# Has the Star Wars Expanded Universe "Jumped the Shark"?



## wingsandsword (Jul 12, 2009)

It was the Expanded Universe that really made me more than just a casual fan of the movies.  The trilogy was lots of fun (and when I became a big fan, it was just the one trilogy), but it was the depth and breadth of the extra materials that really gave it so much more life.  

In High School, the Thrawn Trilogy was my favorite reading.  I ravenously read through all the other EU books that were coming out in the mid-to-late 90's.  Truce at Bakura, Courtship of Princess Leia, and the Jedi Academy Trilogy were all good (or at least decent) novels that filled in logical roles in the progression of the story of Star Wars (what happened in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi, how Han & Leia finally got married, and how Luke re-founded the Jedi Order).  

There were a few duds in there too, like The Crystal Star, or Children of the Jedi, but they were one-off novels that were fairly stand alone and didn't make major lasting changes to the setting.  Heck, it wasn't until Darksaber that they killed off any characters from the movies, and then it was General Madine, a pretty minor character.  

They progressed the timeline on and on, and eventually brought what I thought could have been a decent conclusion to the saga with the Hand of Thrawn duology.  The Empire surrenders and a peace treaty is signed, Luke proposes to Mara Jade, and the New Republic is at peace with the Empire now a surrendered minor regional power in the Outer Rim and dozens or hundreds of up-and-coming Jedi standing ready to defend the Republic.

Then they bring in the Yuuzhan Vong.  That peace lasts about 2 or 3 years before they start a war that is bigger than the Clone Wars or the Galactic Civil War.  Trillions die, many entire planets are killed, including planets that were significant parts of Star Wars canon like Ithor (and Coruscant itself being permanently altered/damaged).  Chewbacca is casually killed off like a Redshirt in the opening of the story just to show the audience this is Serious Business and there won't be a Reset Button ending to this story (not to mention having Mon Mothma die in her sleep right before the events of the start of the war).  I never liked the Vong war, it just didn't seem right.  Bizarre extragalactic sadomasochistic aliens with a racial death & torture cult that have incredibly advanced biotechnology (later admitted by the writers to be inspired by the D&D setting Dark Sun's lifeshaping) and refuse to use any mechanical technology, and are completely immune to and invisible to The Force just didn't seem like something that fit in Star Wars, on top of these strange new teachings that there is no Light or Dark Side and that everything we thought we knew about the Force is wrong, the Republic turns against the Jedi seeing them as villains,  and the New Republic collapses to be replaced with a "Galactic Alliance of Free Federations" (a dumb name IMO).  The concept seemed like bad fanfic or a RPG session that would make me think that the GM was bonkers.  

However, it more-or-less redeemed itself as it went.  I still didn't like where it went, but at least later on they retconned the weird revelations about the Force as being Sith heresies, and they came up with a reason for why the Vong seemed to not exist in the Force (they were racially blocked from it as punishment for their warlike ways which had devastated their home galaxy), and when the Vong war was over at least it felt some sense of conclusion like maybe it could have been seen as the third trilogy.  If they had stopped there, at least you'd had the feeling that the Galaxy would at long-last be at peace, and the Jedi would be there to protect the Galaxy.

However, everything since the Vong War has just gone downhill further.  The Legacy of the Force just seemed to be milking it for what they could extract further.  The Galactic Alliance becomes almost as much of a tyranny as the Empire, with Jacen Solo falling to the Dark Side as Darth Caedus and leading a secret police that engages in torture and extrajudicial killings of all enemies of the state.  Corellia and a group of allied worlds splits from the Galactic Alliance to form The Confederation and the galaxy is in Civil War again with a Dark Lord of the Sith rampaging around.

Just as they solve this Second Civil War (mostly) and kill off Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus and put an end to this reign of terror, we now have the Fate of the Jedi novels starting, where former-Admiral Daala is now the leader of the Galactic Alliance and has Luke Skywalker arrested and held accountable for the fall of Jacen Solo, and has him sent into exile for a decade and told that unless he can prove to her satisfaction at the end of that decade that it was unavoidable, she will have the Galactic Alliance destroy the Jedi Order, and the Confederation isn't any help either since it's now run by former Imperials too.  

If you jump ahead a century, you get the Star Wars: Legacy.  Now the Sith openly rule the Galaxy, the Jedi are once again hunted to the brink of extinction after the destruction of their temple (although the Empire has legions of Force users loyal to it), a Galactic Empire once again rules the galaxy, and last remnants of the old government with even a tenuous claim to being heirs to the Republic survive as a rebel force on the Rim.

I don't know if it was at the New Jedi Order series, Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, or Star Wars: Legacy series, but it seems like Star Wars has really "Jumped the Shark", and it's no longer telling an ongoing tale, but instead reiterating the same old story over and over.  Jedi are set up as enlightened warrior-priests to act as police/peacekeepers, but then hunted down and betrayed by the state after being made scapegoats for the problems of the day and left decimated and having to rebuild.  A just government is set up, but it turns to tyranny and oppression inevitably, leaving a splinter faction to oppose it and the government collapses or is reorganized into a totally new form.  The Sith rule the Galaxy (de facto or de jure) only to be cast down into hiding for a few decades to regroup.  

