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Also the Chimaera was Thrawn's flagship prior to Endor, so it's plausible that as Captain of that Pellaeon bluffed that he was acting with Thrawn's authority and hoped nobody would notice that he was actually deployed elsewhere at the time.
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Aug 22, 2021 05:34
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Arc Hammer posted:I was having a discussion with my brother earlier today about the differences between Disney battle of endor and Legends battle of Endor. i seem to remember pellaeon having a flashback to this at one point and basically after several segments of the fleet broke off (ISDs that would later be with teradoc, zsinj, etc.) pellaeon rallied the remaining loyalists more by being the guy who knows what to do than anything formal
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Aug 22, 2021 05:49
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Arc Hammer posted:I was having a discussion with my brother earlier today about the differences between Disney battle of endor and Legends battle of Endor. Also not relevant to the post-battle, but there was another Grand Admiral, Declann, who blew up with the Death Star.
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Aug 22, 2021 05:53
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Arquinsiel posted:Treating that series of books as canon is really silly, since in the first one alone it contradicts itself a couple of times. Every author got complete freedom to just make poo poo up because it's all unreliably narrated. The contradictions were inevitable with them getting 40 stories out of what we saw on-screen. There's only so much you can do there. Also I'm pretty sure the statement that it's "canon" is stretching the concept to appease nerds. It sure is a book that Disney published, but that doesn't mean they give a poo poo about it being consistent.
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Aug 22, 2021 06:07
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Lord Hydronium posted:There was actually one Grand Admiral still fighting, so Pellaeon was probably acting well above his authority. i love his little story in the guide to warfare. like him getting sent on a suicide mission for some perceived gently caress up and then his entire crew dying and then hallucinating the future and then getting made into that because palpy was watching the whole thing. Xenomrph posted:One could approach it similarly to how the Warhammer 40K canon is handled: “everything is canon, not everything is true.” thats kinda how disney treats it but also "everything is canon until the movies say otherwise."
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Aug 22, 2021 18:25
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Remember the older days of Wookiepedia where people would go and insert their own theories about how contradictory story elements can all be true? Oh and Delusions of Grandeur got brought up a little earlier. I think that was one of the cases where Lucasfilm came back later and attributed that after appearance to an imposter. At some point they decided Fett was showing up too often and created some characters who were impersonating him at various points, and retconned them in to various stories.
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Aug 22, 2021 18:44
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Did Zahn ever do an annotated version of Dark Force Rising and The Last Command? I’m rereading his Heir to the Empire one to brush up on Mt. Tannis, and remembering how much I enjoyed this trilogy.
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Aug 22, 2021 23:13
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Casimir Radon posted:Zahn makes it out to be complete chaos after the Executor crashed into the Death Star, so I’d guess Pellaeon probably just grabbed the reins of a bad situation. Legends has the Imperial military fracture into warlords pretty fast so that checks out. The Essential Guide to Warfare, which came out just before the continuity reboot, is the definitive word on Legends battles and stuff and I think they basically tie up everything with the conflicting Battle of Endor commanders. VaultAggie posted:Did Zahn ever do an annotated version of Dark Force Rising and The Last Command? I’m rereading his Heir to the Empire one to brush up on Mt. Tannis, and remembering how much I enjoyed this trilogy. He wanted to do the annotated versions of the others but the Heir one didn't sell enough for Lucasfilm to greenlight them (not to mention the impending Legends ending probably would have cut them off anyways).
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Aug 23, 2021 02:14
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The Legends material for a lot of the movie events is convoluted. Things are setup like this: The Emperor, Darth Vader, Grand Admirals Declann, Makati, Takel, and Teshik are aboard the Death Star. Piett is leading the fleet aboard Executer Unknown CO on Pride of Tarlandia is second in line. Admiral Strage aboard Chimaera is third in line. Admirals Prittick (Truce at Bakura) and Harrsk (Darksaber) are also present. Things then play out roughly like this:
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Aug 23, 2021 07:09
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Okay i have to admit "Is every third human in this galaxy named Solo?!" out of the frustrated Vong commander in Dark Journey legit made me chuckle out loud and now i have to explain what's so funny to my coworkers here at the vaccination clinic 
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Aug 24, 2021 18:35
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The Shame Boy posted:Okay i have to admit "Is every third human in this galaxy named Solo?!" out of the frustrated Vong commander in Dark Journey legit made me chuckle out loud and now i have to explain what's so funny to my coworkers here at the vaccination clinic Someone else here in the thread can help me out, but isn't there a book where Vader basically uses Space Google to look up Luke Skywalker and it turns out there are like three billion people in the galaxy with that name?
