Um, I don't see anything about Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, but if its the book written by the shit author of Phasma, it doesn't count because she created the idiots.
Dawson's book in question is
Black Spire. While that article didn't mention it (my bad, I mixed it up with another article), it has been confirmed that
Phasma character Vi Moradi is going to be the lead.
Most of those people don't really scream "high standards", especially the kids book authors. Lucino is ok, and JJM is pretty good (he wrote a great Obi Wan book, and he's literally the only person on Earth who has written Kanan and Hera from Rebels in a way that made them actually compelling characters).
Which kid's book authors? All the ones in question wrote GA material for the franchise.
But, you can't count people that wrote for the anthology, though, that's a bit ridiculous.
Too late, I already did and there's nothing ridiculous about it. A contracted author is a contracted author.
Generally, Disney seems to hire mediocre or outright bad writers for most books (presumably because they are cheap or someone at Disney's publishing section knows them/their agents), with a few good writers like Zahn sometimes get thrown a job probably because people like Claudia Gray, Dawson, etc. periodically take SW breaks to write more of their own crap and Disney needs to fill the gap in the schedule.
Del Rey, not Disney, produces most of them (Disney-owned presses do do a lot of the YA books and children's books, if that's what you mean). Also, I wouldn't judge tie-in fiction in comparison to stuff like classic literature, but by its own standards and the standards of that kind of material.
Missing the flavor of crap isn't missing anything.
Forest for the trees. The point is that summaries skip details, so while you may get the gist, a lot of the nuances, context, etc. is missing. It's the reason you don't review something you never read or saw.
I think that the book being too shit to finish says enough. Imagine if you actually had to read all of a terrible book to call it bad
That so?
I have contradicted nothing, unless you can prove that the wookiepedia article is lying, and you haven't even pretended that it is.
No, I'm saying that some of your claims, like the assessments of the characters, are the exact opposite of how it is written. For example, by the end of the book, the characters that you have dismissed as being blind ideologues have in fact engaged in activities like disobeying Imperial orders, wanting pardons for Rebels, and a few things like that. So you will forgive me for not finding you a credible witness, since your case is not only based on hearsay, but, more importantly, disproven by the text itself.
All my arguments work, you just don't like them so you dismiss them, which is your problem, not mine
Except I don't (see above as a case in point).
It's kind of ironic really. The EU was never canon to begin with (just ask Zahn) and when Lucas was running things, more often than not his material would overwrite whole swaths of it, but apparently that was OK because: "retcon".
I agree that, in retrospect, the Legends being canon thing feels like it was only given lip service. In fact, reading between the lines of the old
Essential Reader's Guide, I get the impression that the official way of looking at it was that there was the films/Clone Wars canon (the one Disney is now adding to) and the EU canon of films + tie-ins, something different then what we were lead to believe.
I think the fact that Lucas asked people to not touch the prequel era for years until he started making the movies helped create the illusion that all was canon; while the prequels did step on the toes of some stuff, most of the Legends worldbuilding was set years after ROTJ, making retcons and fixes much less intrusive. Had Del Rey and Bantam been allowed to go hog wild and do everything, I think we would've realized just how little weight Legends had; it would've been like trying to fit TFA into the Legends continuity.
Now that Disney is running things, they're actively incorporating more EU material into canon than Lucas ever did, but people complain...because they stopped continuing a tired, increasingly hackneyed series of novels that have been running on the spot for decades and getting basically nowhere.
I mean what's so awful about a mostly coherent continuity across all forms of media? Hell, at this point it's already way more well put together than the EU ever was.
One think I do like about the new tie-ins is the better levels of interconnectivity then we got with Legends. That said, I think that the old stories do mean a lot to some people, which is something I don't think you can really put a price on. I've also seen readers who feel that the new stuff is playing it safe and not creating stuff of impact, while Legends books could do big stories that changed the course of the franchise (within its own sphere of influence). While I do think Legends ran out of gas by the end, it did have a pretty good run overall and did create a pretty intricate universe, even if there was stuff that needed to be papered over now and then.
Certain people seem to have a very rose tinted view of it now, but the reality was that the EU was a mess.
I do agree not all of it has aged that well and it is pretty messy, even taking into account the retcons and fixes invented to keep it together as best as possible. Honestly, I take it more for its stories then I do it as an alternate
Star Wars universe.
I mean go read the Thrawn trilogy, then Dark Empire, then the Academy trilogy.
In theory those are supposed to be back-to-back-to-back stories but if you pay attention to the tone, content and characterisations they may as well have been each in it's own separate universe. Major characters in one story, effectively vanish in the next. Character arcs from previous stores are utterly ignored or even retrod to no good purpose. Only a few token mentions connect them at all and all are utterly disposable.
As stories I think the Thrawn books still hold up, the Academy ones I don't think ever did once they were stripped of their canon status (although the
I, Jedi mid-quel is pretty good), and I never read Dark Empire, but understand that after the first story arc, it went completely downhill and ended in a whimper.
My understanding is that Thrawn and Dark Empire got really shuffled around. Dark Empire was originally supposed to take place right after ROTJ, but Zahn didn't want to deal with it in his book, set five years later. So, the comic was given some extra exposition to move it forward in time to just after the Thrawn stuff. The Jedi books were being written while Zahn was finishing his Thrawn ones, which I think helped create some problems (in the Jedi trilogy, written before the last Thrawn book, Han and co. have trouble trusting Mara Jade, while the last Thawn book shows her more then earning their trust).
Honestly, it's kinda amazing that they don't mess each other up more then they already do.
And this continued throughout. KoTOR had next to nothing to do with TotJ. The supposedly galaxy altering events of the NJO books were undone in the next arc like it had never happened, as it's were in the next and so on. On paper, Kyle Katarn was second only to Luke Skywalker himself to the legacy of the old Jedi and yet is barely mentioned outside of the games. The idea of the EU as this one big coherent and consistent body of work is a joke.
Some stuff fits together better then others and I do think the abrupt loss of confidence in passing the baton to the next generation to keep the OT movie characters as the leads was a mistake that factored into Legends decline in the final days, with the tired plots and whatnot.