It's almost seeming like you can create a Star Wars era/plot arc by paint-by numbers now: advance the timeline a few decades or a century or two and then throw in all (or at least most) of the above plot elements.

Within the Star Wars universe, sometimes it looks like the ~970 years between the end of the New Sith War and the Clone Wars was the longest period of peace and relative normalcy in the entire 25,000 year history of galactic civilization.

I know that LFL wants to keep marching the timeline on to produce more books and make more money, but they've got millennia of galactic history to work with (KotOR showed they can go back a few thousand years and have fun, for example), and successive massive galaxy-shaking wars each costing billions or trillions of lives and shattering planets and rocking the political structure of the galaxy to the core each time is starting to really wear thing.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 12, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> It was the Expanded Universe that really made me more than just a casual fan of the movies.  The trilogy was lots of fun (and when I became a big fan, it was just the one trilogy), but it was the depth and breadth of the extra materials that really gave it so much more life.
> 
> In High School, the Thrawn Trilogy was my favorite reading.  I ravenously read through all the other EU books that were coming out in the mid-to-late 90's.  Truce at Bakura, Courtship of Princess Leia, and the Jedi Academy Trilogy were all good (or at least decent) novels that filled in logical roles in the progression of the story of Star Wars (what happened in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi, how Han & Leia finally got married, and how Luke re-founded the Jedi Order).
> 
> ...



I can say that I liked the Thrawn trilogy (and also the other Thrawn books) a lot, but I never was quite content with the Vong stuff or other books. The Vong in particular didn't feel like they belonged into Star Wars, at least not the way they were done. I mean, they could have been something like the "New Sith", but being Force-Insensitive doesn't really facilitate that. 

I'd like to note though that the idea of someone betraying the Jedi Knights seems to be recurring theme, that also exists in KOTOR. Maybe that part is inevitable? 

I like some of the ideas I heard regarding Legacies, but more the general setup of the "major players" than the specific historical details, as far as I know them.


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## Klaus (Jul 12, 2009)

To me, you can jump from RotJ to the SW: Legacy series and gloss over everything in-between. If you do that, the theme becomes "the universe goes where the Skywalkers go": when a Skywalker went bad, the galaxy plunged into Dark Times; when a Skywalker rose to the light, the galaxy knew peace; now the last Skywalker is teetering between light and dark, and so is the galaxy.

And in Legacy, the galaxy is divided between the Sith Empire, the Fel Empire, the Galactic Alliance and the Fringe.


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## frankthedm (Jul 12, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> Then they bring in the Yuuzhan Vong.  That peace lasts about 2 or 3 years before they start a war that is bigger than the Clone Wars or the Galactic Civil War.  Trillions die, many entire planets are killed, including planets that were significant parts of Star Wars canon like
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Just because you don't like the Yuuzahn Vong arc, doesn't mean you should leave spoilers unmasked.

Though truth be told, the _frequent_ spoiler complaints i've heard about this series are part why i've grown interested in it. Though I'll agree 



Spoiler



Cheewbacca got punked


.


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## cignus_pfaccari (Jul 12, 2009)

frankthedm said:


> Though truth be told, the _frequent_ spoiler complaints i've heard about this series are part why i've grown interested in it. Though I'll agree
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Chewbacca had an obituary in the Washington Post nigh on 10 years ago.

I think it's okay to not have it in spoilertext.

Brad


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## wingsandsword (Jul 12, 2009)

frankthedm said:


> Just because you don't like the Yuuzahn Vong arc, doesn't mean you should leave spoilers unmasked.
> 
> Though truth be told, the _frequent_ spoiler complaints i've heard about this series are part why i've grown interested in it. Though I'll agree
> 
> ...



The New Jedi Order books were published between 10 and 6 years ago (1999 through 2003), and nothing you called a spoiler in that post is less than 8 years old (Star By Star, with the Fall of Coruscant, was from 2001).  Is a decade-old novel _really_ something we need spoiler protection for?  

I could understand if it was still in production, like plot twists of what just came out for Star Wars: Legacy or the Fate of the Jedi series (heck, even Legacy of the Force is kinda new, I specifically left out a couple of whoppers of plot events from those in my post, I mentioned the fall of Jacen Solo because that was so hyped up, Starwars.com even had a poll to let fans choose what his Darth name would be, they chose "Caedus" so it was used in the novels), but New Jedi Order was finishing right as D&D 3.5 came out, it isn't current events or even close.


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## Morrus (Jul 13, 2009)

You just reminded me why I don't read movie tie-ins. Sounds awful - you have my sympathies. 

Sounds like the movies are a fairly trivial skirmish in that universe.


