Star Wars Books Thread
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Not quite. The exchange was actually: -
Almec: "Mandalore's violent past is behind us. All of our warriors were exiled to our moon, Concordia. They died out years ago."
Kenobi: "Hmm, are you certain? I recently encountered a man who wore Mandalorian armor: Jango Fett."
Alemc: "Jango Fett was a common bounty hunter. How he acquired that armor is beyond me."
I know it's splitting hairs, but he's not calling Jango a "pretender" so much as dismissing the idea that he could have been one of their exiled warriors (remember that this is a cast & clan based social system, so the label "warrior" would have a very particular meaning.)
I feel it's an important distinction since it leaves open the possibility that Jango could have been from some non-warrior clan who took it upon himself to train as a warrior. Being a bounty hunter on top of that may be seen as further proof he's no Mandalorian Warrior, as (and I'm just speculating here) selling oneself as a mercenary could be contrary to their code of honour. Think of it as being akin to the Bushido code.
It still leaves open the question as to where he got the armor as it was not easy to come across (recall even Sabine was accused by the Protectors of stealing her armor.) That story is yet to be told but I can see several possibilities, some that could have Jango being from Mandalorian space (which is something like 1000 systems!) others where he's nothing of the sort.
Whenever that story is to put into canon (it's just a matter of time) I feel a key detail is his request to have a clone to raise as a son. This positively screams "daddy issues". Maybe Jango's father was indeed a wayward Mandalorian Warrior. Maybe he passed some of his training and creed (and armor?) to Jango, or maybe he instilled in him a great cynicism about the much vaunted but often hypocritical "warrior code". Maybe he was hardcore warrior code but Jango hated the old cuss and his deliberately flaunting the armor and violating the code was his way of sticking it to the old man. There's all kinds of possible stories there I think.
Sorry to get nitpicky here, but the TOR novels actually tie into the The Old Republic MMORPG, not the Knights of the Old Republic games.
Ah, my bad, I took the word pretender from wookieepedia. It had been a while since I watched the episode.
I just finished Thrawn. It's okay, while I've read better it's still pretty good. Thrawn himself is awesome, and it was nice getting some background on Governor Pryce from Rebels. And while each of the various "segments" of Thrawn's career are pretty good on their own, this novel could have used more work tying everything together to form one narrative. As it is the arc that runs through it is somewhat weak, thematically. The audience's perspective character, Eli Vanto and okay, but in all honesty his fate at the end is probably the most interesting thing about the character.
To be fair, that does seem to be the official way that canon is treating it; that Jango Fett was not Mandalorian, just using the tech. For example, the Republic Commando: Hard Contact entry in the Essential Reader's Guide pointed out that the TCW episode seems to suggest that Fett wasn't Mandalorian. (Since Legends used the Fett was Mandalorian assumption too many times, I gathered the official explanation for that iteration was that he was, but the New Mandalorians were mistaken or disowning him or something.)
In the old EU, before those terrible Mandalorian epiosdes of TCW at least, Jango was definitely mandalorian but Boba really wasn't until sometime post RotJ. Basically Boba was raised by Jango but didn't have a real connection to the Mandalorians as a culture, while Jango was highly regarded by other mandalorians. Jango was actually the Mandalore, who is basically the leader of the culture, although not one that wields a huge amount of power in peace time (the fact that Jango was absent for about 10 years without much effect to his people was because in peace the Mandalore is more a figure to intimidate outsiders). When he died the role was basically filled by a regent, until around Legacy of the Force when Boba's granddaughter finally gets him to accept his role (her mother had been a full mandalorian, from what I remember) and Boba joins the mandalorians officially and takes his father's old title.
Change happens, there are decades between the Clone Wars and the Legacy of the Force novels, who's to say that the Mando culture changed over this time frame. Is American Culture exactly the same as it was 50 or 60 years ago @kirk55555 ?
Sounds about right.
I just recall the Wook chose to reconcile pre-TCW Legends Jango Fett's backstory as an important Mandalorian with the Legends iteration of TCW suggesting he was just a bounty hunter using (stolen?) armor as the New Mandalorians being mistaken in their assessment on the program (while in Disney canon, the Powers That Be seem to prefer using the TV show rather than pre-TCW Legends as the basis for their backstory).
(In actuality, the granddaughter's mother -- Boba Fett's daughter -- never seemed to identify as Mandalorian. The Wook article for the character describes it as follows:
The footnote cites the Legacy of the Force novel Revelation as the source for that info.
Well, since Boba's/the mandalorian stuff with Jaina in Legacy of the Force was specifically written to tie into the Republic Commando mandalorians (Karen traviss wrote most of the Fett/mandalorian stuff in LotF, a bunch of the characters from the Commando books show up and the whole culture is specifically the same as it was in those novels), I don't know what you're getting at. Its not a matter of change, the culture's have different languages, homeworlds, history and ways of doing things.
But, its all irrelevant anyway. Two different continuities, two vastly different groups called mandalorians that have literally nothing in common but a style of armor and a few names. I obviously have the one I prefer (which is very obvious), but that wasn't what I was talking about. I was just mentioning what the EU had to say about Boba being Mandalorian or not, since that was what was being talked about.