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Aug 24, 2021 20:17
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Chairman Capone posted:Someone else here in the thread can help me out, but isn't there a book where Vader basically uses Space Google to look up Luke Skywalker and it turns out there are like three billion people in the galaxy with that name?
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Aug 24, 2021 20:24
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Ah, that's right. I was definitely mixing up the two. The Allegiance bit I remember also had Mara Jade thinking that Vader was just searching for Xizor again, which both made me laugh and was also a bit surprising for Zahn to be one of the only people to callback to the Vader/Xizor feud that Shadows made such a big deal out of. Actually, I wonder if in the last decade or so Zahn became a gamer, since I feel like his last few books have had a lot of Star Wars game references in them (Xizor, Zaarin, TIE Defenders, even a few Revan and Malak references).
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Aug 24, 2021 20:28
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Zahn was given the WEG sourcebooks when he started writing as a primer. He's always been aware of the gaming stuff.
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Aug 24, 2021 21:48
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I always assumed Antilles was the equivalent of Smith.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:13
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Speaking of Reeves. I never watched Gargoyles as a kid for some reason. Reeves and Steve Perry were both big in the show’s writing. I noticed it was on Disney+ and watched all the way through in a couple weeks. Extremely solid for a kids show. Perry’s SW has been ok, but Reeves was one of the best old EU authors in my opinion.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:31
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Reeves got his Star Wars start writing the Droids and Ewoks cartoons before returning for the novels, which I thought was interesting. He also wrote for Star Trek TNG (albeit only one episode).
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Aug 25, 2021 13:45
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Talk of bringing back the Rebel Alliance but calling it The Resistance in this old book is messing with me and mixing new and old continuities in my head. I never did read the pre Force Awakens stuff but i imagine circumstances surrounding this old Resistance is far more interesting then how it came about in the new canon
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Aug 25, 2021 21:54
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The Resistance and First Order stuff reminds me of some of the later Gundam shows where the protagonists are nominally allied with the official government and they fight remnants of the space fascists. The Resistance is the Londo Bell to the First Order's Neo Zeon remnants.
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Aug 25, 2021 22:05
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The Shame Boy posted:I never did read the pre Force Awakens stuff but i imagine circumstances surrounding this old Resistance is far more interesting then how it came about in the new canon Those books never dealt with it at all - all of the backstory for how the First Order and Resistance came about was developed by Rian Johnson and Claudia Gray for Bloodline. Basically the way it shakes out is that since the New Republic has a bunch of Imperial-aligned worlds in it, half the Republic is in the pro-fascist party (called Centrists) and half the galaxy is in the anti-fascist party (called Populists). When the First Order starts poking around the outer rim (where the Republic doesn't have much stake anyway), the Centrists are like "Let's see how this plays out - the Empire had some good ideas". The Populists can't really stand up to the Centrists to do anything about the First Order, since half of that party are Libertarian star systems that think there shouldn't be a Republic at all and are just aligned with the Populists because at least they don't want to bring the Empire back. Then Space Fox News outs Leia as Vader's daughter, and she's basically kicked out of office and starts the Resistance on her own since:
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Aug 26, 2021 01:27
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If you read the Art of Rise of Skywalker (which, honestly, probably the worst of the Disney-era art books) it does quote from someone in the story group explicitly saying that the general outline of Bloodline was developed by Michael Arndt. Basically the entire Leia arc was Arndt's. And I know that Johnson came up with the Centrist/Populist stuff but I feel like that's such a basic take ("what if there are two political parties diving the country... and one of them is outright evil and the other are the good guys?") it's a bigger slam against him than any of the criticisms about Last Jedi could ever be.
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Aug 26, 2021 02:53
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it's not really implausible tho imo. the new republic solved exactly none of the tension built up over 30 years of crisis and war by palpatine, or the structural problems that the republic had had for centuries. a stance of neglect toward the rim was just going to inevitably lead to somebody exploiting the same issues that led the outer rim to join dooku, especially since the rebel alliance folded the former confederates into their forces and then did jack poo poo for them after they won. for all its faults, the legends new republic was not just a retread of the same core-centric governance that hosed up the republic in the first place, particularly since they fought a long post-"victory" conflict with the imperial remnants rather than simply inviting everybody to join up as soon as they seized coruscant. there was effectively a much longer period of galactic deimperialization and active interest in squashing fascists since the pro-imperial core worlds kept fighting (and dying) instead of trying to simply subvert the new republic.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:07
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The Populists are blatantly the Democrats too, what with being so good that they won't even think about maybe possibly being prepared to fight back against the First Order even a little, and just write strongly worded memos to the Senators with shrines to the Empire in their office.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:09
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Chairman Capone posted:
Neither of the parties are good tho
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Aug 26, 2021 05:24
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Arquinsiel posted:The Populists are blatantly the Democrats too, what with being so good that they won't even think about maybe possibly being prepared to fight back against the First Order even a little, and just write strongly worded memos to the Senators with shrines to the Empire in their office. Yeah, the very Americanization of the Disney New Republic was my least favourite NEU thing.