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## Dire Bare (Jul 13, 2009)

I think you're mostly right, that Star Wars has gone a bit overboard.  I'm certainly a bit burnt out.

I like the Knights of the Old Republic era (I've only played the games and purchased the Saga rulebook), as it does let you tell a similar story, although not exactly the same, as the movies . . . but without all the baggage.

I like the Legacy era (100 years after the movies), for pretty much the same reasons as I like KOTOR (I've been reading the graphic novels).

I think that each of these eras are definitely Star Wars, but do provide a somewhat different dynamic than the originals.

But all the crap that happens after the movies (and before Legacy) is too much.  How many times does Luke and friends have to save the galaxy before they can just retire on some nice planet?  And I too, hated the Vong.

But, I only pay close attention to the two eras I mentioned above, and no longer obsessively collect novels, comics, and other EU materials.  Saves me money and there is still good Star Wars stuff out there.


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## Orius (Jul 13, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> It was the Expanded Universe that really made me more than just a casual fan of the movies.  The trilogy was lots of fun (and when I became a big fan, it was just the one trilogy), but it was the depth and breadth of the extra materials that really gave it so much more life.
> 
> In High School, the Thrawn Trilogy was my favorite reading.  I ravenously read through all the other EU books that were coming out in the mid-to-late 90's.  Truce at Bakura, Courtship of Princess Leia, and the Jedi Academy Trilogy were all good (or at least decent) novels that filled in logical roles in the progression of the story of Star Wars (what happened in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi, how Han & Leia finally got married, and how Luke re-founded the Jedi Order).




The Thrawn Trilogy rocks.  Zahn wrote three novels that really captured the feel of the original trilogy well, nade good use of existing characters, and introduced several EU characters that reamin popular.  Some of the immediate followups were pretty good, both Bakura and Courtship aren't bad, but not as good as Thrawn.  The Jedi Academy, not as good, which is unfortunate, because it's an important part of the storyline.  Problem is that KJA seems to like idiotically comical villains, and it does not follow Thrawn very well.  He also likes stuff that just feels absurdly silly which is a shame, because he's got some good ideas too (like the scene early in Darksaber where Luke tells Han about the culture of the Sand People).



> There were a few duds in there too, like The Crystal Star, or Children of the Jedi, but they were one-off novels that were fairly stand alone and didn't make major lasting changes to the setting.  Heck, it wasn't until Darksaber that they killed off any characters from the movies, and then it was General Madine, a pretty minor character.




Those first two were pretty forgettable, and with Lucas making the Jedi more or less celibate in the prequels, Children of the Jedi doesn't really fit into canon in a way that makes much sense.  Doesn't bother me, because that book was boring as hell.  It could be totally ignored if it wasn't for all the stuff with Callisto which KJA continued in Darksaber.  Darksaber itself wasn't too bad, but it unfortunately had more silly villains.  And Daala was once again written badly.  It's hard to believe she's supposed to be some sort of master tactician when she consistantly blunders as she does, but she is better than the ridiculous Imperial warlords that appear in the book.



> They progressed the timeline on and on, and eventually brought what I thought could have been a decent conclusion to the saga with the Hand of Thrawn duology.  The Empire surrenders and a peace treaty is signed, Luke proposes to Mara Jade, and the New Republic is at peace with the Empire now a surrendered minor regional power in the Outer Rim and dozens or hundreds of up-and-coming Jedi standing ready to defend the Republic.




I haven't gotten that far into the timeline. I kind of lost track of EU about 10 years ago, and it doesn't help the stuff is scattered across a number of different books, comics, and whatever else.  The furthest I actually read was the Corellian trilogy, and the latest books I have are the disappointing Black Fleet Crisis trilogy.  I say disappointing, because they had a lot of potential, the villain were more serious, but the story was structured badly, particularly in the second book.  The Lando/Lobot/droids storyline really dragged on far too long.



> I don't know if it was at the New Jedi Order series, Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, or Star Wars: Legacy series, but it seems like Star Wars has really "Jumped the Shark", and it's no longer telling an ongoing tale, but instead reiterating the same old story over and over.  Jedi are set up as enlightened warrior-priests to act as police/peacekeepers, but then hunted down and betrayed by the state after being made scapegoats for the problems of the day and left decimated and having to rebuild.  A just government is set up, but it turns to tyranny and oppression inevitably, leaving a splinter faction to oppose it and the government collapses or is reorganized into a totally new form.  The Sith rule the Galaxy (de facto or de jure) only to be cast down into hiding for a few decades to regroup.
> 
> It's almost seeming like you can create a Star Wars era/plot arc by paint-by numbers now: advance the timeline a few decades or a century or two and then throw in all (or at least most) of the above plot elements.




