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

[JediSoth]

<SNIPPED FOR SPACE>

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

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

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

As a runner up:

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

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

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

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

 

[wingsandsword]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Orius]

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

 

[wingsandsword]

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

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

Now, for the spoiler sensitive:

Spoiler

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

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

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

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

 

[JiffyPopTart]

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

1. The demise of WEG Star-Wars RPG.

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

DS

 

[JediSoth]

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

1. The demise of WEG Star-Wars RPG.

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

DS

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

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

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

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

 

[BrooklynKnight]

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

 

[Gentlegamer]

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

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

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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

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

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

 

[Orius]

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