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Aug 26, 2021 07:11
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New continuity has Mon Mothma get rid of most of the military right after Endor. Which is stupid as gently caress.
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Aug 26, 2021 08:03
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My read on the Populists and Centrists was a bit more nuanced. Sure, the centrists were the antagonists of the book, but that's because they were the party opposed to Leia's. I clearly remember they talked about how the divide between the parties were about decentralization of power (populists) and giving power to a strong electorate (centrists), and they actually called out how there were left wing and right wing viewpoints on either side. Despite their being two parties, the fact that each side had a left wing and a right wing felt fairly un-American to me, or at least nothing American for more than a century.
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Aug 26, 2021 08:10
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Casimir Radon posted:New continuity has Mon Mothma get rid of most of the military right after Endor. Which is stupid as gently caress. Narratively, ending the Star Wars one year after Endor in a franchise called Star Wars was stupid as gently caress and painted the EU into a ridiculous corner.
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Aug 26, 2021 08:31
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I think one of the biggest issues is that TFA, by its very point in the timeline, makes everything between Return and itself kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you started with Zahn's books, they jumped ahead to a point where things had changed drastically, but not actually that far ahead in the timeline. Also, as books, they were able to more organically set up the changes and new world views. TFA basically jumps in feet first, with an additional 30 years of undefined time tacked onto the front, and what backstory we get is boilerplate at best. Plus it goes out of its way to just dump the Rebels' victory into a trash heap, because clearly it didn't mean poo poo. Zahn's books make the Rebellion's victory and subsequent transformation actually mean something to the story. I point that out because there were ways to narratively continue with freedom fighters versus fascists from where TFA was in the timeline, without directly ditching the Rebellion victory from Endor. It does none of it, and I feel like it's just incredibly off-putting to me. I have no desire to read anything filling in that time frame, because not only do I know how it's going to go, I know it's just going to be a slow march of failure and disappointment. So kind of like the Phantom Menace era prequel EU stuff.
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Aug 26, 2021 09:34
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The Disney canon either intentionally or unintentionally set the Rebellion up to be a rather depressing pet project of former politicians and businesspeople who benefited from the status quo of the Republic and that tracks with their absolute failure to enact meaningful reform after Endor. With newer stuff like Mando, writers are now touching on how the New Republic is kinda poo poo for the galaxy because their only goal was to be in charge rather than the Empire, and the Rim and other dispossessed and marginalized worlds can go gently caress themselves.
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Aug 26, 2021 14:13
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“The Alliance to Restore The Republic” has been a thing since the 90’s Sourcebook days, I believe. At the very least I remember reading it in the novella bits of the X-Wing strategy guide.
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Aug 26, 2021 16:43
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Lake Jucas posted:My read on the Populists and Centrists was a bit more nuanced. Sure, the centrists were the antagonists of the book, but that's because they were the party opposed to Leia's. I clearly remember they talked about how the divide between the parties were about decentralization of power (populists) and giving power to a strong electorate (centrists), and they actually called out how there were left wing and right wing viewpoints on either side. Despite their being two parties, the fact that each side had a left wing and a right wing felt fairly un-American to me, or at least nothing American for more than a century. I mean, the Centrists are literally depicted as unreconstructured pro-Empire people, including a scene where one of the senators talks about how she gets aroused looking at Imperial uniforms, and we know that the Centrists then become the backbone of the First Order (although I think that's something the NEU has kind of waffled on). I think that's more than being just antagonistic than being anti-Leia. I also don't really know how much left or right wing politics really ties into it outside of the basic democracy or dictatorship thing - the only economic take I really recall from the NEU, at least the stuff I've read, is one of Deliah Dawson's books mentioning how the New Republic has privatized healthcare which fucks over veterans, which again is basic American politics. Xenomrph posted:Narratively, ending the Star Wars one year after Endor in a franchise called Star Wars was stupid as gently caress and painted the EU into a ridiculous corner. This is another thing that is so obviously constraining that more recent stuff has clearly tried to walk back, especially with the Mandalorian.