This is the problem with fans taking what's on wookipedia as gospel. It's a fan run wiki like any other with it's own policies and internal politics (no, seriously!) So it can be very subjective in it's interpretations, to say nothing of doggedly literal at times.
A persistent problem I've found that in an apparent effort to make their articles coherent, they incorporate retcons into the main body of the text and since it's a wiki, not every relevant article gets the same interpretation. I remember back when TCW's Dathomir arc came out their articles on Dathomirians, Rattataki and Zabraks were all over the place, with various editors trying to anticipate an official explanation or just putting out competing ideas. All the while trying to reconcile it with EU content, which was always a hopeless endeavour. Basically the same thing happened with Mandalore of course.
The problem with this approach is that it tends to distort or erase aspects of older material that gets less and less recognisable with every retcon (seriously, watching the Clone Wars article change over the years was like some 1984 historical revisionism in action.) Since the Disney buyout, it seems like a good opportunity to wipe away a lot of that and instead present things in each and every incarnation, contradictions and all.
A persistent problem I've found that in an apparent effort to make their articles coherent, they incorporate retcons into the main body of the text and since it's a wiki, not every relevant article gets the same interpretation. I remember back when TCW's Dathomir arc came out their articles on Dathomirians, Rattataki and Zabraks were all over the place, with various editors trying to anticipate an official explanation or just putting out competing ideas. All the while trying to reconcile it with EU content, which was always a hopeless endeavour. Basically the same thing happened with Mandalore of course.
The problem with this approach is that it tends to distort or erase aspects of older material that gets less and less recognisable with every retcon (seriously, watching the Clone Wars article change over the years was like some 1984 historical revisionism in action.) Since the Disney buyout, it seems like a good opportunity to wipe away a lot of that and instead present things in each and every incarnation, contradictions and all.
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Oh sure, I was only referring to the Legends material. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I guess my point is that since they've started dividing up the articles into canon/legends versions, it's made the Legends side of things all the more obviously garbled. At least in articles for subjects that have been covered by several conflicting EU sources, like Boba Fett, the Mandalorians, the Clone Wars etc.
I think they'd be better off rewriting those Legends articles from a real world/publication history perspective rather than try and maintain the "in-universe" narrative.
Sure, the Wook is subject to the same problems that any wiki does.
The Legends (or pre-Disney EU, if you prefer) is a conglomeration of different materials, many of which don't mesh together, but are duct-taped together through any number of retcons, suspension of disbelief, and the like. The reason that the Legends articles read like revisionist history is because Star Wars Legends was constantly revising itself throughout it's lifetime. In the case of Clone Wars, there were two mutually different versions of it (the original multimedia project and the CGI TV show), so the mess came because of how to basically fit the former with the latter (it wasn't always a perfect fit and LucasFilm never got around to created the master timeline of how Legends Clone Wars happened, with the first multimedia project fitted with the TV show as best as could be done), but that is how Legends worked.
(FIY, the closest we ever got to that Legends Clone Wars timeline was the chronological order for the novels in the Essential Reader's Companion. Not a perfect setup, but it does give some data points.)
There are no "multiple" pre-Disney incarnation, there's only one: Legends. There are contradictions to be found, for sure, but there's nothing else to present.
That's not how the Force works? Besides, the point of the Legends articles is to present the most accurate information about the Legends continuity, not the outdated info. Also, many fans who like Legends would probably prefer to see the in-universe perspective. I do.
(Many of the articles do note discrepancies in the behind the scenes sections and the reasons for how the problem is worked out, whether it be by official retcon or best guess by the editors.)
Sure there is. The Boba Fett presented in 'Tales of the Bounty Hunters' is not the same Boba Fett who appeared in the AotC novelisation. That's just one of hundreds of examples that can easily be found.
Here's the thing though: Legends isn't a coherent continuity. Never was. By attempting to force coherence there's an increased erosion and dilution of the earlier materials, sometimes to the point of them becoming unrecognisable. Indeed I've seen several instances where the intent and context of a particular story has been drastically altered to fit in with subsequent continuity. Distorting information is precisely *not* what an encyclopedia should be doing.
Better I think to take a "warts and all" approach and present them as they were intended in each appearance. I'd find it far more interesting to read how these concepts evolved (and far more useful from a research perspective) over the course of decades, from 'Splinter of the Mind's Eye' to the Marvel comics, the WEG sourcebooks, Bantam novels, Dark Horse comics, Lucasarts games and Del Rey novels.
If nothing else, it'd make most of the Legends articles a damn sight more readable than the rambling, pedantic and literal minded word-slush some of them have become.
Thanks to retcons (found in stuff like Legacy of the Force) it is. Same way that the more emotional Mr. Spock in the Star Trek pilot is the same character in the TV show proper.
Yes, a lot of stuff was retconned together to make things mostly work, but it is a huge patch job.
Yeah, Legends is full of retcons. That's the way it's always been.
The Wook is not for how things evolved, but what the final result was. (Also, given that the retcons, whether it be fixing or overwriting older material are official rulings, nothing is being distorted.)
I'm not sure where you'd go for that.
I'm not so sure about that.
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