I'd have to actually read some of the stuff.  I'm trying to look back at what I know of the post-Jedi EU as a whole instead of the individual books/trilogies/series.  Maybe it's not too bad, considering the storyline from Menace onwards:

 The Galaxy goes through a long civil war from the Clone Wars until the several years after Jedi when the New Republic finally emerges.  This war lasts about a generation or so.  Even as the Imperial remnants become less powerful and the New Republic becomes more stable, people are mistrustful of a strong powerful government from all of the abuses committed by the Empire.  Because of this, they're unprepared for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion when it does take place.  The devastation from these wars is so great that the galaxy has yet to rebuild, and estblish as lasting government.  The Legacy Era takes place, what about 100 years after Jedi?  It's not too unreasonable to assume that galactic civilization is still going to be pretty messy after just a century.  Honestly, I've always found the whole 25,000 lifespan of the Galactic Republic (and the 100,000 years of completely urbanized Coruscant) a bit hard to swallow, but I kind of just ignore it to enjoy the universe as a whole.  Possibly the EU does descend into dreck as the years go by though.

I don't know if "Chewbacca dies" is a huge spoiler, given how much fan rage has been vented about it over the years.  I've never read the NJO books, but it didn't stop me from making this crack:



Orius said:


> d20Dwarf said:
> 
> 
> > Ok, here's one for you then.
> ...


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## JediSoth (Jul 13, 2009)

The NJO is why I just chuck Vector Prime and anything after it out the window when planning Star Wars RPG campaigns; they just don't exist in my continuity. I would have much preferred if the authors had been allowed to create new characters and stories instead of screwing with the Heroes of the Rebellion who SHOULD have been able to retire in peace and live happily ever after.

Timothy Zahn's books are the best the EU has to offer, in my opinion. He really has the feel of Star Wars down. After him, I think Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston did the best work with the X-Wing and Wraith Squadron series. It was really a breath of fresh air to read about adventures from people who weren't related to the Solos or the Skywalkers.

I also proclaim in my version of the Universe that the Emperor died in the Death Star at the Battle of Endor, and stayed dead, gosh darn it!


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 13, 2009)

JediSoth said:


> The NJO is why I just chuck Vectory Prime and anything after it out the window when planning Star Wars RPG campaigns; they just don't exist in my continuity. I would have much preferred if the authors had been allowed to create new characters and stories instead of screwing with the Heroes of the Rebellion who SHOULD have been able to retire in peace and live happily ever after.
> 
> Timothy Zahn's books are the best the EU has to offer, in my opinion. He really has the feel of Star Wars down. After him, I think Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston did the best work with the X-Wing and Wraith Squadron series. It was really a breath of fresh air to read about adventures from people who weren't related to the Solos or the Skywalkers.



Yep, I agree. Zahn, Stackpole and Allston made the books I enjoyed the most from all.


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## Felon (Jul 14, 2009)

Star Wars is an IP that's being milked for all its worth rather than being treated organically as a body of work that has a beginning, middle, and end. It's being exploited by the very folks who own it, with no desire to treat it with any respect. So yeah, it jumped the shark.

The counterpoint is that the expression "jumping the shark" is derived from Happy Days, which never really aspired to be a brilliant or ambitious series, so what's the big deal about Fonzie jumping a shark in one particular episode? Likewise, Star Wars was always a pretty shallow body of work to begin with. When you're ten years old, the allure of being singled-out as special is very powerul. It worked for Star Wars, Harry Potter, Ergaon, Avatar, and so many others. But as an adult, doesn't it start to sink in that these "choen one" stories are just a tad trite? 

Instead of telling stories about a protagonist that's a self-made man---experienced, resourceful, insightful, complex--all you gotta do is hack out a yarn about some naive kid who's just naturally better than all these other folks who've worked longer and harder than him. He approaches every problem directly and impulsively, plunging headlong into every snare, but his good, brave heart and naturally superior power allows him to scrape through by the skin of his teeth. The chosen one is patently undeserving of his power and success, but the bad guys are shown to be so totally mean that we want to see them overthrown, and thus we put aside the fact that in the real world, most folks don't have much respect for kids born with silver spoons in their mouth.

Beyond that, Star Wars was not well-positioned to avoid painting itself into a corner. The obvious problem is that those who have access to the Force handily outclass those who don't. So, you gotta start contriving things like "forceproof" armor and force-immune aliens so that you don't have to keep going back to the Sith well for another bucket. Then conversely, you gotta start topping every feat that the force is capable of accomplishing, until eventually Yoda moving a tie-fighter is a joke; we're moving planets and suns now! And you have to start explaining things too--you can't go decades without having to eventually stop and address some of the obvious questions that got skimmed over in three movies. Which is too bad, because the mystery is always better than the explanation.

Speaking of explanations, has there ever been any explanation of how a technologically sophisticated galactic civilization can go millenia without any actual technological advances or shifts?


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## Klaus (Jul 14, 2009)

There has been advances. During Knights of the Old Republic, hyperdrives were much slower, the settled galaxy was much smaller, and even prototype lightsabers had an outside, cord-connected battery. But those examples are paper-thin, at best.


