Lucas told them that he wanted them to “take the gloves off” with a death early on. The story group at Del Rey chose Chewbacca. Lucas said that he felt that people might confuse Anakin Solo with Anakin Skywalker and they had been setting up Anakin Solo to be the main hero of the series. Lucas said that he felt that should be a misdirect and his brother Jacen should be the real hero. So the Del Rey story group to kill off Anakin because they needed another big character to be killed off. Anyway ‘Star by Star’ was released around 9/11 and ended with the fall of Coruscant. The story was just devastating at the time.
The Anakin thing is actually a bit of a myth, even if the feel of it rings true. Lucas never actually gave the order, and you can track down interviews with the NJO authors to confirm this.
@ He didn’t tell them to kill him off. Just that he thought that people would confuse him for his grandfather, and that Jacen should be the real hero. And again from the beginning of the series, he said that he wanted readers to feel that no one was safe. The decision to kill Anakin Solo off came from the story group at Del Rey, same with Chewy, and the same with Mara later on. How they handled the later one caused a bit of commotion between the writers, (which along with some other things around the time, led to one of the authors leaving), as well as the model for Mara, LucasFilm, and ultimately with Lucas. They just should’ve had Zahn have the honor to write his character out, rather than the honorary member of the 501st community.
As a 90s kid I despised the negative response later post-prequel fans had for the NJO books. They were a massive breath of fresh air. Books like Traitor were the best fiction to come out of Star Wars between the early 90s and KOTOR 2 in 2004.
Yeah people like to dick ride the thrawn trilogy and pretend it’s the entire EU. Jaina is by far the single most important character in Star Wars to me though and it crushes me Disney refuses to let her shine.
I remember doing a book report in class on Star By Star sometime in middle school, and had people in class trying to argue with me about things like "no Chewbacca isn't dead". And just straight up asked "did you guys read the book or did I?" Pretty wild some of the events of that arc, well worth reading through it all.
Man, I miss Aaron Allston... Such a great writer, managed to put laugh-out-loud humor into SW all the while telling compelling stories with a huge amount of insight into the human condition. Also, yeah, I thoroughly liked NJO, much as some of the deaths felt utterly devastating. But I read that when I was a bit older, had lost people myself and had learned about grief, so for me it was the right kind of SW at the right time.
I was in 7th grade when I read the whole of the NJO, and I had been speeding through it, until Star by Star. I had accidentally spoiled myself that Anakin died while reading Wookieepedia, and stopped reading and didn't start Star by Star for a month after that, as Anakin was my favorite character at the time. When I actually read it, it was devastating to younger me, and even years later I still have a wee bit of trouble getting thru his death scene
7:56 - Where do I fall? "The world has enough tragedies already; we don't need to invent new ones". I generally try to avoid pieces of media involving heavy themes. My emotions are too clouded to be able to feel catharsis; it just makes me feel worse with zero upsides or positives. I don't need that kind of thing in my life.
I hate that they killed off Anakin Solo and I especially hate that they did it because the people in charge didn't want two characters named Anakin running around because they thought people would get confused about which one was which. (The prequels were being produced and released about this time.)
Yeah, killing Anakin in this way I felt was a bit of a waste, though I did like how the whole war really broke Jacen and led to future events. I know that a lot of people don't, but it felt very reminiscent of Vader's fall to me and fit well within the universe.
@@WhatyourAncestorsknewpersonally I think it’s a lot more funny when people like you try to project their undeniable misery onto others because people enjoy something because thats fictional lol
I have a mix of feelings about the NJO and beyond tone shift. Like, I don't think that Star Wars *shouldn't* have these sorts of tones and events- one of the things I like about the setting is that it's big enough to contain a significant variety. But at the same time, I kinda feel like the NJO books are a flavor of late 90s/early 00s dark that I just find tiresome. Their darker tone has not aged as well as I would have liked, but that hsppens, you can't hold it against the books too terribly much. I dunno, I do feel like my bone to pick with it is mostly based on the loss of the goofier fun star wars tone that was no longer really viable to go back to, rather than being strongly anti-90s edgelord grimdark, but I also acknowledge that wanting the franchise to always stay as it was would've just made it grow stale, so I dunno. Maybe there was a different direction it could've gone, or the direction it went could've been handled with a bit more grace, I dunno.
People's reaction to Chewie's death and hate towards RA Salvatore for it was sad. NJO was a pretty fresh new place for Star Wars and the Vong were very interesting. I've always loved organic tech in sci-fi.
The funny thing about the Bantam era being more light in tone is that there are genuinely terrifying things that exist in some books like the Crystal Spiders in the Jedi Academy trilogy and the Ssi Ruuvi, like I find the Ssi Ruuvi more terrifying then the Vong personally, not in a grimdark way, but more in like a cosmic horror kinda sense.
Yeah, given how much they hated the use of regular technology and droids, the Vong must have been horrified by how the Ssi Ruuvi powered their tech... although I wonder if any leaders or factions would be ruthless enough to use that or (if it existed in Star Wars) the Composer against the Yuuzhan Vong since they'd be super effective at decimating their morale if nothing else.
For me, it was too dang hard to get all the books needed to follow along when i was a kid and had the time to read like that, and then when i was an adult and could afford it, i didnt have time to read them, and only the abridged versions were available on audio, which i didnt want to even bother with knowing id be missing whole parts of the story. Thanks to the heroic youtube star wars audiobook community, ive finally been able to listen through the NJO, Dark Nest, and LotF series and because of that have purchased all the FotJ series audiobooks and Crucible.
Much like the Dark Empire series, this is one that I like much more in concept than execution. The broad strokes are more interesting than the specifics and it feels like the whole thing was too tightly focused on the main OT cast and their descendants. That said I really loved these books when I first read em back in middle school.
It's the sort of thing that could have been better covered by a wider variety of stories. Like, imagine a Battlestar Galactica esque plot about a New Republic fleet trapped behind Vong lines, trying to escort refugees to safety. Or a story about the boots on the ground that's entirely about one battle. We got hints of that but they really didn't go deep enough.
I read Dark Tide first, so my intro to the NJO was depressed alcoholic Han. Almost felt like Vector Prime was light by comparison; up until the end it was mostly a pretty light-hearted novel, just a bit of drama lurking in the back. I eventually grew up to enjoy it in concept, though parts of it weren't good at the time and much didn't age well. Still, I preferred it to the Denning-verse that came after. I can see why Disney wanted to rid themselves of that particular baggage/author...
I finished reading ALL 19 books and loved every one of them. I can see why a lot of people hated them especially Chewie's death. BUT I think the Del Ray books are better in that you never knew if another major character was going to die or not. Having all of the major characters surviving an adventure by the skin of their teeth gets really boring....really fast. Besides the only major character death I really hated was Mara Jade Skywalker's death. I understand why it was done during the LOTF series but still....
I started my journey in Legends in the Junior Jedi Knights series, so the death of Anakin hurt me to my core. But I did love the change of format the New Jedi Order series took in focusing on a single continuous story.
I enjoy the Bantam and Del Rey eras. Del Rey gave us higher stakes and a darker tone, but Bantam gave us Waru, incel Luke, and Winter×Ackbar. All of it is great.
