Darth Hoth wrote:Pelranius wrote:Well, it wouldn't be much fun if we all agreed one everything all the time, would it?
When's the cutoff point for EU material that is retained? I mean, we can't realistically expect to keep say Survivor's Quest in any recognizable form to its official version if we radically revise, say the Black Fleet Crisis to instead be a search for Imperial assets in the Unknown Regions and then someone discovers the Outbound Flight while nosing around the Redoubt.
That would likely be the kind of thing that we should discuss when he have an organisation and more structured mechanism for communication ready (whether a PSW heading for discussions, a user group, sub-forum, Writer's Guild admittance or whatnots). My personal opinion is that rewrites should be as small as possible and do not change basic themes in the "background" (which is, more or less, what the Bantam/comic EU is supposed to be in the end); Illuminatus and the others mostly seem to agree with this.
So, Black Fleet, for example, should still be about the Yevetha, but the focus should be changed to better represent the scale - e.g., they should not be a military threat (though scaled up just the same - in the original, they would be too small to even make the headlines), but could cause a political crisis depending on how the NR reacts to them. Once the political tangles have been straightened out, defeating the raving supremacists should be a curb-stomp (to get an impression of what it should look like, read a little of Stuart's Armageddon). There will be PC alien obstructionists as there were in the book (though not exaggerated to Kratmanesque levels), but there might also be powerful business interests supporting the Yevetha, isolationists who do not want to spend Republic credits on saving Imperial systems,
et cetera. Also, just to add a level of moral ambiguity, we could have rescinded pro-human jingoism among the Core Worlds (such as over Pearl Harbour in real life) in responce to the Yevethan atrocities, making things slightly less clearly cut.
He's got the right idea. There are several thematic principles I've developed thinking about questions like these and the way the EU could've been better handled or fixed. One is the "benefit of a doubt" principle. In other words, find a way to keep things the same while making it more interesting or sensible. In some cases, the utter unrealism or absurdity of something is particularly glaring because what's going on is ridiculous to the educated fan, but not acknowledged as incredible in-universe. To wit, Grand Admiral Thrawn's incredible guessing talents, and all-on-his-own strategic and tactical planning. This is pretty absurd from a real military science perspective and been denounced as wank. So why not have Pelleaon
et al being like, this is impossible, where is he getting this intel? Does he have a staff we don't know about. And have Thrawn acknowledged to be pulling psychological feints and slights-of-hand on both his allies and foes. Muse that Thrawn is having a shadow general staff composed of his own agents in the Imperial Combined Staff, and his old Unknown Regions and Chiss personnel secretly draw up his plans for various ops and an overall strategic plan, and that Thrawn, while a scarcely comprehensible savant of military science and in-his-head detailed planning, he's pulling the wool over the Empire's elite's eyes and his own subordinates to keep them dependent on him. Take this unrealism, flip it on its head, and develop nuance and angle making this how he keeps the High Command and Emperor's Ruling Circle dependent on him (remember, he's nominally serving on their behalf). We kept the basic idea: Thrawn is absurdly talented, does things people don't understand, employs gimmicks and if you will, stage tricks and theatricality, and people know there's more than they are let on to. And we did it with a minimum of invention - basically nothing openly contradicting standing canon, but simply allowed secondary character to act appropriately to incredible and strange events and circumstances, and acknowledged it. That itself goes a long long way.
Or take the Zsinj campaign. What is Zsinj about? Well in the canon he has
Iron Fist, which the EU, in its minimalism, thinks should be a strategic asset in of itself. We know this is absurd. Well how about if
Executor-class command ships were singled out for the CinCs of autonomous strategic formations of Imperial assets (
cf., "Death Squadron," "Scourge Squadron," the Task Force Vengeance from
X-Wing vs. The TIE Fighter: Balance of Power). Now granted, some of these forces don't seem so impressive when we see them, but they had a pan-galactic operating range, and they were capable of shutting down and occupying entire sectors or more in pursuit of counterinsurgency operations. In sectors containing tens of thousands of settled systems and hundreds of millions of barren ones, you could easily see only a small line or squadron in a given system and have the entire unit composed of hundred or even thousands of Star Destroyer-class ships. (One thing I like to remind people is, yeah the Sector Group formation sounds pretty huge, but realistically, what kind of formation does Coruscant mandate for
traffic control alone.) I suggest that these forces in their totality were units of the strategic command of the Empire. And that Zsinj is particularly dangerous because his "
Iron Fist unit" is a fresh unit left over from the Empire's frightening strategic forces which has been reinforced and augmented in the following years by training and planning and recruiting under Zsinj's watch and the assimilation of allied formerly Imperial officers and potentates and formerly independent warlords. Accordingly, while the New Republic is engaged in semi-static, and winding-down line warfare, Zsinj's appreciable strategic assets are free to wreak havoc in rear areas and unaffiliated regions of the galaxy. Solo's force is a detached strategic unit dispatched to engage in counterforce operations against Zsinj and remove his considerable strategic threat. Here we preserve the basic plot, Zsinj and his forces wreaking havoc under his expert command, Zsinj's forces are a strategic threat requiring special attention. But what did we do? We enriched a conception of the strategic balance of power in the galaxy vis-a-vis Empire, Zsinj, and New Republic. We began to texture the war between the three, and we removed irksome suggestions that a single Star Dreadnought is a terrible asset in of itself (while confusingly, the 1.2 kilometer
Mon Remonda can seemingly weather it and a few fighter wings can threaten it).
Historical analogies and references are essential for imparting a sense of verisimilitude to any history or story. I suggest we look for both fictional and historical analogs to various interpersonal and political conflicts, military campaigns, etc. Also, this serves as a good starting point at least, for realistic characters. Reading The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power has been an invaluable aid and I see why Publius recommends them. Get inside the minds of people who deliberately choose fascism and professionals who sympathize with authoritarianism and how they justify it. There were real world people who think and thought those things, use those examples. Hell, there are political extremists in the U.S. who convince themselves of absurdities and who tune out uncomfortable truths like some of the negative effects of U.S. foreign policy. This is a way to look at human and flawed Imperial characters, as Raptor was saying.
