Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

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Bacle said:
Does seem that way.

I'll admit the whole Twi'lek gov/social set-up, at least in Legends, was kinda screwery.

Though unlike Wookie's, with Twi'leks it was often them selling the fellows into slavery.
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Twileks selling other twileks. That is familar paying a local to kidnap a local to sell to the buyer.
 
This is a case of values dissonance. The GFFA has somewhat different norms and morality than RL earth.
 
I'm not super familiar with the old EU, but I'm pretty sure adding piles of backstory onto random background characters to fill page space wasn't something Disney invented, star wars has always been like that. This just seems to be grasping at straws trying to find something to whine about.

I think that the tendency of authors to be all "As an asexual trans person of color, I'm thrilled to be part of the Disney team, and I hope readers will love captain dehin'narboot, who by sheer coincidence is also an asexual trans person of color" is a bit grating, since they always seem to be more focused on filling check boxes and reminding the reader that those boxes have been ticked instead of writing a character. It reminds of Lt Hawk from star trek (the bridge officer that gets assimilated in STFC). He stared in a couple of novels, but because it's Star Trek there was no effort made to keep continuity between different authors. So in one book, he was generic starfleeter man, and in the other one he was gay startfleeter man. It's been a while since I've read either, but I recall generic Hawk being a much more interesting character, because he was just a character and had tome to grow and build as a character, whereas gay Hawk kept putting the breaks on story stuff to go "by the way, have I mentioned how incredibly gay I am? Because I am, I am the gay gay man to ever gay, let me tell you my gay story about how I met my boyfriend, who is also gay". It didn't really ruin the book (in part because it was a section 31 book, so it basically came pre-ruined), but the constant "hey, look how gay I am" moments ended up crowding out every other character trait.

That's not to say you can't have anything but a straight white guy as the lead, of course, but maybe don't hire the guy who's clearly chomping at the bit to add some random diversity character to the franchise.
 
Battlegrinder said:
I'm not super familiar with the old EU, but I'm pretty sure adding piles of backstory onto random background characters to fill page space wasn't something Disney invented, star wars has always been like that. This just seems to be grasping at straws trying to find something to whine about.
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The old EU consisted almost entirely of retconning in backstory for every single background character ever seen in the movies, including "that Rebel pilot you saw for two seconds" and "the dude who cried over Jabba's Rancor". Pretty much the only major characters I can think of from the EU who weren't either a retconned movie character or the child of a movie character were Mara Jade and Corran Horn, and Horn was an *incredibly* blatant Gary Stu for Michael Stackpole.
 
The old EU centered on the children of movie characters, and their descendants.
 
Old major EU characters I can think of off the top of my head not based on the movie characters...

Thrawn
Pellaeon
Daala
Ysaane Isard
Warlord Zsinj
Carnor Jax
Prince Xizor
Kenix Kil
Talon Karrde
Dash Rendar
Jerec
Jan Ors
Kyle Katarn
Tricolous :p
Kadann
Triclops (maximum troll)
Bevel Lemelisk
Lameass Starkiller
Qorl
Lobaccca
Ulic Qel' Droma
Exar Kun
Darth Bane
Jarek Sunber (sp?)
The entire cast of KOTOR
Uhhhhh ummmm...
Desann
Darth Tavion
Soontir Fel
A'sharred Hett
Wynter

Thought I could keep going. I was wrong. I barely read the EU though.

Edit: How could I forget Jorus C'boath... He was such a great character... :p and Rukh and those other lovable Noghri. Bah... I probably spelled everyone's name wrong too.
 
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Husky_Khan said:
Old EU characters I can think of off the top of my head not based on the movie characters...

Thrawn
Pellaeon
Daala
Ysaane Isard
Warlord Zsinj
Carnor Jax
Prince Xizor
Kenix Kil
Talon Karrde
Dash Rendar
Jerec
Jan Ors
Kyle Katarn
Tricolous :p
Kadann
Triclops (maximum troll)
Bevel Lemelisk
Lameass Starkiller
Qorl
Lobaccca
Ulic Qel' Droma
Exar Kun
Darth Bane
Jarek Sunber (sp?)
The entire cast of KOTOR
Uhhhhh ummmm...
Desann
Darth Tavion
Soontir Fel
A'sharred Hett
Wynter

Thought I could keep going. I was wrong. I barely read the EU though.

Edit: How could I forget Jorus C'boath... He was such a great character... :p and Rukh and those other lovable Noghri. Bah... I probably spelled everyone's name wrong too.
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There are ALL the mandos Karen Traviss introduced
 
ShadowArxxy said:
The old EU consisted almost entirely of retconning in backstory for every single background character ever seen in the movies, including "that Rebel pilot you saw for two seconds" and "the dude who cried over Jabba's Rancor". Pretty much the only major characters I can think of from the EU who weren't either a retconned movie character or the child of a movie character were Mara Jade and Corran Horn, and Horn was an *incredibly* blatant Gary Stu for Michael Stackpole.
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I think that's going a bit too far. Certainly there was a chunk of that in the EU, but "almost entirely" is a gross distortion. EU works would certainly use film characters, even lesser known ones, but to my knowledge the EU started out following the main characters from the film and slowly expanded from there, using a mix of film characters and OCs.