Remember when an 18 year old farm boy came home from being assaulted and kidnapped by an old man to find his adoptive parents killed and bodies burning on the front lawn and went on the run to rescue a teenage girl who was being tortured by her father??? Yeah i love A New Hope too. I think people are forgetting Star Wars was never as light hearted as they think it was really just the main characters that were untouchable, plenty of secondary characters had terrible ends before the NJO
I liked parts of the NJO, but I had quit by the halfway-ish point. It was too bleak and I didn't really see any light at the end of the tunnel, if the only rare victories were phyrric.
I liked Star by Star much more than later NJO books (Vergere's and Jacen's side adventure in traitor did nothing for me) but in hindsight I wish they had committed to killing off movie characters rather than stripping their families of all the book originals. With two Solo Kids gone as well as mara while the movie characters continued to stay pushed into the limelight well into their retirement years felt odd and seemed like part of the reason the EU lost a lot of steam towards the end.
I never read any of the NJO books. I tended to like the books I read less as they got further away from the OT in years. If you hadn't followed everything up to that point, I couldn't just jump in with them and know what was what, who was who, and the how to and what for of what was going on. Plus I thought the Vong were kind of dumb, and I still sort of do now. They seem like they were created by someone who was extremely vanilla but who wanted to try and make the most edgy edge lords to ever edge. It also never made sense to me that they had resistance to The Force because they come from a different part of space, but I may very well not know how that all works because of my overwhelming disinterest that's been going on now for decades. It feels to me like if someone wrote a story about a war between Earth and some other planet and the aliens are immune to nuclear weapons because their home planet doesn't have radioactive metals on it, or some BS. Force resistance from something evolutionary is reasonable, because it's part of the way nature works. Force resistance because that part of the natural world isn't in your homeland, but very much IS in your invasion target seems dumb to me. I guess a better analogy would be how European plagues killed so many native peoples in the Americas. The Natives weren't like, "Oh, there aren't plagues here, so we don't get those." They were more vulnerable to that natural force specifically because it wasn't something they previously had to deal with. Anyway, the Vong grow on my slowly, but it's very slow and overall, as you can tell, I am pretty cold on them. My brother in law, on the other hand, absolutely loves the NJO books and it's his favorite part of the EU, so to each his own. Now I shall return to building my Lego Executor Class SSD. It may be specifically the Executor, but since I'm listening to the X-Wing series right now, and Zsinj was always my favorite Imperial Warlord (I do not understand why) I shall personnally consider this vessel to be Iron Fist.
I just want to point out that this tonal shift is more of depiction/storytelling emphasis rather than in-universe stakes. Sure, the NJO is a far grander story than what Bantam era offered, but when you actually look at the lore of the periods, you see the early New Republic Era is at points just as dark, even if the actual stories don't focus on that aspect. The Imperial Mutiny is obviously the primary example, but you also have stuff like the Crytos virus, destruction of Carida and periods of war mentioned in sourcebooks but never properly touched on in the stories. The key difference is obviously that the main characters had plot armour, whereas under Del Rey they did not.
That's what's meant by the stakes in this context though, as far as what the audience was prepared for. You knew bad things could happen to whatever was introduced but there wasn't really any risk for established elements.
I loved the new Jedi order my one grip with Anakin Solo getting killed off is, I saw a lot of his potential and was disappointed because he was about to create a living Lightsaber and that idea intrigue me and fascinated me and I would have been very interested to see wherethat type of new technology would go.
A shame it's a novel so influential, it gave its... weird author too much clout afterwards. Honestly, Troy Denning was better off doing one-offs like Tatooine Ghost, not entire novel miniseries that do a "Happy Ending Override" to a fine chronological series finale to an otherwise beleaguered franchise continuity. As an aside, I'm actually one of those people who actually LIKED Chewbacca's martyrdom, mostly because I already understood the ramifications somehow. Think the death of good Theoden in The Lord of the Rings books and movies. 4:40: Don't care, it's still good food. 4:56: Even if Kyle Katarn got martyred too, he would have taken down an army and a fleet before ending things with a bang. Ah, child soldiers in all but name. Always depend on them on saving their respective worlds and universes, as seen in works like Kim Possible, Gravity Falls, Amphibia, The Owl House, Teen Titans, and so on and so forth. 5:52: Lampshades like this are a precious must do.
I enjoyed the NJO series until Anakin Solo was killed. Mainly, I just really liked his character and was disappointed when he was killed. His conflict with being named after Anakin Skywalker was something I was hoping to get fleshed out more. I read most of the series (it was hard to keep track of and it was years later that I realized I had accidentally skipped some books). But what actually ruined NJO for me was the Legacy of the Force series. Jacen Solo falling to the dark side as the main plot focus of the series was the last straw for me (and I hated Mara Jade going out the way she did. Would have preferred she had gotten a better death if she was going to be killed off). I think at that point I was tired of the books constantly focusing on the Skywalker/Solo family ruining the galaxy every few years and gravitated towards books that weren't focusing on Han, Luke, and Leia.
@ hence why I said “ruined for me.” The NJO and LotF series are good series of books with amazing authors. Just cause I stopped enjoying the material doesn’t mean it’s bad material. Corey said to talk in the comments about our opinions. We don’t all have to like the same things.
Admittedly I don’t particularly care for the series or the Vong in general, but that’s a personal thing, not a mark against the books themselves. I don’t generally care much for grimdark storytelling and I definitely prefer the lighter, pulpier tone with Star Wars. Even so, I respect what the authors created and the fans of the books.
I think the blunt reality is that a lot of Star Wars fans in particular only really want nostalgia. They don't want the interesting look at different themes, they don't want a look at the issues of the day. They want the Star Wars of their childhood, nice and safe were the good guys never really die or do anything actually wrong. As an example, look at the reaction to Episode 8. Sure it has other issues. But looking at some of themes it's trying to deal with (arms dealing to both sides, issues around rebel command leadership, depression etc) in much the same way as people reacted negatively to the Prequels initially (too much politics/economics in my Star Wars, and all the other raa raa) despite it being again other aspects like the dialogue and pacing that should have been criticised. Ultimately I'd say the fandom is the biggest chain around Star Wars neck.
very off topic but could you make a tutorial on how to make the weapons more lore accurately ranged in Thrawns Revenge. I've been messing around with the mod in notepad++ and id like to make the weapons longer range. Just wondering. day 1 of asking
Oh, make no mistake, Lumiya was lying her arse off. Vergere was very much a Jedi, if an eccentric one, like Qui-Gon. It's a dark secret that the Jedi are not, by definition, heroes. They follow the will of the Force, and that can lead to dark places that would horrify other Jedi. Besides that, Vergere was able to speak to Jacen after her death, even affect the material world. The Sith are incapable of this while chained to the Dark Side. As for the how: Qui-Gon guided Yoda and Obi-wan down this path. When Anakin's time came, I believe that they collectively guided his spirit down that path, now having enough influence over the Force that it was no longer necessary for a Jedi to learn the ancient art so long as their spirit was that of a true Jedi. That is what happened to Vergere, I think. Yoda and others, even Anakin Solo, all pitched in. Together, fully intune with the will of the Force, the dead Jedi subtly exerted influence to save the galaxy.
Vector Prime was my first wallbanger. As in, the first book I ever _threw at a wall in disgust._ I've never thrown a book since, either. I agree that the fan backlash was utterly unjustified, but the Vong in general were presented as little more than unstoppable edgelords out to do nothing but cause suffering and Chewbacca's death wound up meaning _nothing_ from a narrative perspective.