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## Dire Bare (Jul 14, 2009)

Klaus said:


> There has been advances. During Knights of the Old Republic, hyperdrives were much slower, the settled galaxy was much smaller, and even prototype lightsabers had an outside, cord-connected battery. But those examples are paper-thin, at best.




Depends on which "Old Republic"!  The setting for the KOTOR games did not have corded lightsabers.


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## Orius (Jul 14, 2009)

Felon said:


> Speaking of explanations, has there ever been any explanation of how a technologically sophisticated galactic civilization can go millenia without any actual technological advances or shifts?




That's one of the biggest problems I have with the franchise as a whole, simply the sheer amount of time that it spans without apparent huge leaps in tech.  But it's Star Wars, so I think the MST3K Mantra should probably apply here.  Don't think too hard about it and let it ruin the enjoyment.


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## JediSoth (Jul 14, 2009)

With some of the philosophies that run rampant throughout the Star Wars universe (apparently, taking children from their parents and raising them to be stoic and supress all the things that make them human (or kel-dor, or twi'lek) is OK; self-aware droids are just tools; millions of cloned humans can be thrown away as cannon fodder; slaughtering an entire tribe of Tusken Raiders, including non-combatant women and children is OK; etc.), it wouldn't surprised me if the galaxy has become psychologically and technologically stagnant. It's very much an elitist society (at least as depicted in the films) where you can get away with murder on a lot of planets.


That being said, I want to make it clear that I do love Star Wars.   I'm just aware that it doesn't depict a utopia or idealized society by any stretch; some facets of it are quite disturbing, actually.


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## Deset Gled (Jul 15, 2009)

Felon said:


> The counterpoint is that the expression "jumping the shark" is derived from Happy Days, which never really aspired to be a brilliant or ambitious series, so what's the big deal about Fonzie jumping a shark in one particular episode? Likewise, Star Wars was always a pretty shallow body of work to begin with. When you're ten years old, the allure of being singled-out as special is very powerul. It worked for Star Wars, Harry Potter, Ergaon, Avatar, and so many others. But as an adult, doesn't it start to sink in that these "choen one" stories are just a tad trite?




"Jumping the shark" (in its original meaning) refers to anything that is essentially "de-evolution" of the series; a character forgetting key lessons learned before that were critical to character development, a reversal of a plot-changing event, or the series reversing it's overall themes are all examples of jumping the shark (and are the issues people took with Fonzie's literal jump).  Jumping the shark basically requires the audience to forget previous events to accept new actions as plausible.

In my mind, the SW universe jumped the shark when Kevin J. Anderson wrote the Jedi Academy trilogy.  This jumped the shark by 1) re-writing history established in the Dark Empire comic series 2) ineptly re-creating an Imperial superweapon threat, forcing the series back into an enemy that had already been defeated, and 3) portraying the characters and caricatures of their former selves.  Of course, I generally consider Mr. Anderson to be the most successful hack in the writing  business, so my opinion may be flawed.  Also, I am appalled that the Daala character has been allowed to exist this long in the SW setting.

Luke Skywalker marrying Mara Jade is jumping the shark, because it would never happen with the original, unaltered characters.  The Galactic Alliance turning it's back on the jedi order is jumping the shark, because it is reverting the series back to where it started, without any narative or developmental reason.  Killing off Chewbacca in an undignified manner is jumping the shark, because he has been established as a hero of high order in a series where heros are treated very classically.


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## Orius (Jul 15, 2009)

Deset Gled said:


> Also, I am appalled that the Daala character has been allowed to exist this long in the SW setting.




Daala wouldn't be so bad if she actually showed some actual tactical thinking at least in KJA's books.  Instead her so-called strategies basically seem to be "go Leeroy Jenkins on the New Republic and when that fails to gank them then retreat and whine about Imperial warlords".



> Luke Skywalker marrying Mara Jade is jumping the shark, because it would never happen with the original, unaltered characters.




What's so bad about that?  That felt like the sort of direction Zahn was writing in when he did the Thrawn trilogy, particulary the last book.


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## Krafus (Jul 16, 2009)

The Powers That Be at Lucasarts seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place; I recall reading somewhere that novels featuring the Big Three as major protagonists sell substantially better than novels that don't. This has resulted in Luke, Han and Leia having to save the galaxy again and again. Yet those characters are inevitably aging in the novel line, and the publishers must be aware that at some point, they'll have to let the Three settle down for good, or at least let other characters take center stage.

Or, given some of Luca$'s tendencies, maybe we'll get a 100 year-old, greying, balding Han piloting the Falcon with spotted hands, but even so displaying the same skill and spirit he had in the days of the Civil War.

I agree that the Vong felt, well, unlike Star Wars. I can understand the new publisher (Del Rey, I think) wanting to move past the "Imperial warlord of the week" pattern established by the previous one (Bantam?), and to shake things up. So they came up with the idea of a new major war. Unfortunately, I never managed to accept the Vong and their arsenal as plausible. Completely biological technology advantageously comparing to hyperdrive, lasers, starfighters, capital ships, etc.? It was too much.

