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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. Yeah, I still think my favorite WEG supplement ever was Fragments From the Rim, which was literally a random shotgun of various setting things. Stuff like the in-setting equivalent of the Onion mocking the hell out of everyone (I particularly liked the bit about them having reviews of Imperially banned rock groups written under the name "Ars Dangor, Advisor to the Emperor" a la a name of a particularly arrogant Imperial character from other supplements) didn't have much to do with the Rebellion or Empire or any of the grand stuff from the movies or books, but it certainly helped make the Star Wars galaxy FEEL like an actual huge galaxy with tons of wild stuff going on just off-screen from what we got to see. Admittedly West End Games was writing an RPG and knew it, so some of the design of the universe they did was very much focused on "here's stuff for adventurers to do" (I always loved that they just KNEW there were going to be Rebel parties that would come up with insane yet somehow successful plans to do stuff like steal multiple Star Destroyers and the like, and designed a department in the Rebellion where they tried to corral all these mad bastard geniuses, point them in the right direction then stand back out of the blast zone) but still by default they had to come up with a lot of basic "this is how everyday life" works stuff too since you'd have players who would wonder about what band might be playing in the cantina, or what the equivalent of the local supermarket was, and similar. Because they had to accommodate players who would cheerfully run around doing drat near random things, they had to think broad (and include a bunch of potential plot hooks), which worked out very well in the end for the universe worldbuilding, while Disney seems to kind of go with a less scattered approach which doesn't come up with as many interesting ideas because of the tighter focus. Not that I haven't seen good worldbuilding in the Disney stuff, but it tends to not show enough of the off-camera things compared to the old canon. Though old canon was getting a little creaky from the overload by the end, and had its own issues (too much focus on the main SW characters doing everything in the novels, for one).
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Aug 27, 2021 08:08
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You've nailed the reason why the WEG stuff is charming as gently caress. It's trying to account for literally every playstyle and it just throws a fuckton of flimsy premises at the wall and hopes that one of them sticks for a given group.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:16
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OhFunny posted:The Legends material for a lot of the movie events is convoluted. that kinda works well enough. the Imps go in cocky that this is some big super trap to crush the rebels and a ton of the top brass is their to mark the glorious end to their careers or some poo poo. then the rebels start rolling 20s and most of the top brass either dies or flees. Arc Hammer posted: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. yeah pretty much. i think the idea was they killed the big fleets of the empire in two engagements and then brought went brought on a ton of ex imperials outside the ones that fled or were obvious war criminals. Arc Hammer posted: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. i mean yeah pretty much. they want to old republic back but with some reforms and new coat of paint but didnt route out the empire or at least the hardliners. i wouldnt put them that fully selfish, but its clear they didnt really have much of a plan post war galaxy outside, 1. make republic 2.0 2. do some reforms. 3. dont gently caress around in the galaxy with military entanglements.
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Aug 27, 2021 16:11
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Should have done an Ackbar's March to the
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Aug 27, 2021 16:25
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Arc Hammer posted:Should have done an Ackbar's March to the maybe they will. i could see it happening.
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Aug 27, 2021 17:04
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Why is Traitor so much more expensive and harder to find online? I must always have a backlog of 2 books to be waiting for me as i'm currently reading one! 
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Aug 27, 2021 18:19
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The Shame Boy posted:Why is Traitor so much more expensive and harder to find online? I must always have a backlog of 2 books to be waiting for me as i'm currently reading one! It's widely praised as one of the best of the series, probably makes tracking down secondhand copies harder
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Aug 27, 2021 18:44
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Have the NJO books been kept in publication with the "Legends" banner? I feel so out of the loop on buying the old books I'm not sure if they're all being kept in print or not. I seem to recall the X-wing books going out of print for a while but I forget if that was after the continuity reboot or a bit before.
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Aug 27, 2021 19:59
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The Shame Boy posted:Why is Traitor so much more expensive and harder to find online? I must always have a backlog of 2 books to be waiting for me as i'm currently reading one!
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Aug 27, 2021 20:03
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They have, all the ones i've bought so far have the legends banner minus Dark Journey and Star by Star since i bought those many many years ago.
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Aug 27, 2021 20:03
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Lord Hydronium posted:What country/platform are you looking at? In the US, and I'm seeing new copies on Amazon for $8 or Kindle for $9, and on eBay used copies seem to run about $3-4. i've just been going through Amazon for all my purchases and it was a bit surprising to see the prices go beyond $8 for a few of the sellers on there (and lower as well tbf), Didn''t have that come up when i was buying any of the others. Although considering it's the most popular book in the series i can see why there would be many different options there. It was kinda the same when i went looking for copies of Star by Star and Dark Journey that had the legends banner along the top but they ended up being more money than i was willing to spend to rebuy a book so alas i won't have all the books have Legends along the top for this collection. 