I enjoyed all the books until the last one. It just felt like it was too much of a "final conflict" with too sudden of an end, almost like the authors were told to wrap it up quick. But that is my only real complaint.
I really need to get into the NJO-era EU, but not sure where to start. Should I start with the NJO or the Thrawn trilogy? I'd planned to read the Thrawn trilogy in high school, but never got the chance to finish Heir to The Empire
Start with Thrawn. I don't always recommend chronological order and you can probably safely skip quite a few books in between, but the Thrawn Trilogy is foundational to much of the EU. They're also just good books.
The New Jedi Order was gritty and captivating. It kept you on the edge of your seat, not wanting to stop reading because of the need for finding out what's will happen next. While some important characters died like Chewy and Anakin, they had deaths that heroes deserved. Also, it took Star Wars in a new direction, with a story line far different than just light vs dark side, sith vs jedi, government vs rebels. I believe it gave a refreshing and captivating feel to Star Wars that it hadn't had in years. I think if Disney had gone this direction with an R-rated series, targeted for the now adult fans, their sequels would have done much better, and be accepted by more. Meanwhile they could do stories in between, that are less dark, for younger Star Wars fans.
Looking back, the New Jedi Order was a lot like The Last Jedi on the meta level. Both were following from overly safe stories. Both took big risks that resulted in a huge backlash. And the stories that followed were less a continuation from them than a response to that backlash and therefore became the worst in their respective universes. As much as I liked the New Jedi Order as a kid, Legacy of the Force was so bad that I'd gladly erase the entire Del Rey era from EU continuity just to keep it from happening. It boggles my mind that their response to the backlash against the NJO was to copy/paste the story of the prequels when the prequels had a far bigger backlash and prequel hate was at its height. Everyone involved in the decision to turn Jacen into a Sith lord just because he was the face of the NJO should never have been allowed to write Star Wars books in the first place. NJO felt like Star Wars was 'growing up' with me. LOTF felt like Star Wars was regressing and dumbing down, but in the most mean-spirited way possible to spite both the fans who liked NJO and the fans who grew up reading the older books where the Solo twins were growing up. There was no salvaging the EU after LOTF and it was the reason I welcomed Disney erasing the EU from continuity at first, before it became clear they were only going to take from the worst aspects of the EU (Kylo Ren being discount Jacen and Palpatine's return) while if anything good from the EU was going to be used, it would only be in cartoons like Rebels bringing in Thrawn.
I did not like these books very much and only ended up reading about three of them (not in order). There were also too many of them in a very short time and my local library did not keep up with the releases - i could not afford to buy that many books in a year. I appreciate what they were trying to do but i think the execution could use some work. I also think the whole "palpatine knew the vong were coming and was building the deathstar for it" thing dilutes his evil.
Unfortunately, this is where Star Wars Legends loses me; mainly because it just got too miserable and joyless. This was the fourth galactic-scale conflict in the course of 2 decades that completely devastated the galaxy and the Yuuzhan Vong pushed that to the eleventh degree with how edgy try-hard they were. Afterward, things would get worse and darker with Jacen falling to the Dark Side in the 2nd galactic civil war, Darth Krayt rising up to purge the Jedi again, and Cade Skywalker being one of the last Jedi in a galaxy stuck in another dark age. This is why Luke's appearance in The Last Jedi doesn't bother me that much, his fate there is an improvement compared to Legends. If people like this, great, I'm glad they got something out of this that I didn't, but this was the moment where Star Wars just stopped being fun.
Was not a fan of the NJO. I was an OG girl. Much preferred the Bantam era even with some silliness. NJO was dark and sadistic. Hated how they destroyed too many planets especially Courscant. It also felt like they made my favorite character Mara sick so they could side line her in the story. Seems like the guy's loved it but my female SW friends not so much.They made the OT gang often seem like they forgot everything they had learned and had to be lectured by the super solo kids. It sometimes got irritating. I don't need major character deaths just for excitement. It's a waste of character and kind of lazy easy drama rather than creating other kinds of problems. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy dark tones but I don't care for the idea of worshiping pain. You couldn't really get a new story it was like one super long 19 book story. I got sick of the vong by then.
I never liked the Vong era. Definitely devalued the Rebellion’s victory over the Galactic Empire, because I felt that the Empire would have been much better placed to fight the Vong than the New Republic. Also I strongly disliked the Vong as a species, and would have been glad to see Palpatine, Vader and the Empire exterminate them utterly in a justifiable genocide.
To be fair … The Empire agrees with you. 🤣 One of my favorite moments of the NJO is Han Solo arguing with an Imperial officer convinced of exactly what you’re saying, and Han’s response was basically to say Palpatine would have created some sort of superweapon (the “Nose of Palpatine” was a great suggestion for a name) that would have malfunctioned and been destroyed by the Vong.
I'll probably never read the NJO. Too pessimistic. I much prefer the feel of the Bantam books, and a few of the later EU books using Jude Watson's characters.
Eh, never got to them, as they didn't have NJO books at the local library, but honestly, I wasn't really feeling the tone. My teenage self liked having a galaxy to explore and that can sometimes have some higher stakes for some adventures, and more low-stakes pulpier ones at other times. However, it is true that the Warlord/Superweapon of the week format was growing kinda stale. But honestly the Vong felt like a wrong call. Monocultural mono-species as THE Galactic scale Threat felt a bit un-Star Wars (Well, except humans, because writers can give humans some nuance unlike how most writers treat alien species). Not to mention in the retrospective of clearly playing into the worst impulses of that age, whose consequences we're still dealing with. Don't really know what would have been a better choice to shake up the status quo. Maybe a time skip? Sequel trilogy length? Legacy length? Something to let the actions of the heroes have some impact. Of course, any impact is dimished in a universe that has the lore of thousand years of peace, if you want to have anything which has to do with the beloved characters. However, whatever crisis should emerge, it should to be from galactic contradictions, though to be fair, I can see why they were not considered to be core of Star Wars in the era when the prequels were still coming out.
I am torn on the NJO. I genuinely like the series for the most part, but then they let Denning take the lead on everything that followed, which led me to not read the DNT or anything else from the Denningverse. The Denningverse conveniently converged with TCW, the other major EU work I have no interest in, especially the Mortis nonsense. So I was left with an EU I had completely lost interest in by the end and a new film canon that was not a compelling replacement for what the EU was.
If you ask me what the Yuuzhan Vong era was, I'd say it was a waste of opportunity. I'm a very boring person. I like politics. I like complex characters. I like space battles. All three were almost absent from the Legends works - the space battles, if there were any, were terribly straightforward and uninteresting. The politics and intrigue were at a low level, and only the heroes could sometimes be interesting (and then only in theory; in practice, they were either apologists for good or apologists for evil). And then the Yuuzhan Vong appear. Some crazy creatures who seemed to have jumped out of Warhammer, like some kind of love child of the Dark Eldar (sadism) and the Chaos (destruction). We could have seen complex villains, or more interesting dynamics of the remaining factions in the galaxy. How will Pellaeon and the Moffs behave, what will change inside the Remnant with the arrival of a new threat. How will the Hutts, Ssi-Ruuk, Yeveta, etc. react? And this is a great opportunity to give us a decent space battle, with tactics, strategy, self-sacrifice. And everything goes to hell. The Vong are boring and uninteresting, angry sadists. The New Republic is still good and kind. The main focus is still on the Jedi, on the Solo-Skywalkers, although it would be possible to highlight other heroes and other categories of characters. Here they capture Coruscant, and instead of an epic battle in the spirit of the Legend of the Heroes of the Galaxy, they show me some kind of matinee, where Viki Shesh, modified by some implants, very stupidly and ineptly tries to steal Luke's son, and in the process runs away from the battlefield with her bare ass (literally). Sorry, you have a super star destroyer going into a final ramming battle, you have the defense of the galactic capital being torn apart, let's talk about that, shall we? No, why, we have the Jedi again. And that's my problem. Such potential, but in the end it all boiled down to the same mantra. Jedi, Jedi, Jedi.
