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