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Aug 27, 2021 20:23
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So, Star by Star. I was wondering whether this would hold up, or whether after reading the rest of Denning's output it would feel like a prelude of things to come. It turns out kind of both, but mostly the former. It's still very Denning-y - the first chapter features both disguises and unnecessary descriptions of gore - but for the most part the worst excesses that will come to define his later work aren't quite there yet, or are at least muted. It is kind of noticeable just how much of his later work comes out of and refers back to the events of this book, from the entire plot of Dark Nest to all the terrible things that will happen with Tahiri. And of course, Anakin. I was never really a big fan of Anakin. Not that I disliked him, just literally I wasn't a big fan, I liked the character just fine and that was it. I think a big part of it is that I got into the NJO knowing what would happen to him and never really having read anything with him beforehand (except technically Dark Empire, where he's a baby). So when I did finally get to the NJO, I kind of just saw him as a dead man walking, and focused more on characters like Jacen who had a future. But this read has really shown me the appeal of the character and why his death hit so hard, and Denning plays no small part in that. I'm thinking in particular of the scene where they decide to launch the mission to Myrkr, where we see through Han and Leia's eyes how he's become an adult and a natural leader of his peer group. One of the real strengths of the NJO as a whole is in how we watch the Solo kids mature over it, and seeing that potential cut short actually does hit this time. Aside from that, Denning's other main strengths here are capturing the epic scale of the events - even the non-action setpieces like Nom Anor addressing the Senate feel imbued with an appropriate amount of grandeur, and the Battle of Coruscant is practically a novel in itself - and his Han and Leia. His Luke has always felt a bit off, and it's the same here too; there's one bit in particular where he's like "Alema's obviously going to fall to the dark side, it's just a question of when and for how long", and it's like, isn't that kind of your job to stop that? Also I don't remember if I ever noticed this before, but is Denning just kinda bad at action sequences? I kept getting confused at the geography of a lot of scenes and where characters were in relation to each other, and I don't think it was me just suddenly forgetting how to read. Especially all the scenes in the worldship, where the unfamiliar environments just didn't feel like they were very well explained, so it often wasn't even clear what the setting looked like, much less what everyone was doing in it. Dark Journey up next, and finally at the halfway point!
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Aug 30, 2021 00:48
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Descriptive violence doesn't automatically translate to good action scenes.
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Aug 30, 2021 01:04
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It's not just you, i also got really confused at times where and when everything was happening in relation to each other during some of the action sequences. Particuarly near the end when Jacen is fighting the queen voxyn and it keeps jumping around or they fall down to certain levels of the little ship/platform thing they are on. Or whenever the jedi kids got clever and used their lightsabers to go up and down levels of the ship was a little 
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Aug 30, 2021 01:55
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I also started reading NJO only after the series ended and I knew everything that was going to happen, and I just didn't really like Star by Star. Not for gore reasons but it just felt like such a bleak book, but in ways that went beyond the basic downer stuff that happened in it, if that makes sense. Though I do think Star by Star is better than all of Denning's output save Tatooine Ghost. One thing I'll always disagree with is Borsk having a heroic end. It always read to me as Borsk basically realizing that his career was over and deciding to go out rather than stick around to face consequences. Which also leads to the side notion that I feel like, just going from Thrawn Trilogy and Hand of Thrawn, Borsk was, while an antagonist, not really villainous in the way he became later. I think Stackpole really hated him, and used him as an unfortunate embodiment of the typical military sci-fi conservative notion of "civilians just get in the way and if the military was free to do whatever it wanted without oversight, everyone would be safer." That attitude is throughout the X-wing books and I think the later views of Borsk took from Stackpole rather than Zahn. Are there any sites online left over from 2001 where contemporary reactions to Star by Star upon its release can still be read? I'd be curious to see what people actually thought at the time.
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Aug 30, 2021 02:31
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You could probably search TFN’s threads from back then. Though a Star Wars forum from 20 years ago might be a rough read. Hell, it’s probably a rough read now. JJK was my first EU reading so I wasn’t particularly down with Anakin getting killed off. So I had a pretty strong dislike of it at the time, and Denning’s writing just got worse from there. I was shocked that Crucible really wasn’t that bad, other than leaving a bunch of plot threads dangling. Denning could have at least killed off Ship, I loving hate Ship.
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Aug 30, 2021 02:45
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Here's the official TFN Star by Star thread from 2001. Kind of interesting that a thread on the largest Star Wars novel on the largest Star Wars site was only six pages: https://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-official-star-by-star-discussion-thread-spoilers-from-eov-and-sbs.3595553/ Also the official TFN review, which is overwhelmingly glowing: https://www.theforce.net/books/reviews/r_star-by-star.asp Complete non-sequitur, but for some reason this made me think of the unnamed Mayor of Sernpidal from Vector Prime and how for years people on TFN thought that he was meant to be Boba Fett.