Those books were Awesome, I enjoyed them. They were Great. And of course, Lucas films could’ve taken any of these books and turned them into the new trilogy, but they were going different routes yes and then when he sold the company to Disney Kathleen Kennedy did everything she could to disregard his counsel, his advice and she was a witch a hateful person who wants to push this woke agenda and I’m getting so sick of it. It’s time she was fired and Bob Iger needs to grow a spine and say enough is enough.
The beginning of era "Everything is s...t, everyone has depression and can't be happy" and it's goes only downhill in Denningverse. NJO was at least well written (mostly). I am depressed and this world is s...t, why would I like to read more of it?
I've thought long and hard about that and although I love a lot of the EU books, I'm very unsure that all that many of them would have worked as movies. And pressing the Vong War into just three movies would have necessitated painful cuts that I don't think the story would have survived intact.
Just reduce the scale of the Vong War, include a time skip btwn movies (similar to how the prequels did), and fill in the rest of the Vong War with a Clone Wars style tv show. 🙃
You want to see a film trilogy that is condensing 19 books that are collectively a sequel/conclusion to around 20 other books with loads of new characters and locations that you're already expected to know? Those films would need to be 90% context to who everyone is on top of adaptating around 5-7 books each. So much would be cut altogether or significantly reduced. The Ryn, Anakin and Tahiri's plotline, the Han & Leia half of the Force Heretic Trilogy and so much more would all have to go. The search for Zonama Sekot, the plot of the last five books, would be maybe 45 minutes of a film and the finale of The Final Prophecy and The Unifying Force would be a total of maybe 20 minutes. It'd be a terribly paced disaster.
Like many, I grew up on the Star Wars saga in the 80s and 90s, often imagining a post-RotJ world featuring the Big 3 and the future/next generation. The imperfect but still amazing PT gave me a frame of reference as to what a Jedi looked like that the OT didn't have for obvious reasons, as well as well as its incredible world building providing a wider-angle view of the entire Star Wars galaxy in general. I love the Bantam era novels because they gave us many great characters, species, planets, etc. But I prefer the Del Rey era novels and the way they used those elements while continuing to build upon them up until George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney. The post-RotJ world from the "Legends" (or, IMM, the real-EU) material is more of a genuine continuation of George Lucas' six film saga. This as opposed to the sequel trilogy that Disney made. Which, from conception, never respected George Lucas' saga, and in fact defecates over all six films. This is the reason why the IP has faded in spite of a handful of great productions (Rogue One, Andor, Mando S1/S2, and TotJ). If Lucasfilm ever gets leadership that has a clue they may begin to right the wrongs of the past dozen years. In that event they can start by embracing the Solo/Skywalkers from the Legends material or at least giving us comparable equivalent characters.
Those books were Awesome, I enjoyed them. They were Great. And of course, Lucas films could’ve taken any of these books and turned them into the new trilogy, but they were going different routes yes and then when he sold the company to Disney Kathleen Kennedy did everything she could to disregard his counsel, his advice and she was a witch a hateful person who wants to push this woke agenda and I’m getting so sick of it. It’s time she was fired and Bob Iger needs to grow a spine and say enough is enough.
If you ask me what the Yuuzhan Vong era was, I'd say it was a waste of opportunity. I'm a very boring person. I like politics. I like complex characters. I like space battles. All three were almost absent from the Legends works - the space battles, if there were any, were terribly straightforward and uninteresting. The politics and intrigue were at a low level, and only the heroes could sometimes be interesting (and then only in theory; in practice, they were either apologists for good or apologists for evil). And then the Yuuzhan Vong appear. Some crazy creatures who seemed to have jumped out of Warhammer, like some kind of love child of the Dark Eldar (sadism) and the Chaos (destruction). We could have seen complex villains, or more interesting dynamics of the remaining factions in the galaxy. How will Pellaeon and the Moffs behave, what will change inside the Remnant with the arrival of a new threat. How will the Hutts, Ssi-Ruuk, Yeveta, etc. react? And this is a great opportunity to give us a decent space battle, with tactics, strategy, self-sacrifice. And everything goes to hell. The Vong are boring and uninteresting, angry sadists. The New Republic is still good and kind. The main focus is still on the Jedi, on the Solo-Skywalkers, although it would be possible to highlight other heroes and other categories of characters. Here they capture Coruscant, and instead of an epic battle in the spirit of the Legend of the Heroes of the Galaxy, they show me some kind of matinee, where Viki Shesh, modified by some implants, very stupidly and ineptly tries to steal Luke's son, and in the process runs away from the battlefield with her bare ass (literally). Sorry, you have a super star destroyer going into a final ramming battle, you have the defense of the galactic capital being torn apart, let's talk about that, shall we? No, why, we have the Jedi again. And that's my problem. Such potential, but in the end it all boiled down to the same mantra. Jedi, Jedi, Jedi.
Lucas told them that he wanted them to “take the gloves off” with a death early on. The story group at Del Rey chose Chewbacca. Lucas said that he felt that people might confuse Anakin Solo with Anakin Skywalker and they had been setting up Anakin Solo to be the main hero of the series. Lucas said that he felt that should be a misdirect and his brother Jacen should be the real hero. So the Del Rey story group to kill off Anakin because they needed another big character to be killed off.
Anyway ‘Star by Star’ was released around 9/11 and ended with the fall of Coruscant. The story was just devastating at the time.
I’m still on Star by Star, so I’m bummed Anakin is killed. Especially since Jacen’s insufferable attitude is really grating on me
@@meeper46Don't worry. Jacen gets better in Traitor.
The Anakin thing is actually a bit of a myth, even if the feel of it rings true. Lucas never actually gave the order, and you can track down interviews with the NJO authors to confirm this.
@ He didn’t tell them to kill him off. Just that he thought that people would confuse him for his grandfather, and that Jacen should be the real hero. And again from the beginning of the series, he said that he wanted readers to feel that no one was safe.
The decision to kill Anakin Solo off came from the story group at Del Rey, same with Chewy, and the same with Mara later on. How they handled the later one caused a bit of commotion between the writers, (which along with some other things around the time, led to one of the authors leaving), as well as the model for Mara, LucasFilm, and ultimately with Lucas. They just should’ve had Zahn have the honor to write his character out, rather than the honorary member of the 501st community.
As a 90s kid I despised the negative response later post-prequel fans had for the NJO books. They were a massive breath of fresh air. Books like Traitor were the best fiction to come out of Star Wars between the early 90s and KOTOR 2 in 2004.
Thrawn to KotOR was the golden age of the EU. Everything that came before was amateurish by comparison, and all that followed seemed shallower for it.
@@warlordofbritannia The Xwing books could hold on their own tbh.
