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Mercy Kill is also pretty good and should go on that list in the OP. It puts a cap on Wraith Squadron and gives most everyone their deserved happy endings. As opposed to the dogshit the rest of the franchise turned into for the heroes.
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Dec 22, 2020 17:08
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fartknocker posted:The only problem I have with Mercy Kill is it is, chronologically, the second to last book of the old EU before Crucible. I read it without doing any of the Legacy of the Force or Fate of the Jedi series, so jumping to that is... tricky. At a minimum, you'd have to have some working knowledge of the New Jedi Order, since Allston has two books there (Rebel Dream & Rebel Stand) and the Wraiths in general show up in one or two others, plus some of the insanity that happens after that too. It is a good book and if you like the Wraiths or Allston's style (As I did), it's very much worth the effort, but it requires a more background (Semi-regular consulting of Wookiepedia or a solid reference book like Essential Guide to Warfare) to get the sense of the setting than other Wraith books set back during the pre-Thrawn era. I honestly don't think Mercy Kill required any more than the usual amount of "ok those are weird words in strange contexts, but this is Star Wars so that's par for the course" level of acceptance from readers. There's a bit of NJO-ish prologue, there's a bit of slightly-post-Thrawn era Wraith-ing, and then the main plot revolves around the crew cleaning up after some loose threads from what appears to be FotJ plot. I just kind of took the FotJ references in stride; I never read any of it nor consulted Wookieepedia over it.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:54
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Also Denning really really wanted to gently caress bugs so that was like a running thread in every Star Wars book he wrote. And while I'd be like, sure ok, whatever puffs your thorax, I'm not gonna judge, it's literally loving everywhere. VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 02:37
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Hiro Protagonist posted:You know, maybe the Disney take over was an objectively good thing if that's the direction Star Wars was heading. I'd say that, but the same people under whose watch this poo poo happened, are still in charge of books. Overall they showed their unfitness for the franchise with NJO, but as soon as any portion of the Dark Nest trilogy's manuscript made it to their editors they should've canned the whole thing. (Given the current state of the franchise with their propensity for cancelling any portion of any level of canon as soon as convenient, and re-doing the same era over and over, they should've just erased NJO as soon as it happened.) VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 14:43
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Allston's takedown of the entire franchise, right here:
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Dec 23, 2020 17:21
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chaosrefined posted:Don't forget Denning throwing casual sexism around. Paraphrasing here, but there's a section where Jaina and Jacen had a fight, but Luke was projecting his image over Jaina's. When the illusion broke, Jacen was surprised to see his sister. Later on, she talks about this with the OG 3 and talks about the surprise Jacen had shown. Han, for some loving reason, chalks this up to the fact that Jaina was a girl and thus couldn't possibly best Jacen in combat. JFC
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Dec 23, 2020 17:45
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Lord Hydronium posted:I kinda see a parallel between how Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi dealt with the NJO with how Rise of Skywalker treated The Last Jedi. Sorry we did something interesting, it won't happen again. To be fair, TLJ tried to do that with TFA.
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Dec 23, 2020 20:00
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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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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: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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It's no glupp shiito or baron papanoidea...
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Dec 25, 2020 01:09
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Chairman Capone posted:The problem is we know it would be pronounced Snooke. My recommendation is "Snookums"
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Dec 28, 2020 01:38
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Robot Style posted:Something kind of interesting I found recently - it turns out Rise of Skywalker had concept work done for World Devastators, in case anyone thought that the idea of Palpatine's clone wasn't directly lifted from Dark Empire: JJ Abrams' parts of the series are basically pick and chosen from the entire Dark Empire series, 1, 2 and Empire's End. Which makes the decision to use Rian Johnson's script for 8 particularly exasperating.
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Jan 12, 2021 22:05
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Sector Corrector posted:The Rat Thread actually answered my question. 2 out of 6 ain't bad
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Feb 1, 2021 16:08
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Sabotaging Legacy and trying to kill off Traviss's poo poo makes him more sympathetic, not less. (still awful, however)
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Feb 7, 2021 00:15
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Dapper_Swindler posted:since the ps4/switch port got announced for republic commando. i am curious how the books are. i bought hard contact for cheap but how are the sequels? Bad to worse.
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Feb 25, 2021 00:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:The first three books are quite good by Star Wads novels standards. Since the continuum of Star Wars novels stretches from, like, Iron Fist, to, like, Planet of Twilight, that's not saying much.
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Feb 25, 2021 05:51
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I think Dark Empire is legit one of the best ways to have done the sequels. Sure, there's garbage in there that should stay buried, like the steamships and whatever, but if you wanted to draw a throughline from the prequels, having it be the Skywalkers discovering and putting an end to Palpatine's quest for eternal life is a pretty good one. X-Wing series and some of the other stuff should always be spin-offs, a lot of them don't really deal with the gestalt totality of Star Wars. A Star Wars "main" story needs to deal with the Force mysticism parts of it as well as the mil-SF parts of it, and Dark Empire does both. VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 16:02
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I was pretty pissed off because it was super obvious in TFA that Rey was supposed to be a Skywalker all along, like they all but put it in neon. Then Rian Johnson hit and they had to retroactively make her a Skywalker via Palpatine like Anakin.
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Mar 9, 2021 17:06
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General Battuta posted:“let’s do something new” 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.
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Mar 9, 2021 18:36
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Casimir Radon posted:The thing that nags at me after the most recent 5 Zahn books, is whether Thrawn is really this bad at politics, or just wants people to think he is. It just keeps getting brought up. Feels like a nod to the list of things Sherlock Holmes is supposedly incompetent at, which included not knowing about heliocentricism. Hey now, knowing skull caliper measurements is way more important to Victorian-ish detectives than knowing that the earth orbits the sun
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Jul 12, 2021 14:45
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