What are your hopes for the new Star Wars EU/continuity?

A lot of the 1990s novels don't really "feel" like Star Wars to me because they aren't about Jedi vs Dark Siders, they're about warlords and super weapons. They were living in a pre-Prequel world where we never got really see Jedi and Sith and actual lightsaber battles.

 

If that's what post-prequel stories are more like, then I would be less inclined to read them. It's not that you can't have Sith with lightsabers in fights, it's that it is so formulaic and cheapens the whole thing. There are just so many things about the prequels and the EU that make no sense at all. The Jedi are more like a paramilitary force than wise men who use anachronistic weapons and a force that isn't easy to understand or explain. I don't think I'll ever like Star Wars as a franchise because it demystifies itself and really becomes more limited when they oversaturate the world with Jedis and their opponents.

Also, what is the deal with the Sith being so much like the Jedi? I thought it was more sinister when they were basically an evil cult who manipulated everything from the shadows.

 

So you think the Daley and Crispin novels did not feel like Star Wars?

What have you read?

 

The Truce at Bakura - actually this was the first Star Wars book I ever got when I was a kid. I was so disappointed, and this was when I was impressionable and making up my own stories that really made no sense. I think that says how much I didn't like it.

Dark Empire II - had some really kickass artwork on the covers. I'm serious! Awesome designs and it really looked like it fit in. I remember the story being pretty much a repeat of the movies. I liked it then, but looking back, it really didn't add anything new. Plus the planet destroyer things were kind of a pointless step back.

The first of the Thrawn books - I don't see what is so wonderful about these. Too many references to casual spoken lines from the movies for one thing. Just because we might see something like "The guns, they've stopped!" doesn't mean that it's going to be like the Gettysburg Address to the characters. All of that said, I really like the whole Chiss species and the Thrawn character. Maybe if it wasn't so distracting to have the main characters in there so prominently...especially Han Solo.


various comics - all of varying quality. The Jedi-Sith ones aren't bad to me and some are actually quite good on their own, but that's not what makes Star Wars good to me. The ones featuring Darth Vader are entirely superfluous and really don't make him any more interesting to me. I will say that comics and art from before the prequels were a lot more willing to take risks and even to redesign the characters. It might sound like heresy to say that the Battle of Hoth reimagined would suck, but I did have this comic art that really took it to the next level; The walkers were all three times as big and the sky looked a lot more bleak and cold (almost purple instead of blue).
I think it comes down to this: if they draw their inspiration directly from the movies (especially the prequels), they are less interesting. If they take risks, they obviously could screw up and feel un-Star Wars, but I think this is where the best opportunities are.

 

If they even approach the quality of the Thrawn trilogy, the new EU books will be a marked improvement on 98% of the previous work that comprised that ridiculous mishmash of tangled continuity and tortured storylines. It was even worse than Trek continuity towards the end and that's no mean feat.

 

Didn't he also say that he was originally planning to make Darth Vader into an alien with some kind of a robot head until Empire Strikes Back?

The worst thing about George Lucas is that it seems like everything he has said since the 80's has been a bunch of lies.

 

It was ALWAYS going to be just six movies dammit!

 

There were plenty of books and comics exploring bold new things in the EU. You just picked the wrong titles.

 

Well that's the inherent problem with Star Wars. You run the risk of being too derivative or you read something where you wonder why it isn't simply in its own universe. I think one comic that rode the line perfectly was Darklighter, which was simply the backstory for Biggs. It kept the look and feel of Star Wars, expanded a minor character in a way that didn't feel contrived, and told a nice complete story that didn't ruin anything. Shadows of the Empire wasn't bad either. Yeah Dash is basically a Kurt Russel character masquerading as Han Solo...but it's plausible in the framework of the overall story. I think he's a lot better than having another mystical ninja Jedi whose defining feature is his ability to do somersaults. Compare that with some of the other stories - a sun destroying super weapon, psychic velociraptors, anything from the Old Republic which makes the whole official saga seem insignificant...I'd rather not waste my time. I think the point I stopped trying is when they made IG-88 into some kind of all important character. That isn't what made him interesting in the first place. It's almost like they are admitting that any one-off design from the original movies is a hundred times more interesting than what the prequels offered, but they still don't know how to work with them half the time.
Don't get me wrong, I've read some Trek comics where I want to throw it at the wall with how stupid they make the characters act. (anything involving clemency for the Borg as a species is completely gotdamn retarded)