Legacy comics were peak for me@@warlordofbritannia
@@billyherrington5112agreed
Yeah people like to dick ride the thrawn trilogy and pretend it’s the entire EU. Jaina is by far the single most important character in Star Wars to me though and it crushes me Disney refuses to let her shine.
I remember doing a book report in class on Star By Star sometime in middle school, and had people in class trying to argue with me about things like "no Chewbacca isn't dead". And just straight up asked "did you guys read the book or did I?" Pretty wild some of the events of that arc, well worth reading through it all.
Appreciate the slow zoom-in on the pig-thing roast 👍
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed! 😅
Man, I miss Aaron Allston... Such a great writer, managed to put laugh-out-loud humor into SW all the while telling compelling stories with a huge amount of insight into the human condition. Also, yeah, I thoroughly liked NJO, much as some of the deaths felt utterly devastating. But I read that when I was a bit older, had lost people myself and had learned about grief, so for me it was the right kind of SW at the right time.
I was in 7th grade when I read the whole of the NJO, and I had been speeding through it, until Star by Star. I had accidentally spoiled myself that Anakin died while reading Wookieepedia, and stopped reading and didn't start Star by Star for a month after that, as Anakin was my favorite character at the time. When I actually read it, it was devastating to younger me, and even years later I still have a wee bit of trouble getting thru his death scene
I deliberately read Vector Prime last because I wanted to put off reading about Chewbacca's death as long as I could
1:19 Corey's humor works best when Eck is here to awkwardly not get it 😭
We love you Corey!
That subscription plug is damn hilarious!
What a terrible fate for those children! The horror! 😱 And to think viewers of this video will be forced to do the same…. 😢
7:56 - Where do I fall?
"The world has enough tragedies already; we don't need to invent new ones".
I generally try to avoid pieces of media involving heavy themes. My emotions are too clouded to be able to feel catharsis; it just makes me feel worse with zero upsides or positives.
I don't need that kind of thing in my life.
I hate that they killed off Anakin Solo and I especially hate that they did it because the people in charge didn't want two characters named Anakin running around because they thought people would get confused about which one was which. (The prequels were being produced and released about this time.)
Yeah, killing Anakin in this way I felt was a bit of a waste, though I did like how the whole war really broke Jacen and led to future events. I know that a lot of people don't, but it felt very reminiscent of Vader's fall to me and fit well within the universe.
It's hilarious how serious star wars fans take it all though.
@@WhatyourAncestorsknewpersonally I think it’s a lot more funny when people like you try to project their undeniable misery onto others because people enjoy something because thats fictional lol
@@Gandalfthegoldenbird lmao I'm the miserable one?! This video talks about death threats to the author over the killing of a fictional character.
@@WhatyourAncestorsknew the star wars fandom is extremely toxic
I have a mix of feelings about the NJO and beyond tone shift.
Like, I don't think that Star Wars *shouldn't* have these sorts of tones and events- one of the things I like about the setting is that it's big enough to contain a significant variety.
But at the same time, I kinda feel like the NJO books are a flavor of late 90s/early 00s dark that I just find tiresome. Their darker tone has not aged as well as I would have liked, but that hsppens, you can't hold it against the books too terribly much.
I dunno, I do feel like my bone to pick with it is mostly based on the loss of the goofier fun star wars tone that was no longer really viable to go back to, rather than being strongly anti-90s edgelord grimdark, but I also acknowledge that wanting the franchise to always stay as it was would've just made it grow stale, so I dunno. Maybe there was a different direction it could've gone, or the direction it went could've been handled with a bit more grace, I dunno.
People's reaction to Chewie's death and hate towards RA Salvatore for it was sad. NJO was a pretty fresh new place for Star Wars and the Vong were very interesting. I've always loved organic tech in sci-fi.
Yeah love it or hate it the NJO was interesting
The funny thing about the Bantam era being more light in tone is that there are genuinely terrifying things that exist in some books like the Crystal Spiders in the Jedi Academy trilogy and the Ssi Ruuvi, like I find the Ssi Ruuvi more terrifying then the Vong personally, not in a grimdark way, but more in like a cosmic horror kinda sense.
Yeah, given how much they hated the use of regular technology and droids, the Vong must have been horrified by how the Ssi Ruuvi powered their tech... although I wonder if any leaders or factions would be ruthless enough to use that or (if it existed in Star Wars) the Composer against the Yuuzhan Vong since they'd be super effective at decimating their morale if nothing else.
For me, it was too dang hard to get all the books needed to follow along when i was a kid and had the time to read like that, and then when i was an adult and could afford it, i didnt have time to read them, and only the abridged versions were available on audio, which i didnt want to even bother with knowing id be missing whole parts of the story.
Thanks to the heroic youtube star wars audiobook community, ive finally been able to listen through the NJO, Dark Nest, and LotF series and because of that have purchased all the FotJ series audiobooks and Crucible.
Much like the Dark Empire series, this is one that I like much more in concept than execution. The broad strokes are more interesting than the specifics and it feels like the whole thing was too tightly focused on the main OT cast and their descendants. That said I really loved these books when I first read em back in middle school.
Same, I'm almost glad that this direction ended and didn't continue. Almost.
Yeah not that much really happens for 19 books of writing
It's the sort of thing that could have been better covered by a wider variety of stories. Like, imagine a Battlestar Galactica esque plot about a New Republic fleet trapped behind Vong lines, trying to escort refugees to safety. Or a story about the boots on the ground that's entirely about one battle. We got hints of that but they really didn't go deep enough.
The New Jedi Order series feels like the Transformers: The Movie of the Post-Endor EU.
Having just watched PointlessHub’s analysis of that film (& the series pre-/post-movie) I think I understand what you mean. 😅
I read Dark Tide first, so my intro to the NJO was depressed alcoholic Han. Almost felt like Vector Prime was light by comparison; up until the end it was mostly a pretty light-hearted novel, just a bit of drama lurking in the back. I eventually grew up to enjoy it in concept, though parts of it weren't good at the time and much didn't age well. Still, I preferred it to the Denning-verse that came after. I can see why Disney wanted to rid themselves of that particular baggage/author...
I finished reading ALL 19 books and loved every one of them. I can see why a lot of people hated them especially Chewie's death. BUT I think the Del Ray books are better in that you never knew if another major character was going to die or not. Having all of the major characters surviving an adventure by the skin of their teeth gets really boring....really fast. Besides the only major character death I really hated was Mara Jade Skywalker's death. I understand why it was done during the LOTF series but still....
Had to edit my post above. Had the wrong 9 book series mentioned Mara got killed in the LOTF series, not the FOTJ series. My apologizes.
I’m still listening to the audiobooks of them on RUclips
I read so many novels and never got bored. By the end of the NJO, I didn't care anymore. That's worse than being bored.
I started my journey in Legends in the Junior Jedi Knights series, so the death of Anakin hurt me to my core. But I did love the change of format the New Jedi Order series took in focusing on a single continuous story.
I enjoy the Bantam and Del Rey eras. Del Rey gave us higher stakes and a darker tone, but Bantam gave us Waru, incel Luke, and Winter×Ackbar. All of it is great.
What means incel luke? He wasnt virgin or unmarried in EU. You mean he started hating woman or something?
@billyherrington5112 you haven't listened to their podcast have you? 😂
@@JJJBunney001 no, I am here first time
@@billyherrington5112♂️welcome to the club♂️
awesome video - merry Christmas!!
