels for Halo and didn't much care for them. With Denning I didn't even bother. Traviss also wrote for Gears of War and Gears 3 has a surprisingly good story that she penned for the game. The COG in Gears is also fascist as gently caress but the setting does treat them as major assholes even when set against the genocidal Locust Horde. Traviss gets poo poo in Gears for the birthing camps bit of worldbuilding but I'm not going to fault her for it because unlike Halo, which doesn't always hold the UNSC to account, the COG are outright villainous a lot of the time and the books and games treat the birthing camps and postwar breeding programs as gross human rights abuses. What I can fault Traviss for in Gears is that she latches onto another "nomad warrior culture" like she did with the Mandalorians by making the Pasangas? (The guys that Tai was from in Gears 2) into her new pet characters that the game protagonists fawn over.
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Dec 24, 2020 20:47
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I read a Denning Halo book recently because I'm an idiot who cares about the Halo story. It was just really long procedural descriptions of how to move equipment through rocky terrain interspersed by some tension-free battles (because you know none of the important characters are going to die in a book). It did have a cool stealth landing sequence though. I do feel like Denning always had a habit of meticulously describing boring tactical stuff (as opposed to cool tactical stuff like Stover's fights).
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Dec 24, 2020 20:49
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You're reading Shadows of Reach? The only thing that interests me from that book is how it relates to the Banished being the antagonists in Halo Infinite. I read the synopsis and it sounded really dumb. Good to know that its also a slog to read.
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Dec 24, 2020 21:03
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Speaking of Halo books, wasn’t there a Forerunner trilogy or something? Was that worthwhile?
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Dec 24, 2020 21:08
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Xenomrph posted:Speaking of Halo books, wasn’t there a Forerunner trilogy or something? Was that worthwhile? It's a very different set of books from the other Halo novels. It deals with the Forerunners downfall, the origin of the Flood and the fate of ancient humanity. So the books stretch over thousands of years, Dune style as humanity goes up against Forerunners while fleeing from the Flood and then thousands more years pass after. It's a lot more high concept science fiction than the mil-sf of most Halo novels. I'm not a fan of some of the developments that happen in the books but they're pretty much required reading if you want to understand half of what is talked about in Halo 4 and Halo 5. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to you.
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Dec 24, 2020 21:14
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jivjov posted:Something that takes some internalizing is that the target audience is the bored browser of the shelves, or a grandparent looking for the title "Star Wars" to give as a gift, nothing more. Those of us who a dying for breadth and expansion of the universe are secondary at best when it comes to the marketing folks. The authors themselves are likely are more interested in stories like that...but when you're working in someone else's sandbox, you gotta take the story briefs you're given I read Black Spire recently and noticed that there was a really weird disconnect in the content where you could tell that the author was trying to put her own desires into the book. It's the big tie-in for Galaxy's Edge at Disney so it exists mostly to establish the storyline present in the park, like how the Resistance base got set up on Batuu and how Vi Moradi got Kylo Ren flying in personally, so a lot of the book is a huge marketing thing where she has to visit every store and talk about how all the named food items and cocktails are so amazing and you should totally try them (I do agree, Ronto Wraps are awesome). And then every so often it suddenly swerves into really dark or adult territory. Oga is introduced murdering a Wookiee who was sleeping with one of her Rodian girls (not exactly a pairing most of us think about). Most of the characters suffer from PTSD and one is a former First Order officer who's still dealing with his indoctrination's effects on his mind and freaking out when he doesn't have anything to do because he was trained to consider himself worthless if not constantly giving a purpose for his existence. There's a smuggler who seems like a classic swaggering rogue but is actually a terminal alcoholic who wishes for the sweet non-existence of death to get out of his misery and summarily executes captured First Order troopers even when they would be valuable to keep because he wants revenge for his partner getting killed. They recruit a bunch of local farmers to help them beat the First Order and the ones who don't get killed run away because you can't just give a bunch of dudes on Mad Max contraptions old pawn shop blasters and defeat a unit of stormtroopers. It's also one of the few works to actually have stormtrooper armor be useful. Unless you've got a heavy blaster pistol like a DL-44 or a rifle, the armor actually works. All the people with little civilian handguns need to shoot for the gaps in the plates.
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Dec 24, 2020 23:58
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Xenomrph posted:Speaking of Halo books, wasn’t there a Forerunner trilogy or something? Was that worthwhile? Not really. It's late period Bear which means it's full of meditations on the "deep funk of biological truth" and protagonists who are constantly bewildered and along for the ride rather than really doing anything. Just go read EON for a better book with cool posthumans and weird megastructures. It also introduces one of the funniest trends in the Halo extended universe, the duplication of everything. By the time he's done there are two human civilizations, two Halo arrays, two Arks, two characters named the Didact (one a good guy who ends up in the Halo 3 terminals, one a bad guy who ends up in Halo 4), two Flood outbreaks (one caused by people using Flood powder as dog shampoo), and two many long travelogues about bewildered characters walking they-don't-know-where. I mean too many. Two stars. e: I forgot there are two Mendicants Bias, one a good one and one an evil one?? General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Dec 25, 2020 |
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Dec 25, 2020 00:07
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Offensive Bias is the good one who was made to kill the evil Bias. But I mean with a name like Mendicant he was going to be evil no matter what.