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Aug 26, 2021 16:58
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In the end I’m less down on the Battle of Jakku than others because it ended up getting some pretty sick depictions in Aftermath, Lost Stars, and Alphabet Squadron (among other works) Not even the timeline aspect bothers me that much since Aftermath and Alphabet (and Squadrons, come to think of it) do a pretty good job of highlighting the complete and utter splintering of the Imperial military post-ROTJ.
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Aug 26, 2021 17:31
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Jakku being the last battle against the Empire tracks with Disney New Republic's utter failure to capitalize on rooting out the Imperial remnants. They scored a major victory at Jakku, signed a hasty armistice, and then left the Rim alone allowing Imperial Warlords to settle in without much worry of major offensives against them.
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Aug 26, 2021 17:46
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Chairman Capone posted:I mean, the Centrists are literally depicted as unreconstructured pro-Empire people, including a scene where one of the senators talks about how she gets aroused looking at Imperial uniforms, and we know that the Centrists then become the backbone of the First Order (although I think that's something the NEU has kind of waffled on). I think that's more than being just antagonistic than being anti-Leia. Yes, the centrists party is the one the pro-imperialists flocked too, but its not monolithic. The Centrist senator co-star of the book is testament to that. Though he likes to collect Imperial uniforms, he is very clearly not an empire supporter. My main point is that while the book initially presents the two parties as populist = good, centrists = evil, that is a deliberate set up so that leader you see that there is more nuance to both sides than what you initially see, and that coincides with the growth of that centrists senator co-star who's name escapes me.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:20
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Cross-Section posted:In the end I’m less down on the Battle of Jakku than others because it ended up getting some pretty sick depictions in Aftermath, Lost Stars, and Alphabet Squadron (among other works) In the NuEU, you’ve got Rebels cribbing a ton of stuff from Clone Wars, The Mandalorian cribbing a ton of stuff from Rebels, Hera Syndulla shows up in literally everything, Alphabet Squadron gets mentioned in everything, the High Republic has distant ancestors of OT-era EU characters, which has ancestors of sequel trilogy era characters, newly-invented Imperial Light Cruisers show up in Rebels, Squadrons, and the Mandalorian, and it’s all so interconnected that it just feels too small and constrained. I don’t need every new book to be littered with references to other contemporary books/videogames that are otherwise narratively disconnected. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 23:53
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Xenomrph posted:One of my other complaints with the NuEU is how everything feels too tightly knit; the old EU took the shotgun approach and had a ton of disconnected plots and planets and ships and characters who were only tangentially related to each other because Han/Luke/Leia ended up encountering them. It made the Galaxy seem bigger, with more varied stuff in it (especially the old West End Games stuff, which was all over the place). Only once there was, like, decades of EU built up did things start to cross over or get mentioned across multiple stories in order to remind readers that it was one big galaxy, and it culminated with the NJO acting like a victory lap for the whole thing. It might just be because I'm a drat youngin' but I don't really mind any of that stuff (though I really don't get the Arquitens criticism given the mass-produced nature of the Imperial Navy in both canons). I think it's ultimately a consequence of the changing times (re: pop culture, cinematic universes becoming text instead of just implied) and massively different circumstances in which both the old and nuEU were produced. Still, you might like the Ascendancy books, given that that they're basically a original setting outside of a handful of references to Legends lore and Zahn's own works.
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Aug 27, 2021 01:39
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Cross-Section posted:(though I really don't get the Arquitens criticism given the mass-produced nature of the Imperial Navy in both canons).
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Aug 27, 2021 02:03
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Xenomrph posted:It’s just really convenient that instead of resurrecting any of the myriad Legends ships and scattering them around to give some kind of variety like the old EU had, they just made one type of new ship and put it literally everywhere. It’s just another example of the “small galaxy” problem. look I miss the victory class as much as you do but it's time to move on In all seriousness I think this was a intentional thematic move in terms of re-establishing early on the visual language of the monolithic and imposing Imperial Navy versus the relatively ragtag, diverse Rebel fleet  Though true to the old EU, half the Rebel ships are captured Imp ones lol
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Aug 27, 2021 02:19
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Xenomrph posted:It’s just really convenient that instead of resurrecting any of the myriad Legends ships and scattering them around to give some kind of variety like the old EU had, they just made one type of new ship and put it literally everywhere. It’s just another example of the “small galaxy” problem.
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Aug 27, 2021 04:38
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