Remember when an 18 year old farm boy came home from being assaulted and kidnapped by an old man to find his adoptive parents killed and bodies burning on the front lawn and went on the run to rescue a teenage girl who was being tortured by her father??? Yeah i love A New Hope too.
I think people are forgetting Star Wars was never as light hearted as they think it was really just the main characters that were untouchable, plenty of secondary characters had terrible ends before the NJO
3:50 ah yes cinema
I was also confused by that sudden zoom-in. 😅
I liked parts of the NJO, but I had quit by the halfway-ish point.
It was too bleak and I didn't really see any light at the end of the tunnel, if the only rare victories were phyrric.
0:47 God I miss team rocket
I liked Star by Star much more than later NJO books (Vergere's and Jacen's side adventure in traitor did nothing for me) but in hindsight I wish they had committed to killing off movie characters rather than stripping their families of all the book originals.
With two Solo Kids gone as well as mara while the movie characters continued to stay pushed into the limelight well into their retirement years felt odd and seemed like part of the reason the EU lost a lot of steam towards the end.
I never read any of the NJO books. I tended to like the books I read less as they got further away from the OT in years. If you hadn't followed everything up to that point, I couldn't just jump in with them and know what was what, who was who, and the how to and what for of what was going on. Plus I thought the Vong were kind of dumb, and I still sort of do now. They seem like they were created by someone who was extremely vanilla but who wanted to try and make the most edgy edge lords to ever edge. It also never made sense to me that they had resistance to The Force because they come from a different part of space, but I may very well not know how that all works because of my overwhelming disinterest that's been going on now for decades. It feels to me like if someone wrote a story about a war between Earth and some other planet and the aliens are immune to nuclear weapons because their home planet doesn't have radioactive metals on it, or some BS. Force resistance from something evolutionary is reasonable, because it's part of the way nature works. Force resistance because that part of the natural world isn't in your homeland, but very much IS in your invasion target seems dumb to me. I guess a better analogy would be how European plagues killed so many native peoples in the Americas. The Natives weren't like, "Oh, there aren't plagues here, so we don't get those." They were more vulnerable to that natural force specifically because it wasn't something they previously had to deal with. Anyway, the Vong grow on my slowly, but it's very slow and overall, as you can tell, I am pretty cold on them. My brother in law, on the other hand, absolutely loves the NJO books and it's his favorite part of the EU, so to each his own. Now I shall return to building my Lego Executor Class SSD. It may be specifically the Executor, but since I'm listening to the X-Wing series right now, and Zsinj was always my favorite Imperial Warlord (I do not understand why) I shall personnally consider this vessel to be Iron Fist.
Tahiri Veila best girl
I just want to point out that this tonal shift is more of depiction/storytelling emphasis rather than in-universe stakes. Sure, the NJO is a far grander story than what Bantam era offered, but when you actually look at the lore of the periods, you see the early New Republic Era is at points just as dark, even if the actual stories don't focus on that aspect. The Imperial Mutiny is obviously the primary example, but you also have stuff like the Crytos virus, destruction of Carida and periods of war mentioned in sourcebooks but never properly touched on in the stories. The key difference is obviously that the main characters had plot armour, whereas under Del Rey they did not.
That's what's meant by the stakes in this context though, as far as what the audience was prepared for. You knew bad things could happen to whatever was introduced but there wasn't really any risk for established elements.
@CoreysDatapad Fair
I loved the new Jedi order my one grip with Anakin Solo getting killed off is, I saw a lot of his potential and was disappointed because he was about to create a living Lightsaber and that idea intrigue me and fascinated me and I would have been very interested to see wherethat type of new technology would go.
So we went from Family Friendly Books to, Edgy Dark Books.
A shame it's a novel so influential, it gave its... weird author too much clout afterwards. Honestly, Troy Denning was better off doing one-offs like Tatooine Ghost, not entire novel miniseries that do a "Happy Ending Override" to a fine chronological series finale to an otherwise beleaguered franchise continuity.
As an aside, I'm actually one of those people who actually LIKED Chewbacca's martyrdom, mostly because I already understood the ramifications somehow. Think the death of good Theoden in The Lord of the Rings books and movies.
4:40: Don't care, it's still good food.
4:56: Even if Kyle Katarn got martyred too, he would have taken down an army and a fleet before ending things with a bang.
Ah, child soldiers in all but name. Always depend on them on saving their respective worlds and universes, as seen in works like Kim Possible, Gravity Falls, Amphibia, The Owl House, Teen Titans, and so on and so forth.
5:52: Lampshades like this are a precious must do.
Best of Star Wars for me. Just made a 2 hour video on the whoke series. Spectacular stuff.
For me, everything after Survivor's Quest is an alternate reality.
If han had turned everthing in force awakens becouse of The death of Chewbacca this would Be way Better
I wonder if they were planning to kill Luke by dropping a moon on him, too.
I think the story would have been better had Jacen died in Star by Star, Luke in the later books, and Anakin been the hero at the end.
I enjoyed the NJO series until Anakin Solo was killed. Mainly, I just really liked his character and was disappointed when he was killed. His conflict with being named after Anakin Skywalker was something I was hoping to get fleshed out more. I read most of the series (it was hard to keep track of and it was years later that I realized I had accidentally skipped some books). But what actually ruined NJO for me was the Legacy of the Force series. Jacen Solo falling to the dark side as the main plot focus of the series was the last straw for me (and I hated Mara Jade going out the way she did. Would have preferred she had gotten a better death if she was going to be killed off). I think at that point I was tired of the books constantly focusing on the Skywalker/Solo family ruining the galaxy every few years and gravitated towards books that weren't focusing on Han, Luke, and Leia.
If the NJO books were ruined by the infamous Karen Traviss slop of later years for you then the problem is you, not the books.
@ hence why I said “ruined for me.” The NJO and LotF series are good series of books with amazing authors. Just cause I stopped enjoying the material doesn’t mean it’s bad material. Corey said to talk in the comments about our opinions. We don’t all have to like the same things.
Have you/are you planning to make a teren Rogriss video?
He's one of the next ones
@@CoreysDatapad pog
I agree sire!
Admittedly I don’t particularly care for the series or the Vong in general, but that’s a personal thing, not a mark against the books themselves. I don’t generally care much for grimdark storytelling and I definitely prefer the lighter, pulpier tone with Star Wars. Even so, I respect what the authors created and the fans of the books.
I think the blunt reality is that a lot of Star Wars fans in particular only really want nostalgia. They don't want the interesting look at different themes, they don't want a look at the issues of the day. They want the Star Wars of their childhood, nice and safe were the good guys never really die or do anything actually wrong.
As an example, look at the reaction to Episode 8. Sure it has other issues. But looking at some of themes it's trying to deal with (arms dealing to both sides, issues around rebel command leadership, depression etc) in much the same way as people reacted negatively to the Prequels initially (too much politics/economics in my Star Wars, and all the other raa raa) despite it being again other aspects like the dialogue and pacing that should have been criticised.
Ultimately I'd say the fandom is the biggest chain around Star Wars neck.
very off topic but could you make a tutorial on how to make the weapons more lore accurately ranged in Thrawns Revenge. I've been messing around with the mod in notepad++ and id like to make the weapons longer range. Just wondering. day 1 of asking
Oh, make no mistake, Lumiya was lying her arse off. Vergere was very much a Jedi, if an eccentric one, like Qui-Gon. It's a dark secret that the Jedi are not, by definition, heroes. They follow the will of the Force, and that can lead to dark places that would horrify other Jedi.
