Geeky Star Wars Book Thread: Attack of the Disney Clones

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Geeky Star Wars Book Thread: Attack of the Disney Clones

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

You should read my OFFICIALLY CANON star wars story "The Final Order" which is all about the fascism of the Empire and how there's no 'clean Starfleet' (to echo the noxious 'clean Wehrmacht' myth). Except we're not allowed to call it the Imperial Starfleet, despite that being the term from the Empire Strikes Back opening crawl, because it's too Star Trek.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2020 19:42

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Crazy Joe Wilson posted:

Obviously this thread is going to try to avoid bitching about wiping out the old EU, but is it okay to still reference or discuss the Legends stuff? I recently read the original Thrawn trilogy a few months ago and got my hands on "Spectre of the Past" or whatever. I really enjoy them.

No, absolutely not, Disney will put you in the memory hole. This thread is strictly canonical!

# ¿ Dec 17, 2020 21:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Arbite posted:

? It was called that on Mandalorian earlier this season.

Maybe your fancy TV shows can do it but I got a hard no from Disney editorial on using �Starfleet.�

# ¿ Dec 18, 2020 18:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Huh. I always thought Star Wars was historically unpopular in China. I guess it's too big a market to ignore.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2020 04:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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).

# ¿ Dec 24, 2020 20:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 00:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 00:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 01:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Xenomrph posted:

Pillar of Autumn is the very first ship we see in the series, it was always dumb names.

Actually after much quiet reflection you'll find that it's stupid and dumb.

We'll have to agree to disagree, they both sound like gibberish abstract words strung together into a little phrase. Like I was trying to come up with similar gibberish ship names and my brain just wouldn't let me, as if there was a mental block that said "This is gibberish, stop it". But I think I can power through it and come up with some Halo ship name contenders.

"Emancipation Of Silence"

"Beginning Through Fate"

"Eagerness With Strife"

"Benevolence And Hardship"

I could probably do this all day.

Edit--

"Questions Upon Mirth"

See I can tell you're wrong because the ones you're coming up with are terrible. There's an art to it.

Read Iain Banks!

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 04:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

George Kansas posted:

Right now I'm reading Lost Stars and the main thing I'm really enjoying out of it is how it makes members of the empire more sympathetic. Particularly passages like this (from right after the death star done blew up alderaan):

While I was browsing through this thread I saw a post about how it's problematic that this book humanizes someone who is submitting and serving fascism, and I haven't finished the book so I'm not really arguing that point here I suppose, but I do think there is a lot of value in writing characters who are doing the mental calculations required to rationalize their service and try to answer the question "are we the baddies?" in a way that correctly engineers the easier solution of "no, everything is fine, I am fine to continue serving in this organization."

I will always be infinitely more interested in this sort of almost mundane, bureaucratic evil than I am the tolkien-esque dark side power fantasy temptations of the Force.

I agree that this is valuable but there's a very thin line between this and "Clean Wehrmacht".

# ¿ Dec 28, 2020 20:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Even in a galaxy far far away the black guy dies first.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 17:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

T___A posted:

I mean in the meta sense, by like the authors and stuff.

"You gotta have an Empire because that's Star Wars" � the authors and stuff

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 17:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Van Dis posted:

One thing I definitely do not conclude when looking at the sequel trilogy is that planning the narrative with an eye towards internal coherence and integrity was a prime goal, so unless there's a source for that claim I remain skeptical.

They tossed out the EU because it was too complicated to explain, then they set about making a new sequel trilogy which ended up being a complicated mess. Since they tossed out the EU first, the way the sequel trilogy turned out isn't really relevant to that decision.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2021 17:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah I liked that a lot. The �let�s do something new� message was so right for that middle installment. Anything could�ve happened in the third one! Anything at allllllll

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 18:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:

The problem was that the main guy pushing that message was the antagonist who was depicted throughout as confused, torn, and ultimately mistaken. Even within TLJ itself.

Like that was even Luke's arc, being pushed back towards not rejecting the wisdom of the past amidst all the failures.

That's not a problem.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 18:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm love Shatterpoint

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 15:19

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The thing that's extremely clever about Republic Commando is that it's on paper just another narrow-corridor heavily scripted shooter, exactly like a zillion others from that time. But it lets the player cue all the scripted sequences. "Cover 62 while he blows up the droid dispenser" would be a boring set piece once, let alone repeated 150 times. But the choice to let the player tell 62 to blow up the droid dispenser makes it part of play and suddenly it goes from insufferable to really pretty fun. You can set up your guys where you like them and then tell 62 to do his thing, and maybe he'll fail and you'll have to go revive him, or try to do it yourself, or put a different squadmate on the job, or whatever. Just putting the scripted sequence in the gameplay where it can be touched by all the other gameplay systems does so much work.

There are a couple other neat things about that game too, like enemies which will actually advance all the way up to you (aside from the usual melee/suicide guys most shooter enemies just kind of flit around between cover and wait for you to make a move). And it has great audio. I really like that game.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2021 04:16

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

i love it for the same reasons, but i do hate the super battle droids. they are a bitch to kill even if you do the grenade then shoot thing.

They are difficult but I think very necessary to to the gameplay. If you can revive/be revived by your squad mates then the only way to create actual difficulty is enemies who will push you constantly and kill you when you try to revive. Their slow walk advance puts a timer on the encounter.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2021 16:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The damage tuning is definitely a way to slow the combat down so the squad tactics stuff matters more. If the player could easily kill stuff you wouldn�t need sniper/grenade/demo orders. Also enemy damage output would have to go up too and then your squad mates would die more and people would hate them.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2021 17:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Is this the one that starts with the incredibly laborious prose description of the New Hope opening but done in reverse?