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Aug 30, 2021 02:53
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Was there another thread? That one cuts off before it actually comes out. Weird to think about how all of that was right around 9/11.
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Aug 30, 2021 03:04
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fey'lya is such a weird character. he's basically Leia's Designated Nemesis to give her something to do in her stay-on-Coruscant politician-mom role and the various authors' understandings of leia's character are so far apart that fey'lya comes across as this insane power-hungry politician with constantly shifting positions and ideology whose sole consistent character trait is that he doesn't like whatever leia is doing at the moment. stackpole's depiction is probably the only one that has no relationship to leia as such and is more about just making fey'lya the troubling "dark side" of the rebel alliance/new republic coalition which our boy corn horn can virtuously condemn as he flies around in his cop x-wing
Jazerus fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 03:06
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Jazerus posted:fey'lya is such a weird character. he's basically Leia's Designated Nemesis to give her something to do in her stay-on-Coruscant politician-mom role and the various authors' understandings of leia's character are so far apart that fey'lya comes across as this insane power-hungry politician with constantly shifting positions and ideology whose sole consistent character trait is that he doesn't like whatever leia is doing at the moment. stackpole's depiction is probably the only one that has no relationship to leia as such and is more about just making fey'lya the troubling "dark side" of the rebel alliance/new republic coalition which our boy corn horn can virtuously condemn as he flies around in his cop x-wing
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Aug 30, 2021 06:06
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Jazerus posted:fey'lya is such a weird character. he's basically Leia's Designated Nemesis to give her something to do in her stay-on-Coruscant politician-mom role and the various authors' understandings of leia's character are so far apart that fey'lya comes across as this insane power-hungry politician with constantly shifting positions and ideology whose sole consistent character trait is that he doesn't like whatever leia is doing at the moment. stackpole's depiction is probably the only one that has no relationship to leia as such and is more about just making fey'lya the troubling "dark side" of the rebel alliance/new republic coalition which our boy corn horn can virtuously condemn as he flies around in his cop x-wing I dont actually hate him as a character. he is an opportunistic "nationalist" who takes contrarian positions to the majority because thats what weird ghouls like him do. doesn't help that he was basicaly alliance IC so he knows everyone's secrets but he is too up his own rear end and petty to use power in a smart way until its too late.
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Aug 30, 2021 12:31
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Characters like Borsk and Pellaeon are great and help make their respective factions feel like actual organisations run by people.
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Aug 30, 2021 12:52
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Casimir Radon posted:Was there another thread? That one cuts off before it actually comes out. Weird to think about how all of that was right around 9/11. I've also gone and looked through the old TheForce.net threads, but I haven't found any single megathread for the book so far. There's a ton of 1 to 2 page threads with OPs that are that person's review/reaction to the novel around the time of it's release. It could be megathreads weren't a thing in that forum's culture back then or it went for so long it'll be hard to find with no archive feature. These are the two longest threads I've uncovered. I'm a little amused the earlier threads had posters calling Anakin "Jimmy" in a bid to avoid spoiling people. Any speculation on if and how "Jimmy" will come back? (SPOILERS!!) He is dead (just say it) (SBS Spoilers) There was another thread around Dark Journey's release where all the people thinking it's a fake out or he's coming back somewhere lose all hope when his body is burned on a funeral pyre.
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Sep 3, 2021 02:24
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I liked the talk of "well he didn't disappear like Obi Wan did! That means he's still alive!" in that thread. I suppose at that point there were not many references for dead Jedi other than Obi Wan and Qui Gon and good ol' Anakin Sr himself who both also got the funeral pyre treatment.
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Sep 3, 2021 18:03
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Even well into Legacy of the Force there were still a small handful of people expecting Anakin to return, though by that point it was less "he never died" than that he did die, but would be cloned because he died in a cloning facility. I remember a couple people were even thinking he would be Darth Krayt from the Legacy comics.
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Sep 3, 2021 18:52
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Anakin did return in LOTF when Jacen provided Tahiri with access to time travel sex.
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Sep 3, 2021 19:44
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Anakin as Krayt would be wild, but wild enough that I'd be onboard for. I do still think that Krayt as Jacen would have been good but I think it would have required Lucasfilm to actually apply pressure to the novel writers (mainly Denning) who were clearly unwilling to play ball in the other direction. I remember a lot of people thinking that flow walking was going to be used to change the past so that Anakin never died, basically resetting the timeline. I'm sure something like that was in Denning's mind at one point.