Besides that, Vergere was able to speak to Jacen after her death, even affect the material world. The Sith are incapable of this while chained to the Dark Side. As for the how: Qui-Gon guided Yoda and Obi-wan down this path. When Anakin's time came, I believe that they collectively guided his spirit down that path, now having enough influence over the Force that it was no longer necessary for a Jedi to learn the ancient art so long as their spirit was that of a true Jedi. That is what happened to Vergere, I think. Yoda and others, even Anakin Solo, all pitched in. Together, fully intune with the will of the Force, the dead Jedi subtly exerted influence to save the galaxy.
Vector Prime was my first wallbanger. As in, the first book I ever _threw at a wall in disgust._ I've never thrown a book since, either. I agree that the fan backlash was utterly unjustified, but the Vong in general were presented as little more than unstoppable edgelords out to do nothing but cause suffering and Chewbacca's death wound up meaning _nothing_ from a narrative perspective.
I enjoyed all the books until the last one. It just felt like it was too much of a "final conflict" with too sudden of an end, almost like the authors were told to wrap it up quick. But that is my only real complaint.
I really need to get into the NJO-era EU, but not sure where to start. Should I start with the NJO or the Thrawn trilogy? I'd planned to read the Thrawn trilogy in high school, but never got the chance to finish Heir to The Empire
Start with Thrawn. I don't always recommend chronological order and you can probably safely skip quite a few books in between, but the Thrawn Trilogy is foundational to much of the EU. They're also just good books.
Read them all, or at the bare minimum read the Thrawn trilogy, X-Wing books, Hand of Thrawn duology etc. first
I would start with the heir to the empire trilogy. It’ll set everything up.
The New Jedi Order was gritty and captivating. It kept you on the edge of your seat, not wanting to stop reading because of the need for finding out what's will happen next. While some important characters died like Chewy and Anakin, they had deaths that heroes deserved. Also, it took Star Wars in a new direction, with a story line far different than just light vs dark side, sith vs jedi, government vs rebels. I believe it gave a refreshing and captivating feel to Star Wars that it hadn't had in years. I think if Disney had gone this direction with an R-rated series, targeted for the now adult fans, their sequels would have done much better, and be accepted by more. Meanwhile they could do stories in between, that are less dark, for younger Star Wars fans.
Looking back, the New Jedi Order was a lot like The Last Jedi on the meta level. Both were following from overly safe stories. Both took big risks that resulted in a huge backlash. And the stories that followed were less a continuation from them than a response to that backlash and therefore became the worst in their respective universes. As much as I liked the New Jedi Order as a kid, Legacy of the Force was so bad that I'd gladly erase the entire Del Rey era from EU continuity just to keep it from happening. It boggles my mind that their response to the backlash against the NJO was to copy/paste the story of the prequels when the prequels had a far bigger backlash and prequel hate was at its height. Everyone involved in the decision to turn Jacen into a Sith lord just because he was the face of the NJO should never have been allowed to write Star Wars books in the first place.
NJO felt like Star Wars was 'growing up' with me. LOTF felt like Star Wars was regressing and dumbing down, but in the most mean-spirited way possible to spite both the fans who liked NJO and the fans who grew up reading the older books where the Solo twins were growing up.
There was no salvaging the EU after LOTF and it was the reason I welcomed Disney erasing the EU from continuity at first, before it became clear they were only going to take from the worst aspects of the EU (Kylo Ren being discount Jacen and Palpatine's return) while if anything good from the EU was going to be used, it would only be in cartoons like Rebels bringing in Thrawn.
I did not like these books very much and only ended up reading about three of them (not in order). There were also too many of them in a very short time and my local library did not keep up with the releases - i could not afford to buy that many books in a year. I appreciate what they were trying to do but i think the execution could use some work.
I also think the whole "palpatine knew the vong were coming and was building the deathstar for it" thing dilutes his evil.
Unfortunately, this is where Star Wars Legends loses me; mainly because it just got too miserable and joyless. This was the fourth galactic-scale conflict in the course of 2 decades that completely devastated the galaxy and the Yuuzhan Vong pushed that to the eleventh degree with how edgy try-hard they were. Afterward, things would get worse and darker with Jacen falling to the Dark Side in the 2nd galactic civil war, Darth Krayt rising up to purge the Jedi again, and Cade Skywalker being one of the last Jedi in a galaxy stuck in another dark age. This is why Luke's appearance in The Last Jedi doesn't bother me that much, his fate there is an improvement compared to Legends. If people like this, great, I'm glad they got something out of this that I didn't, but this was the moment where Star Wars just stopped being fun.
Make more videos of Star Wars including this video about God of the force Anakin Skywalker Which I know I think you might just love. You can do it.
Was not a fan of the NJO. I was an OG girl. Much preferred the Bantam era even with some silliness. NJO was dark and sadistic. Hated how they destroyed too many planets especially Courscant. It also felt like they made my favorite character Mara sick so they could side line her in the story. Seems like the guy's loved it but my female SW friends not so much.They made the OT gang often seem like they forgot everything they had learned and had to be lectured by the super solo kids. It sometimes got irritating. I don't need major character deaths just for excitement. It's a waste of character and kind of lazy easy drama rather than creating other kinds of problems. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy dark tones but I don't care for the idea of worshiping pain. You couldn't really get a new story it was like one super long 19 book story. I got sick of the vong by then.
100%
I never liked the Vong era. Definitely devalued the Rebellion’s victory over the Galactic Empire, because I felt that the Empire would have been much better placed to fight the Vong than the New Republic. Also I strongly disliked the Vong as a species, and would have been glad to see Palpatine, Vader and the Empire exterminate them utterly in a justifiable genocide.
To be fair … The Empire agrees with you. 🤣 One of my favorite moments of the NJO is Han Solo arguing with an Imperial officer convinced of exactly what you’re saying, and Han’s response was basically to say Palpatine would have created some sort of superweapon (the “Nose of Palpatine” was a great suggestion for a name) that would have malfunctioned and been destroyed by the Vong.
I'll probably never read the NJO. Too pessimistic. I much prefer the feel of the Bantam books, and a few of the later EU books using Jude Watson's characters.
Eh, never got to them, as they didn't have NJO books at the local library, but honestly, I wasn't really feeling the tone. My teenage self liked having a galaxy to explore and that can sometimes have some higher stakes for some adventures, and more low-stakes pulpier ones at other times. However, it is true that the Warlord/Superweapon of the week format was growing kinda stale.
But honestly the Vong felt like a wrong call. Monocultural mono-species as THE Galactic scale Threat felt a bit un-Star Wars (Well, except humans, because writers can give humans some nuance unlike how most writers treat alien species). Not to mention in the retrospective of clearly playing into the worst impulses of that age, whose consequences we're still dealing with.
Don't really know what would have been a better choice to shake up the status quo. Maybe a time skip? Sequel trilogy length? Legacy length? Something to let the actions of the heroes have some impact. Of course, any impact is dimished in a universe that has the lore of thousand years of peace, if you want to have anything which has to do with the beloved characters. However, whatever crisis should emerge, it should to be from galactic contradictions, though to be fair, I can see why they were not considered to be core of Star Wars in the era when the prequels were still coming out.
