Star Wars - Expanded Universe
 

So,

In order to wipe the taste of bad new star wars from my mind... I decided to go back and re read some of the old expanded universe stories.

The Zahn trilogy still holds up. masterfuly done new tales...and reminds you of the movies every so often to show it's in the same universe.


The Kevin J Anderson trilogy though. My god, how did those books ever leave the publisher? Half baked ideas. Thoughts repeated, sometimes in the same paragraph. dialogue that sounds like bad fan fiction. lines from the movies repeated literally every 20 sentences. sometimes twice. About 50% of the plot feels worth reading. the rest is nothing but filler. decent enough ideas. decent enough new characters...horribly executed.


About the only NEW EU books I've tried was Aftermath. absolutely Horrible. It made Kevin J Anderson look like a hugo award winner.

I decided to give one more a try. Ashoka. So far, it reads pretty good. But, about 40 pages in, and ALL the characters allowed to talk are women. And the first guy allowed to talk is 'a mean drunk'. the new story group isn't exactly being shy about what it thinks......and if this is the quality of the newer books, maybe it's a good thing I've avoided them so far.......

anyone else revisiting the old eu?

Yes! I JUST started reading these.

Loved "Heir to the Empire." Waiting on my copy of "Dark Force Rising" to come in.

It's really weird to read the words "Dark Jedi" and realize these were written before Sith was a thing.

When the Disney announcement was made about jettisoning the EU I actually wished that a lot of it could be "saved." By that, I mean gently rewritten by the original authors to suit the new continuity. It wouldn't even take much. You could spend 1 hour and make the Zahn trilogy work just fine, for example. Like, pick 6 or 7 of the best, most beloved books and just do new editions, you know? It'd seem like a great act of good faith from Disney.

But I don't think -- at all -- that fans would agree on what warrants saving and what doesn't, and it would just piss off more people than please.

Grand Admiral Thrawn is in Star Wars Rebels, that's all that matters.

Kind of a sad consolation prize, though.

Who knows, though. How mind-blowing would it be if the "Rian Johnson trilogy" ends up being a retrofitted Thrawn trilogy set 5 years after Endor?

God no.

Keep Ruin Johnson and those SJW pansies from Lucasfilm far away from Thrawn.

As for books..

I think fans would largely agree on what to keep and what to ditch before the Vong War happened.

After that, I think things got alot more divided.

I personally didn't mind the Vong themselves.. but what I hated was everyone dying. and the turning of jacen. It just got way too dark.

Maybe. But would they agree on if the Vong war itself should even be saved?

Only Star Wars EU I care about got Jaxxon in it.

You sound more and more like Trump every day. This sounds like something I'd read in a Trump tweet.

Completely divorced from the stories that made him a beloved antagonist that even some people who haven't read the books at least heard of, so it's not much of a victory.

How do you even do that anymore, though? Mark Hammil's still kicking, but much older now. Luke would almost have to be involved if we're talking five years out from Endor.

Assuming that Michael Douglas in the beginning of Ant-Man kind of stuff is off the table... complete recasting. Sebastian Stan as Luke. The new Han can be Han. Etc.. That kind of thing.

We could even take that cast and do more solo movies in between 6 and 7 to better fill out that void.

True. Though there really is no good word, even now, for a Force user who uses the Dark Side who is not a member of the Jedi Order and who is not a Sith Lord. Just because you can use the Force and use the Dark Side doesn't just make you an honorary Sith any more than teaching yourself how to lift rocks or swing a lightsaber with the aid of the Force makes you a member of the Jedi. What do you call such a person? "Dark Side user"?

I would argue that most would agree it should be dropped.

although I think it should be kept, because the series had to evolve past empire versus rebels somehow.

I actually wouldn't be opposed to that. Would they actually do it is the question. Especially since they apparently have serious reservations about new Han.

People wanted the blue guy, and they got the blue guy.

Encapsulated into a children's cartoon. I'm happy they did it... but it's ordering the filet mignon and getting a burger and fries.

He's most likely going to continue to appear after it ends. Rebels ends in 5 episodes, I doubt he will be killed off. In fact he'll likely survive through the events of Episode 6 just like he did in the original EU.

There's now a 30 year gap between Episode 6 and 7, anyone who thinks we won't get the usual Luke/Han/Leia adventures with Thrawn or Snoke (?) like the old EU did is kidding themselves.

He gets a goofy theme song. A hard to understand voice. and he doesn't really seem like the cold calculating character from the books. he's just kind of there as a placeholder and because they already used vader in season 2.

Decided to read some of the one star reviews on the Asohka novel...because some of how the book is written set off SJW warning signs. So glad they didn't retcon asohka to be gay, but it seems like what they did in the book was damn close enough...

sigh. another book, another SJW mentality. First aftermath, now this. I think I'll only relegate to picking up Zahn books from now on. They seem smart enough to leave him on his own accord.

Thrawn doesn't have a "hard to understand voice" it must be your lack of comprehension of sounds on TV, that's a sign of autism.

Either way Thrawn is likely to survive Rebels and the original trilogy and probably appear in post-Episode 6 stories in comics/novels like he original did, with loosely adapted stories he was previously in.

I finished reading the Thrawne trilogy. I think the third book (The Last Command) was a little weaker than the first two, but very good nonetheless. Mara Jade and Talon Karrde are both really great.

And Grand Admiral Thrawne was a great, great character. Really loved him. Did not expect him to go out that way, but it was a great twist. I was wondering how he could not survive, given he's so incredibly brilliant and strategic... getting killed on the bridge, just crushed by a falling bulkhead or something seemed like the most sensible but a little anticlimactic... and then BAM. Yep, that makes sense.

Gonna go back and read The Truce at Bakura and Tatooine Ghost next. Also need to find a copy of The Courtship of Princess Leia after those... I think I'll probably fill in all the random Original Trilogy era novels, like the Han Solo trilogy by AC Crispin, before I move on to the next post-ROTJ trilogy...

The EU was a mess but it had tons of amazing stories. Scrapping the EU to make something mediocre that in a few years will be as big of a mess s the old EU makes you question why even bother.

You could've made neckbeards happy by keeping the old EU the way it was. You release new books that don't give a damn about what happened before and let the EU writers come up with convoluted fixes just like they did when the prequel trilogies took a dump all over the EU as they contradicted established canon. So yeah, even a deus-ex machina Crystal that reset the events so a la DC so "some things may/may not have happened but other events will be different" to explain why the sequel trilogies contradictions happened.

The best alternative would've been to "select" books and make them fit in continuity somehow in the new canon and the ones that just couldn't be refitted write new stories taking the great ideas that worked and make them fit in the new canon. Instead they seem to be doing whatever the hell they want and creating mediocre stories.

Hell, make neckbeards happy and just continue releasing NEW books under the Star Wars Legends banner which they're currently using to re-release best sellers that are no longer canon. I'm sure there's a big enough fan base that would merit the continuation of the "Legends" EU even if it's not canon, in fact that would make haters of Disney Star Wars find their own safe bubble to continue stories that they liked, keep fans of the EU happy and they would let the Disney Star Wars crap continue without as much noise.