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Sep 3, 2021 19:45
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There was that droid that thought it was Anakin that Thracken was trying to use to get Centerpoint working again. Understandably Time Travel Sex is much dumber allowing it to be forgotten. Edit: At one point, in the last thread I think, somebody linked a thread from TFN where a bunch of super well adjusted posters were debating whether what Tahiri attempts to do to Ben in the last LOTF book constitutes rape. Casimir Radon fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 3, 2021 21:10
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Casimir Radon posted:Edit: At one point, in the last thread I think, somebody linked a thread from TFN where a bunch of super well adjusted posters were debating whether what Tahiri attempts to do to Ben in the last LOTF book constitutes rape. The entire TFN/Wookieepedia crowd have a huge number of far-right people. Didn't it come out not too long ago that the guy who basically ran Wookieepedia for the last decade with an iron fist was an actual Neo-Nazi?
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Sep 3, 2021 21:27
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A 30 year old woman grabbing a 14 year old boy's penis while he's strapped down to a torture rack absolutely is rape. But TFN doesn't exactly engage in critical thinking, and the insane hoops the later books went through to try and repair Tahiri's image meant that the readers often took it at face value. The book says she's not bad anymore so that's that. Insane sycophants.  How the gently caress else is that supposed to be read? Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 3, 2021 21:33
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Arc Hammer posted:Anakin did return in LOTF when Jacen provided Tahiri with access to time travel sex. Was gonna read Leacy next considering its next in the timeline and all but now i HAVE to read it for the context
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Sep 3, 2021 21:37
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Chairman Capone posted:The entire TFN/Wookieepedia crowd have a huge number of far-right people. Didn't it come out not too long ago that the guy who basically ran Wookieepedia for the last decade with an iron fist was an actual Neo-Nazi? I just pretend it ended after I Survivor’s Quest and I’m happier for it.
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Sep 3, 2021 21:38
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The Shame Boy posted:Was gonna read Leacy next considering its next in the timeline and all but now i HAVE to read it for the context I want to say it either happened in Inferno or Revelation, but I'm leaning towards Inferno because that was one of Denning's poo poo sandwiches. Revelation is a dog's dogshit book too from Karen Traviss but I enjoyed how absolutely over the top stupid it was when it ended.
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Sep 3, 2021 21:45
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Arc Hammer posted:I want to say it either happened in Inferno or Revelation, but I'm leaning towards Inferno because that was one of Denning's poo poo sandwiches. Revelation is a dog's dogshit book too from Karen Traviss but I enjoyed how absolutely over the top stupid it was when it ended. It was the last book; and yeah Traviss and Denning are both awful and miserable but Traviss at least has some good dumb fun bits. She also turned out to be a huge BNP shithead though so who can say
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Sep 3, 2021 21:57
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StashAugustine posted:It was the last book; and yeah Traviss and Denning are both awful and miserable but Traviss at least has some good dumb fun bits. She also turned out to be a huge BNP shithead though so who can say Oh I thought Denning had introduced the time travel stuff earlier to get Tahiri to join Jacen by drip feeding her Anakin sex. By Invincible Tahiri and Jacen were straight up loving alongside her time travel sex and Allston got confused saying "wait when did they become an item?"
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Sep 3, 2021 23:15
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The whole series would be an abomination without what they did to Tahiri.
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Sep 3, 2021 23:24
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Chairman Capone posted:The entire TFN/Wookieepedia crowd have a huge number of far-right people. Didn't it come out not too long ago that the guy who basically ran Wookieepedia for the last decade with an iron fist was an actual Neo-Nazi? There was a big ol huge schism at the Wook regarding listing gender identity for characters, and the head guy in charge was a big chud and fought it so hard that the greater Fandom hosting network got involved and kicked a couple people out. The official Twitter account for wookiepedia was compromised for a bit when one of the ousted mods changed the password, but they got that back too
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Sep 4, 2021 00:12
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At this point in time I don’t know that there’s any characters with ‘non-standard’ gender identities. Could be wrong though. It does smack a little bit of that BioWare guy getting in trouble for saying there were no gay people in Star Wars.
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Sep 4, 2021 00:17
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^^^^ There are a couple at least. jivjov posted:There was a big ol huge schism at the Wook regarding listing gender identity for characters, and the head guy in charge was a big chud and fought it so hard that the greater Fandom hosting network got involved and kicked a couple people out. The official Twitter account for wookiepedia was compromised for a bit when one of the ousted mods changed the password, but they got that back too StashAugustine posted:It was the last book; and yeah Traviss and Denning are both awful and miserable but Traviss at least has some good dumb fun bits. She also turned out to be a huge BNP shithead though so who can say
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Sep 4, 2021 00:26
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Ok, if it was an author than yeah, being a dick about that is really dumb. Traviss isn’t really in the BNP. Though I think her politics do actually suck.
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Sep 4, 2021 00:29
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