I am torn on the NJO. I genuinely like the series for the most part, but then they let Denning take the lead on everything that followed, which led me to not read the DNT or anything else from the Denningverse. The Denningverse conveniently converged with TCW, the other major EU work I have no interest in, especially the Mortis nonsense. So I was left with an EU I had completely lost interest in by the end and a new film canon that was not a compelling replacement for what the EU was.
If you ask me what the Yuuzhan Vong era was, I'd say it was a waste of opportunity.
I'm a very boring person. I like politics. I like complex characters. I like space battles. All three were almost absent from the Legends works - the space battles, if there were any, were terribly straightforward and uninteresting. The politics and intrigue were at a low level, and only the heroes could sometimes be interesting (and then only in theory; in practice, they were either apologists for good or apologists for evil).
And then the Yuuzhan Vong appear. Some crazy creatures who seemed to have jumped out of Warhammer, like some kind of love child of the Dark Eldar (sadism) and the Chaos (destruction). We could have seen complex villains, or more interesting dynamics of the remaining factions in the galaxy. How will Pellaeon and the Moffs behave, what will change inside the Remnant with the arrival of a new threat. How will the Hutts, Ssi-Ruuk, Yeveta, etc. react? And this is a great opportunity to give us a decent space battle, with tactics, strategy, self-sacrifice. And everything goes to hell. The Vong are boring and uninteresting, angry sadists. The New Republic is still good and kind. The main focus is still on the Jedi, on the Solo-Skywalkers, although it would be possible to highlight other heroes and other categories of characters. Here they capture Coruscant, and instead of an epic battle in the spirit of the Legend of the Heroes of the Galaxy, they show me some kind of matinee, where Viki Shesh, modified by some implants, very stupidly and ineptly tries to steal Luke's son, and in the process runs away from the battlefield with her bare ass (literally). Sorry, you have a super star destroyer going into a final ramming battle, you have the defense of the galactic capital being torn apart, let's talk about that, shall we? No, why, we have the Jedi again.
And that's my problem. Such potential, but in the end it all boiled down to the same mantra. Jedi, Jedi, Jedi.
I lost interest in the EU because of the NJO.
Same
You're depriving yourself.
@@davidb9639 Jacen becomes another imperial warlord with somewhat longer legs than most. That's about all I missed.
Those books were Awesome, I enjoyed them. They were Great. And of course, Lucas films could’ve taken any of these books and turned them into the new trilogy, but they were going different routes yes and then when he sold the company to Disney Kathleen Kennedy did everything she could to disregard his counsel, his advice and she was a witch a hateful person who wants to push this woke agenda and I’m getting so sick of it. It’s time she was fired and Bob Iger needs to grow a spine and say enough is enough.
The beginning of era "Everything is s...t, everyone has depression and can't be happy" and it's goes only downhill in Denningverse. NJO was at least well written (mostly). I am depressed and this world is s...t, why would I like to read more of it?
So the short answer is: Troy Denning.
Denning >>>>> Johnson or Headland.
Would've been PERFECT if this story was the Sequel Trilogy...
I've thought long and hard about that and although I love a lot of the EU books, I'm very unsure that all that many of them would have worked as movies. And pressing the Vong War into just three movies would have necessitated painful cuts that I don't think the story would have survived intact.
Just reduce the scale of the Vong War, include a time skip btwn movies (similar to how the prequels did), and fill in the rest of the Vong War with a Clone Wars style tv show. 🙃
@@UGNAvalon Ooof 😬
You want to see a film trilogy that is condensing 19 books that are collectively a sequel/conclusion to around 20 other books with loads of new characters and locations that you're already expected to know?
Those films would need to be 90% context to who everyone is on top of adaptating around 5-7 books each. So much would be cut altogether or significantly reduced.
The Ryn, Anakin and Tahiri's plotline, the Han & Leia half of the Force Heretic Trilogy and so much more would all have to go.
The search for Zonama Sekot, the plot of the last five books, would be maybe 45 minutes of a film and the finale of The Final Prophecy and The Unifying Force would be a total of maybe 20 minutes. It'd be a terribly paced disaster.
Like many, I grew up on the Star Wars saga in the 80s and 90s, often imagining a post-RotJ world featuring the Big 3 and the future/next generation. The imperfect but still amazing PT gave me a frame of reference as to what a Jedi looked like that the OT didn't have for obvious reasons, as well as well as its incredible world building providing a wider-angle view of the entire Star Wars galaxy in general.
I love the Bantam era novels because they gave us many great characters, species, planets, etc. But I prefer the Del Rey era novels and the way they used those elements while continuing to build upon them up until George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney. The post-RotJ world from the "Legends" (or, IMM, the real-EU) material is more of a genuine continuation of George Lucas' six film saga.
This as opposed to the sequel trilogy that Disney made. Which, from conception, never respected George Lucas' saga, and in fact defecates over all six films. This is the reason why the IP has faded in spite of a handful of great productions (Rogue One, Andor, Mando S1/S2, and TotJ). If Lucasfilm ever gets leadership that has a clue they may begin to right the wrongs of the past dozen years. In that event they can start by embracing the Solo/Skywalkers from the Legends material or at least giving us comparable equivalent characters.
The yuuzhan vong was a slog. I skipped everything but the first novel
Those books were Awesome, I enjoyed them. They were Great. And of course, Lucas films could’ve taken any of these books and turned them into the new trilogy, but they were going different routes yes and then when he sold the company to Disney Kathleen Kennedy did everything she could to disregard his counsel, his advice and she was a witch a hateful person who wants to push this woke agenda and I’m getting so sick of it. It’s time she was fired and Bob Iger needs to grow a spine and say enough is enough.
If you ask me what the Yuuzhan Vong era was, I'd say it was a waste of opportunity.
I'm a very boring person. I like politics. I like complex characters. I like space battles. All three were almost absent from the Legends works - the space battles, if there were any, were terribly straightforward and uninteresting. The politics and intrigue were at a low level, and only the heroes could sometimes be interesting (and then only in theory; in practice, they were either apologists for good or apologists for evil).
And then the Yuuzhan Vong appear. Some crazy creatures who seemed to have jumped out of Warhammer, like some kind of love child of the Dark Eldar (sadism) and the Chaos (destruction). We could have seen complex villains, or more interesting dynamics of the remaining factions in the galaxy. How will Pellaeon and the Moffs behave, what will change inside the Remnant with the arrival of a new threat. How will the Hutts, Ssi-Ruuk, Yeveta, etc. react? And this is a great opportunity to give us a decent space battle, with tactics, strategy, self-sacrifice. And everything goes to hell. The Vong are boring and uninteresting, angry sadists. The New Republic is still good and kind. The main focus is still on the Jedi, on the Solo-Skywalkers, although it would be possible to highlight other heroes and other categories of characters. Here they capture Coruscant, and instead of an epic battle in the spirit of the Legend of the Heroes of the Galaxy, they show me some kind of matinee, where Viki Shesh, modified by some implants, very stupidly and ineptly tries to steal Luke's son, and in the process runs away from the battlefield with her bare ass (literally). Sorry, you have a super star destroyer going into a final ramming battle, you have the defense of the galactic capital being torn apart, let's talk about that, shall we? No, why, we have the Jedi again.
And that's my problem. Such potential, but in the end it all boiled down to the same mantra. Jedi, Jedi, Jedi.