Gwendoline Christie is quite tall, being taller than the average stormtrooper even without the armor on. I mean I'm reasonably tall at 188 cm, and I'd have to look up at her, and I don't have to do that to very many women.
The problem with adapting Mara Jade is that her story is intrinsically tied up with Luke's and from what little we know, that doesn't appear to be compatible with where they're going with the ST. Now sure, you can alter things, have her just be some force sensitive mercenary or an Inquisitor type working for the ISB but that's not Mara Jade. It's Mara Jade in name only. That's not to say they won't have a character or two inspired by her, but that's as far as it goes.
I actually came up with a way you could adapt Mara and keep a lot of the basic plot points from her Legends story. Instead of being an Emperor's Hand she was recruited and trained by the Grand Inquisitor, and when he dies she leaves the Empire. From there things pretty much play out the same way they did in Legends, with her joining up with a smuggler, or they could change things up a bit more and have it be Hondo. They could transfer the romantic story to Kanan, and if they really wanted even turn it into a love triangle with him, Mara, and Hera.
First off, I doubt Kanan is long for this world with the final season coming up. Secondly: love triangle? Eww. As for the rest of what you describe, it's as I said above: Mara Jade in name only. Here's the thing: the core of Mara's character is the arc she undergoes in the Thrawn trilogy that pretty much culminates in the later duology. All that stuff about being Emperor's Hand and a functionary for an underworld boss is just background. It's her character's starting position. The meat of her story is in her struggle to stop running, put her past behind her and move forward. Actually, not unlike Kanan in a lot of ways. If one were to just keep her as the cool Imperial assassin/underworld operative thing then it would be a shallow imitation, perpetually stuck in the first act of their story. It'd be like if Luke never left the moisture farm, if Han had stayed a mercenary, if Anakin lived his whole life as a slave or if Palpatine was just a corrupt little senator that had never met Plagueis. They would not be the characters we know, because they are defined by their stories.
I was imaging this as a way to introduce her as a recurring character or even a full time member of the Ghost crew, with an arc dealing with the kind of stuff you're talking about. It seemed to me like you could do her arc from Legends and just switch out the Emperor and Grand Inquisitor, and Luke and Kanan.
I figure, if they want to use Mara Jade, they will wait for a different show. Because of the huge gap of basically unknown between RotJ and TFA, she would easily be in there someplace and still be gone before we pick up the story again with Luke Skywalker in TLJ.
They've spent *way* too much time on the Kanan/Hera relationship to go with some hackneyed, soap opera level love triangle/forced romance story nonsense. If they wanted to do that then they may as well use Callista instead of Mara as that was pretty much her whole thing. It's all academic at this point anyway since the upcoming season will be their last. They're likely going to spend every episode of this truncated season on tying up loose ends, not introducing new complications. Yeah, if you're going to introduce her or a character inspired by her at all then post RotJ is the period to do it. Any earlier and she's just a generic Imperial villain with red hair and a suspiciously familiar name.
I hoped that we get another Jaden Korr novel from Jedi Academy but with the new directions It won't happen anymore. But I still am hoping for Dooku novel by James Luceno
Something I found odd throughout the entire Leia book... Spoiler Palpatine was brought up a bunch of times. Tarkin was even in it a bit. But no mention of Darth Vader.
Yeah, Vader isn't exactly a public figure. During this period he's the Emperor's personal enforcer and very few that encounter him live to tell the tale, most of which know to keep their mouths shut. Recall that in 'Rebels' they had no clue who he was, beyond the obvious. Bail certainly knows, but it's a secret he's kept very much to himself, not even trusting it to Ahsoka (his head of intelligence) it would seem. One gets the impression he wasn't massively active prior to this point. In the early years he would have been mostly concerned with tracking down the last surviving Jedi and training his new Inquisitors, but as those became fewer and further between I imagine he rarely left Mustafar save to do the Emperor's bidding. It seems it wasn't until after the events of ANH that he became more directly involved in larger events.
Come to that, Palpatines not exactly a public figure either. I mean obviously everyone knows who he is, but it's been mentioned several times in the books that he very rarely appears in public, and all released images of him are doctored to make him appear younger and not hideously deformed. We even saw some evidence of this in Rebels with an image of Palpatine on the state news that's clearly taken from when he was Chancellor.
Yeah, one of the few times that a current image of him was shown was in the first Star Wars Annual, which looked like a live televised address.
From a Certain Point of View and William Shakespeare's Star Wars: The Force Doth Awaken came out today. I plan on reading From a Certain Point of View eventually, but I already got the Klingon Travel Guide today, and I'm trying to cut back on my book buying. Anybody read the other William Shakespeare's Star Wars books? They seem like a potentially fun idea, but I haven't really heard much about them. In honor of the releases StarWars.com posted interviews with the editor of Point of View and the writer of The Force Doth Awaken. The Point of View interview also includes the social media cards that were posted to announce the writers, and their names of the writers and their past Star Wars work or best known work. It really is one hell of an impressive list, and I think it's great that all of them were willing to do it for free.
I read the ANH one. There are some genuinely funny parts to it, like Han commenting at the end of the Greedo scene "never doth I reveal whether 'twas I who shot first or he." But really, the joke wears itself out halfway through and it just become a rather tedious retelling of the movie with all the dialogue done in faux Shakespearean style.
That was what I was afraid of. It seems like the kind of thing that could be fun for a scene or two, like as a sketch on SNL or as an online thing, but I don't know if I could take a whole book of it. I actually do like Shakespeare, but I don't know if I'd want to read something in that style that wasn't originally intended to be done in that style.