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Dec 25, 2020 00:28
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No, every Halo fan I talk to says that, but I’m not talking about Offensive Bias. There is a Mendicant Bias they recover and fix and bury on the Ark. But then there’s another Mendicant Bias still with the Flood.
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Dec 25, 2020 00:46
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Well the contender class constructs could operate multiple platforms. One of the theories is that the Mendicant platform still with the Flood is actually inside the Domain and he's infected Cortana with the Logic Plague, if she wasn't already infected during her stay on High Charity.
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Dec 25, 2020 00:51
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This must be what it's like listening to us Star Wars nerds talk if you've only seen the movies (it's amazing, don't take this as a passive-aggressive post trying to make you stop)
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Dec 25, 2020 01:03
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halo lore is uniquely impenetrable because the names are all loving terrible and don't convey any narrative weight. everything has a really portentious sounding name even if it's totally inconsequential
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Dec 25, 2020 01:06
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It's no glupp shiito or baron papanoidea...
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Dec 25, 2020 01:09
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Which is a shame, because the early Halo names were awesome. Pillar of Autumn, Truth and Reconciliation, Foward unto Dawn, Arbiter, etc.
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Dec 25, 2020 01:17
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:It's no glupp shiito or baron papanoidea... Or Elan Sleazebaggano
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Dec 25, 2020 01:28
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VaultAggie posted:Which is a shame, because the early Halo names were awesome. Pillar of Autumn, Truth and Reconciliation, Foward unto Dawn, Arbiter, etc. Really? I always thought those names (Arbiter aside) were somehow simultaneously dumb, clunky, and pretentious, as if the shipbuilder was just a bit too far up their own rear end. And the Covenant using the same nonsense-words naming scheme that the humans did made me roll my eyes even harder. Like if *only* the Covenant did it I could almost get behind it, but having both factions just string words together and call it a ship name felt bizarre.
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Dec 25, 2020 01:42
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Xenomrph posted:Really? I always thought those names (Arbiter aside) were somehow simultaneously dumb, clunky, and pretentious, as if the shipbuilder was just a bit too far up their own rear end. And the Covenant using the same nonsense-words naming scheme that the humans did made me roll my eyes even harder. Like if *only* the Covenant did it I could almost get behind it, but having both factions just string words together and call it a ship name felt bizarre. I mean the human ships started out being named reasonably after locations etc. then they just started going wild with the full phrases
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Dec 25, 2020 01:47
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Xenomrph posted:Really? I always thought those names (Arbiter aside) were somehow simultaneously dumb, clunky, and pretentious, as if the shipbuilder was just a bit too far up their own rear end. And the Covenant using the same nonsense-words naming scheme that the humans did made me roll my eyes even harder. Like if *only* the Covenant did it I could almost get behind it, but having both factions just string words together and call it a ship name felt bizarre. To the contrary it owns.
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Dec 25, 2020 01:50
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pillar of autumn/truth and reconciliation are great names and they aren't at all alike. one conveys a very napoleonic militarism while the other implies either religious fundamentalism (which turned out to be the case) or, much more interestingly, a post-revolutionary society. i won't pretend that all of the later ship names are as good, but they do tend to keep to their themes based on which society built them. the covenant being really into Virtue Names is also cool and good in theory, but in practice i found it basically impossible to keep track of which character had which abstract name. i think they tried to stick with single-word names to make it "simpler" and "easier" but that poo poo just slides right out of my brain
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Dec 25, 2020 02:15
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Mendicant Bias was ripped into two parts after Offensive Bias stomped him flat. One got thrown into the Forerunner ship that Truth uses and the other was sequestered on the Ark. When Truth's ship reached the Ark they reunited back into one being. Offensive Bias is off, I dunno, drinking martinis or something.
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Dec 25, 2020 02:33
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Angry_Ed posted:I mean the human ships started out being named reasonably after locations etc. then they just started going wild with the full phrases General Battuta posted:To the contrary it owns.  Jazerus posted:pillar of autumn/truth and reconciliation are great names and they aren't at all alike. one conveys a very napoleonic militarism while the other implies either religious fundamentalism (which turned out to be the case) or, much more interestingly, a post-revolutionary society. i won't pretend that all of the later ship names are as good, but they do tend to keep to their themes based on which society built them. "Emancipation Of Silence" "Beginning Through Fate" "Eagerness With Strife" "Benevolence And Hardship" I could probably do this all day. Edit-- "Questions Upon Mirth" Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Dec 25, 2020 |
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Dec 25, 2020 02:38
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pillar of autumn i'll grant you, because although it sounds like it's named for some obscure war monument it is just flat made up, but truth and reconciliation is a powerful name for an alien ship because it's a term rooted in human history. our recent history, but distant history for the space fascists of the UNSC. it's enough to make you wonder whether the covenant are really the bad guys (they don't do any war crimes in halo 1) the problem with the names you made up, and similarly the actual names that the later halo writers created, is that they follow the form of "truth and reconciliation" without understanding it. the other covenant ships shouldn't be "virtue x and virtue y" because that was not actually the process used to create the name "truth and reconciliation". i guess when they decided the covenant were religious fanatics they kind of made it hard to extend the implicit theme of post-revolution justice since the revolution didn't actually happen until the end of halo 3
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Dec 25, 2020 03:04
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