So I guess it comes down to quality control. It's like bad episodes of Trek. We all know they exist and we ignore them as best we can. With the way the whole franchise went with the prequels, it's almost like you run a higher risk of wasting your time on stuff that totally misses the point of the original movies or of good plots in general.

 

What? That's some of the best EU right there. Big stuff happens in other ceturies too, the galaxy is huge.

 

I've really only read one Star Wars novel outside of the movie tie ins and "Splinter in the Mind's Eye", and "Shadows of the Empire", and that was "Death Star". Now that was a fun read.

I have read the Dark Empire comics (including Empire's End). Those were pretty cool reads....and I have the Dark Empire series on CD.... DE, DEII, Empire's End. It's a decent listen, but you can really hear some goof ups in the voice acting....such as a voice actor accidentally reading sound effects direction, or someone just misreading two lines and accidentally making them into a run on sentence.

 

Has anyone else read the original Star Wars book? I mean the one that was released along with the movie? It really is a good read, and it's the only movie adaptation which doesn't follow the movie near exactly. There's a lot more going on there, from character's inner monologues to what Lucas probably actually had in mind...it actually was a lot different than what was on screen, but not with lots of stupid stuff. The scenes are a lot more dynamic and surprisingly violent.

I think it's a good starting point for EU books. Not necessarily just gore and stuff, but a more creative AND serious take on the universe.

 

If you want something different the Kotor comics were great before the canon apocalypse.

 

The original novelization was actually ghost written by Alan Dean Foster.

 

The SW novel also adds an interesting introduction which outlines the events leading up to the movie. It actually is pretty much the political story of Episodes I-III-the Fall of the Republic, the Clone Wars, the Jedi purge-with one major difference-the Emperor is portrayed as weak and a recluse (and no mention is made of him having the force), hardly the mastermind of the movies.

Another interesting reason for the novel's differences is the FX change. The X-wing fighters are blue group in the novel, but they realized when working on the FX that blue would be transparant on a blue screen, so what the finished film had was red.

The prequel novels aren't really straight adaptations, they have a lot of added material that isn't in the films, such as the history of the Sith in TPM, a lot of stuff in AOTC's opening and Anakin's motivation makes more sense in the ROTS novel.

All the novels also pretty much use most of the deleted scenes, such as the Biggs stuff cut from the original film. I think the reason it was cut was to make the opening fast paced and not disjointed-originally the blockade runner scenes were mixed with the Bigg's scenes (Luke sees the space battle, for instance, while repairing a Moisture Vaporater).

 

For my part, I have no expectations. Because I'm not touching any of it, not until after Episode VII comes out. And I won't be there opening night for that either - I'll wait and hear spoiler-free reviews from friends and family. If they like it, and then if (and ONLY if) I like what I see, then I'll check the nu-EU out. If not, then I'll just say a sad goodbye to Luke, Han and Leia and get on with my life.

I am not getting burned again.

 

I never paid much attention to the Star Wars EU fandom. Can someone here fill me in on how the Yuuzhan Vong were regarded?

 

I hope it's worth sticking with...

 

Fandom has mixed feelings about the Vog War, i enjoyed it.

 

I thought the book series including them (New Jedi Order) was overly-long winded and grimdark. The Vong are rather cool villains, very well realized, but they feel weirdly out of place to me. Like a guy in a blood-encrusted WH40K cosplay at a brony convention.

I suppose that counts as mixed feelings.