# ¿ May 9, 2021 00:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Mostly Russian but a little bit Finnish

# ¿ May 9, 2021 22:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Wasn't there some bizarre rumor that they approached David Fincher to direct a star war and he wanted to do droid liberation? I'm going to google this after making this post rather than before for the sake of :justpost:

e: this definitely happened sort of

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jun 4, 2021

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 17:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Arc Hammer posted:

Snokeclones is a joke that nobody in the movie made.

I go to the corner store and I order a snow cone. A muffled voice jeers "and you're just a child in a mask"

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 15:22

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I don�t remember much Force heresy going on in Force Heretic

# ¿ Oct 16, 2021 01:22

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I shoved a New Rebellion reference into Disney canon :sun:

# ¿ Nov 4, 2021 06:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Crazy Joe Wilson posted:

So what's the general consensus on the Disney EU versus the Old EU? I know the old EU got super-convoluted by the end, my impression of Disney EU is it's on its way there. Just from the comics alone it feels like they're trying to cram too much inbetween the OT movies. Am I off the mark or is that the general sentiment?

You fool! Don't you know there is no Disney EU? There is only....The Group!

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 09:25

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I would love to see his Star Wars trilogy but I suspect we won�t get it.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2021 16:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Casimir Radon posted:

I remember Rogue Planet is where Zenoma Semitic was first introduced. I�ve never read it but it�s been basically forgotten as a book at this point. None of the prequel era novels really had much staying power.

Shatterpoint stayed with me p. good :mad:

# ¿ Dec 30, 2021 00:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

What's the difference between a swoop and a speeder bike anyway?

# ¿ Jan 7, 2022 16:00

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Black Fleet Crisis feels incredibly 90s to me, not in a good or bad way, it's just very of the time. Big united 'end of history' state tries to cope with random aggro warlords doing genocides.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2022 20:37

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Bothuwui

# ¿ Jan 27, 2022 17:47

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

In the novel Invincible, who is invincible?

# ¿ Feb 2, 2022 04:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Maybe they're elite because they don't do a ton of drugs to cope with their PTSD and brain injuries and murder each other all the time like irl special forces. They're well adjusted and stable.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2022 15:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

feedmyleg posted:

Heh. Ordered the old Han Solo/Lando books from a used bookstore online for nostalgia purposes. They just arrived alongside a copy of Heart of Darkness that I didn't order. I can only assume this was a scathing judgement on the part of the seller, saying "Please, for the love of god, read some real literature."

Immediately mail back a copy of SHATTERPOINT

# ¿ Feb 24, 2022 05:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Troy Denning got started doing D&D stuff and Abeloth just seems like a fuckin D&D thing to me.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2022 14:43

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The nerd narrative about Lost is pretty wrong. They settled on an outline and stuck to it. They painstakingly answered every question and even released a 10th or 15th or whatever anniversary video to answer all the questions that hadn't been answered to fans' satisfaction.

Some of the answers just weren't very good.

Damon Lindelof's post-Lost output on TV (Leftovers, Watchmen) has been universally excellent and I think he deserves most of the credit and or blame for Lost. Abrams was barely involved after the pilot afaik.

# ¿ May 23, 2022 22:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Air Budd Dw???

# ¿ May 25, 2022 21:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Luuke...

Snoke...

What does it mean??

# ¿ May 26, 2022 04:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Xenomrph posted:

Did they re-canonize anything from the old Tales books or did they change poo poo for the sake of changing poo poo?

I rewatched TLJ last night for the first time since it came out, knowing what the movie is trying to do made me soften on the movie a lot but it�s still got real problems. I think the biggest one is that Holdo is dumb as gently caress by not telling anyone what her surprisingly simple and reasonable escape plan was, and it gets a shitload of people killed because the chronically reckless loose-cannon ace pilot (who had already disobeyed orders at the beginning of the movie) predictably disobeys orders and does something reckless that jeopardizes Holdo�s plan.

Like� all she had to do was tell him the plan. There was no �OPSEC� there, there wasn�t a traitor onboard or the First Order hacking their comms, when one of her key personnel is known for disobeying orders then maybe she shouldn�t be hiding information from him - especially when she ends up telling him the plan anyway (after a shitload of people have been senselessly killed, naturally) and he immediately says �oh yeah, that makes sense�.

If she�d told him what was up from the start, Poe wouldn�t have gone rogue, sent Rose and Finn on a borderline suicide mission that almost gets them captured or killed repeatedly and nearly fails like 4 times (and finally does fail at the end, nearly getting them killed and directly resulting in the First Order learning about the fleeing transports and blowing up like 80% of them), and staged a loving mutiny.

It�s not enough to ruin the movie, and it does have worthwhile stuff and I am glad I rewatched it, but when the entire B-plot and much of the tension, stakes, and tragedy hinges on one character willfully being a dumbass, it chafes a little.

This is so utterly backwards.

# ¿ May 26, 2022 23:55

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

What Holdo should have done was thrown Poe in the brig immediately when she took command, and told him nothing, and saved the Resistance.

Shooting him would've worked too.

She has no obligation, as the commander of a warship in combat, to tell anyone anything, especially when the first thing that man does when he gets the information is to broadcast it in the clear to the enemy.

The gender dynamics are of course even worse. Women need to understand and manage the emotions of those hotshot men. It's not the responsibility of the men to trust the women or to manage their own rebellious feelings. no. That silly woman in a dress should've just trusted the space action man with all her secrets. Then he would've known not to do the bad thing.

# ¿ May 27, 2022 00:02

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Geeky Star Wars Book Thread: Attack of the Disney Clones

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