I would also object to the term "retconning" being used there. That's typically used to refer to changing events and facts in the past history of a work (IE, TJL retconned the bits of the TFA novel that explicitly stated star destroyers could outrun a TIE fighters in terms of straight line acceleration). The EU didn't do that, it just went from "there is this guy on cloud city carrying a thing that looks like an ice cream maker" and said "and his name was Willrow Hood, and the thing he was carrying was a rebel data core, and he was carrying it around to keep it out of imperial hands". That's not a retcon.

It's also worth noting that for most of those characters, their backstory was never brought up in the books, or games, or other material that the average reader fan would find (Jabba's rancor handler was one of the few exceptions to that), it was mostly in the old star wars databank, the encyclopedia, or collectable cards.
 
Battlegrinder said:
I would also object to the term "retconning" being used there. That's typically used to refer to changing events and facts in the past history of a work (IE, TJL retconned the bits of the TFA novel that explicitly stated star destroyers could outrun a TIE fighters in terms of straight line acceleration). The EU didn't do that, it just went from "there is this guy on cloud city carrying a thing that looks like an ice cream maker" and said "and his name was Willrow Hood, and the thing he was carrying was a rebel data core, and he was carrying it around to keep it out of imperial hands". That's not a retcon.
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Uh, yes it is. Retcon is "retroactive continuity", and that's exactly what the EU does -- it takes a (minimally) established element and retroactively adds backstory to fill it out, altering (and almost always terribly contradicting) past lore. The EU was always incredibly shy about adding *actually new* material, as opposed to constant recycling of *the same* movie and movie-derived material, not really expanding on it but simply rehashing the same characters along largely the same terribly cliche story lines with little to no character development, over and over and over again.

That was really the worst element of the EU and one of the major areas where the new Disney Canon is infinitely better; you would never see anything as creative and interesting as the "Vader Immortal" VR adventure in the old EU.
 
I love it when people take popular well known terms like 'retcon' and decide to go full literal tard on it's meaning despite it already being understand by 99.9% of people already as something else.

"What? Luke and Leia are siblings? That's a retcon. Look at the words!"

When really everyone knows retcons means adding shit that contradicts previous shit. Not just adding shit that hasn't been covered yet.

But since we're being literalarians (not a word) I will admit we would never get anything like Vader Immortal of course, mainly because VR gaming has just broken into the mainstream. Shocking how that works.
 
Husky_Khan said:
But since we're being literalarians (not a word) I will admit we would never get anything like Vader Immortal of course, mainly because VR gaming has just broken into the mainstream. Shocking how that works.
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I'm not referring to the fact that it's a VR game; I'm referring to the actual plot line. Granted, "Vader looks for Force artifacts" is not novel, but the details and the lore are actually adding loads of new stuff that greatly extends and expands upon existing lore instead of just rehashing it.
 
I mean, SWTOR thiugh not the best is not that bad of a game and you do that kinda stuff.

VR tech had it been around bigger before the buy out there would be SW games for it.
 
ShadowArxxy said:
That was really the worst element of the EU and one of the major areas where the new Disney Canon is infinitely better
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Um....are you sure you're thinking of the same EU that the rest of us are? Because when you summarize it as:

ShadowArxxy said:
incredibly shy about adding *actually new* material, as opposed to constant recycling of *the same* movie and movie-derived material, not really expanding on it but simply rehashing the same characters along largely the same terribly cliche story lines with little to no character development, over and over and over again.
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....I mean, that's your opinion and you're free to hold it, but that's also a pretty good summary of the new universe as well, in that it's a blatantly recycled empire vs rebels fight featuring such stunning new character concepts as "desert dwelling force user with a hidden connection to the villains and who was trained by the last of the old Jedi order".

As for the new VR thing, sure, maybe it's great, and we would have never seen it's like under the old system. Empire at war was also great, and we'll certainly never seen it's like in the new setting, because the nature of the new setting makes it impossible. And as good as you seem to think Vader Immortal is....does the phrase "recycling movie and movie-derived material...simply rehashing the same characters along the the same storylines" sound familiar to you?

And fundamentally, VI sounds like it has the same problem that Fallen Order and a number of other new part of the canon have, in that it's basically a massive waste of time for the players, provided this summary is correct. You run around, do a bunch of vaguely star-warsy stuff and learn a bunch of lore that has zero relevance to anything else in any other part of the setting, in the midst of a plot that has potential to change the course of the saga, and then events unfold that force the plot to proceed as it always was and make your efforts moot, and then you quietly vanish from the setting never to been seen again. Woooo.

Like, even the force unleashed managed to do better than that, and like 50% of that game was just a unrepentant power fantasy about letting you run around as this massive edgelord, shooting people with force lighting and not be the bad guy (or at least the bad-est guy). You got to at least participate in something that would shape later events, you got to have an impact on the setting. Force Unleashed had you help form the rebel alliance. Vader Immortal lets you trash Vader's living room a bit.
 
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