The Legacy of Force series wasn't too bad at first, but the last two books were IMO really bad and have mostly turned me off the novel line, at least in this particular era. The fact that the latest Fate of the Jedi novel apparently only has 236 pages of writing at full hardcover price does nothing to improve my opinion

Oh, and I agree that it's a bit silly to use spoilers for a series of novel that ended a half-dozen years ago. Should we keep from mentioning spoilers from Lord of the Rings as well?

Two last but important notes: first, if you like Aaron Allston, you might want to read this:

aaron_allston: Orange Juice, Laxatives, and Near Death Experiences

And if you like the Legacy and/or Republic comics, its author John Ostrander is in similar straits:

TheForce.Net - Latest News - John Ostrander Benefit Auction


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## wingsandsword (Jul 17, 2009)

I won't begrudge Star Wars for the idea that in thousands of years there has been very little technological progress.  Vast, galaxy-scale starfaring civilizations with millennia of history and very slow technological progress once they get that "galactic civilization" level is pretty common in Sci-Fi.  Dune comes right to mind, so does the Foundation.  

Think of the level of progress they reached before technology slowed down.  They have FTL drives that can put a starship that is a mile long and holds tens of thousands of people across the galaxy in days or hours, and FTL communications providing real-time communications galaxywide.  They have artificial gravity, force fields, and weapons that could easily maul planets into unrecognizable slag.  They can clone people so well that the clones don't necessarily know they are clones (Sate Pestage, Ysanne Isard and Bevel Lemelisk were in this situation).  They have free-floating holograms.  They have reliable and simple antigravity that can make entire cities float permanently.  They have medical technology that can cure almost any disease or malady, and prosthetic limbs, internal and sensory organs that are just as good (if not better) than their organic counterparts.  They have intelligent (and possibly fully sentient) robots that can fill virtually all servant roles and many technical and highly skilled positions.  They also have an order of what are essentially psychic monks that can literally see the future and fight with the power of twenty men, and are devoted to preserving peace and justice.  

I wouldn't call the wedding of Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade jumping the shark either, as they had spent years building to that point.  Mara Jade was driven to kill Luke when they first met, but that compulsion was eliminated by the end of the novels she appeared in.  They spent more than a decade within the setting, and about 5 years or so in the real world.

If I had to focus one one specific point, it would probably be either:

1. Vector Prime.  The novel (from 1999) that starts the New Jedi Order series and Yuzzhan Vong War story.  Killing Chewbacca off casually, introducing the Vong and making them out to be so much more dangerous and unstoppable than even the Galactic Empire at it's peak, and giving them biotechnology that easily beats out starships developed over thousands of years in a stand-up fight.  

2. Outcast.  The novel (from 2009) that starts the Fate of the Jedi series.  Daala is now the leader of the Galactic Alliance (despite being the most incompetent major Imperial leader), and the galaxy is on the edge of starting yet another Jedi Purge.  Apparently no lessons from the Jedi Purges of the Empire, or the anti-Jedi violence of the Yuzzhan Vong War were learned at all.  Despite saving the galaxy, usually singlehandedly, a dozen times or more Luke Skywalker is put on trial as a war criminal because his nephew became a Sith Lord and they are holding him, and through him all Jedi, responsible for Jacen Solo's reign of terror.  So, the Empire will never really die (no matter how ineptly it is lead) and Jedi will always be persecuted no matter how valiant and selfless of heroes they are because it only takes one in the whole galaxy to fall and suddenly everyone is acting like every Jedi is secretly a Sith, and Luke Skywalker will always save the Galaxy to go right back to having to prove himself and save it all over again next year.

As a runner up:

Star By Star (from 2001).  The New Jedi Order novel that has the Vong take Coruscant and forever alter the centerpiece world of the Galaxy, the New Republic government completely collapse (after being portrayed as incompetent boobs so muddled in bureaucracy they demand that the General coordinating the defenses of Coruscant while it is under siege do so right before the Galactic Senate so they can advise and debate on his orders in real time).  If you thought there would be no "reset button" after Vector Prime and Chewbacca's Death, this made it much worse and made it more than one major character being killed, the entire Star Wars setting is forever altered here.  Since the beginning of Star Wars, it was about restoring the lost glory of the Republic, and this is the novel that throws the Republic right out the window.


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## JediSoth (Jul 17, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> <SNIPPED FOR SPACE>
> 
> If I had to focus one one specific point, it would probably be either:
> 
> ...




Yeah, I really gotta agree with you here. To me, Star Wars was always about epic, mythological heroism. Good vs. Evil, not gritty, let's-make-everyone-hopeless war. By the end of the Hand of Thrawn duology, I felt they could have given both the Skywalkers and Solos a "And they lived happily ever after" card. Luke and Mara were getting married after YEARS of building a relationship. Han and Leia had three kids and the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic finally had come to terms with each other. The characters needed a break.

But now, with the NJO and later series, it just seemed like the Solos and Skywalkers are cursed to be some sort of nexus of catastrophe and evil. If I knew them, I'd make sure I was never anywhere near them, because if some bad stuff goes down, you just know it's going to be centered around them. Screw that. It's like on House, M.D.: if they ever start running diagnostics on you that, realistically, the team isn't qualified to do (sorry, diagnosticians do NOT do half the crap they do in House), you just know you're going to have a seizure or go into cardiac arrest or something. I wouldn't let them get near me with a 10' pole.

On the other hand, it illustrates the great thing about RPGs: I can take a lot of things out of my continuity like Dark Empire (well written and compelling, but I don't think the galaxy needed the Emperor to come back and have umpteen superweapons again), and the entirety of NJO, LotF, and FotJ. I also choose to consider at least one element of The Clone Wars to be apocryphal: Mace Windu's bare-handed fight and victory against a droid army (including seismic tanks). That's just an embellishment 'cause the only witness was a little kid.


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## wingsandsword (Jul 17, 2009)

JediSoth said:


> Yeah, I really gotta agree with you here. To me, Star Wars was always about epic, mythological heroism. Good vs. Evil, not gritty, let's-make-everyone-hopeless war. By the end of the Hand of Thrawn duology, I felt they could have given both the Skywalkers and Solos a "And they lived happily ever after" card. Luke and Mara were getting married after YEARS of building a relationship. Han and Leia had three kids and the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic finally had come to terms with each other. The characters needed a break.



Definitely agree.  The Hand Of Thrawn should have been the "They lived happily ever after" end of the main Star Wars saga, and reading it you get the feeling like it was really written with that role in mind.  Some occasional side-stories could be told after that, or things set generations in the future, but nothing worlds-shakings for Luke and company after that should have been made.



> On the other hand, it illustrates the great thing about RPGs: I can take a lot of things out of my continuity like Dark Empire (well written and compelling, but I don't think the galaxy needed the Emperor to come back and have umpteen superweapons again), and the entirety of NJO, LotF, and FotJ. I also choose to consider at least one element of The Clone Wars to be apocryphal: Mace Windu's bare-handed fight and victory against a droid army (including seismic tanks). That's just an embellishment 'cause the only witness was a little kid.



When I run Star Wars, I ignore NJO and everything afterwards.  I keep the Vong in, but they are much smaller menace, just isolated scout ships that are hostile and aggressive but certainly not a galaxy-scale menace.  I'll use races and people introduced afterwards, but as far as I'm concerned the Yuzzhan Vong Worldships died before they could reach the Galaxy and only a number of scoutships arrived.  There are enough Vong to make trouble, but they don't have the vast colonization equipment they need to terraform and move worlds or the nigh-infinite fleets they used to overwhelm the New Republic through overwhelming force.  They are more akin to a threat on the level of the Ssi'Ruuvi, a "one book" threat instead of a menace as big as the Galactic Empire itself.

I'll agree that their probably is a legend that Mace Windu singlehandedly destroyed an army by himself, but it's probably just a legend that began when one little kid started telling his friends.


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## Orius (Jul 18, 2009)

I think outside the universe, it's a problem of trying to please a large group of fans with diverse tastes.  On one hand, there's a set of fans who want to see things good for the heroes of the Rebellion.  On the other, there are some fans who just aren't interested in stories where the main fans aren't present, and they're not going to be interested in Han and Leia playing holoshuffleboard in their old age.   There are fans that like seeing the Empire as a threat, but after Daala was defeated in Darksaber, the Imperial remnant didn't seem like s erious threat any more, I don't know what it was like in Thrawn's duology.


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## wingsandsword (Jul 18, 2009)

Orius said:


> There are fans that like seeing the Empire as a threat, but after Daala was defeated in Darksaber, the Imperial remnant didn't seem like s erious threat any more, I don't know what it was like in Thrawn's duology.



In The Hand of Thrawn duology (Specter of the Past & Vision of the Future) the Empire/Imperial Remnant was definitely well past its prime.  The novels open with the Imperial Remnant on the brink of total defeat, it holds only a few sectors in the Outer Rim (having finally lost the Deep Core and a few other Imperial strongholds), a relative handful of Star Destroyers, and it is so shorthanded on ships that it has even largely had to stop using any form of TIE Fighter and use whatever mass-marketed commercial starfighter it can get its hands on.  Most of the Imperial leaders, lead by now Grand Admiral Pellaeon, want to discuss a peace treaty with the New Republic, but a small faction manages to somehow resurrect Grand Admiral Thrawn (and find the last surviving member of the Royal Guard, about a decade after the last one was believed dead, while they are at it) and uses rumors of a document that would prove the Bothans were participants in a major Imperial genocide, and uses these two developments to rally unaligned worlds to the Imperial flag and push the New Republic to the brink of Civil War.

Now, for the spoiler sensitive: 



Spoiler



The "Thrawn" was literally just a con man with a disguise, an Imperial Moff hired a master actor/con man and he had some cosmetic surgery, and with some faked battles it looked like the genius was back, at least for a brief period enough to rally some worlds and pull the Empire out of surrender negotiations.  The Royal Guardsman was a somewhat-unstable clone of one of the real last surviving guards, created as a side experiment during the original Thrawn Trilogy, the original Guardsman was one of Thrawn's troopers and died in the campaign, so the clone quietly assumed his identity.


  So, in other words the Empire by those novels was a pathetic shell of what it once was, and had to use lots of trickery and fakery to even approach being a plausible threat.  The novels end with the signing of a treaty that ends the Galactic Civil War, as the New Republic recognizes the Imperial Remnant as a legitimate sovereign entity, albeit one that rules only a tiny portion of the Rim of the galaxy, and the Galactic Empire formally acknowledges it does not rule the Galaxy and is only a regional power (at best) now.  

These novels also, in the long term, set up some concepts with the Empire that would later play out in the Legacy Era, and making it quite explicit that the human-centric racism of Palpatine was gone from what the Empire had now become, in fact many of the more outright "evil" aspects of the Empire were gone from the Imperial Remnant at this point, largely because they didn't have the military power to enforce it and the only way to sway more worlds to their side was to be less overtly evil.  The fact that all the various Imperial darksiders had finally been stomped out by that point meant that the Dark Side wasn't synonymous with Empire anymore either.  

Doing a little research, the sense of finality and conclusion found in those two novels was probably intentional because they were the last Star Wars novels produced by Bantam before the license shifted to Del Rey, and it was the last Star Wars novel produced before the prequels (Del Reys first novel was the Episode I novelization).


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## Sabathius42 (Jul 21, 2009)

Two things marked the end of the SW extended universe for me.

1. The demise of WEG Star-Wars RPG.

2. The "Starkiller" or whatever fighter sized ship it was that was totally indestructable to the point of being able to be parked inside the middle of a sun and had more destructive power than a Death Star.  That was a load of crap.

DS


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## JediSoth (Jul 21, 2009)

Sabathius42 said:


> Two things marked the end of the SW extended universe for me.
> 
> 1. The demise of WEG Star-Wars RPG.
> 
> ...




Ah yes, the Suncrusher. And after Kyp Durron used it to annihilate more than one inhabited star system, he was branded a War Criminal and put on trials for Crimes Against Sapients and executed for mass murder on a scale not seen since the Destruction of Alderaan.

Except, that didn't happen. He was forgiven and trained as a Jedi. 

"Oh, you blew up several million people? BAD BAD....but, you feel sorry for what you did? OK, all is well! Kumbayah, my friends, kumbayah...."

Other than that, I liked the Jedi Academy trilogy, but then they had to go and make him a prominent member of the NJO. No, just no. It destroys my suspension of disbelief. But, as I said in an earlier post, some aspects of the Star Wars galaxy are quite disturbing, and apparently, if you're well connected enough, you can literally get away with murder. Hell, you can get rewarded for it!


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## BrooklynKnight (Jul 22, 2009)

Whats starting to piss me off is the length of the books. Omen is only 250 or so pages long. It's way to small for a hard cover! It's missing a hundred pages!


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## Gentlegamer (Jul 23, 2009)

I just read the OP, and it makes me glad I didn't read any further than Jedi Academy.

The only worthy EU stories are the original Thrawn trilogy, in my opinion.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 23, 2009)

I prefer the Zahn books over all others, but I think the X-Wing / Rogue Squadron / Wraith Squadron series was also pretty good. Not perfect, but I enjoyed them more than other non-Zahn books. They were in many ways more light-hearted with interesting characters. 

In fact, the set of characters created by Zahn and the Squadron books was overall very interesting. 

The only bad thing about Zahns book is the part on Honghor, which on rereading I find boring compared to the rest, and the fact that he introduced Borsk Fey'lya, a fracking prick that did never feel relatable or believable in the later books.


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## Orius (Jul 25, 2009)

Yeah, but he wrote Fey'lya as a back-stabbing rat bastard and did so effectively.  He was never relatable in even the Thrawn trilogy, he was little more than a pain in the ass.  Which makes it far more effective when Talon Karrde outsmarts him and makes him look bad.  It's no wonder the New Republic collapsed if he ended up running it.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 25, 2009)

Orius said:


> Yeah, but he wrote Fey'lya as a back-stabbing rat bastard and did so effectively.  He was never relatable in even the Thrawn trilogy, he was little more than a pain in the ass.  Which makes it far more effective when Talon Karrde outsmarts him and makes him look bad.  It's no wonder the New Republic collapsed if he ended up running it.



The problem was he became downright incompotent and short-sighted. Comic-Book villain or stupidity. It got annoying, it was not entertaining or believable. There was nothing smart anymore in what he did. That someome like Karrde could play him is believable. But that he is basically responsible for making an effective war against the Vong impossible is ... straining it beyond credibility.


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