How death is handled..

[Trytostaydead]

I think some of the authors of the EU handle death pretty poorly in their books. They throw around tens of thousands of lives in a single engagement and have the characters act rather blase about it. When a corvette blows up, that's over a hundred lives lost. When a SD goes up, that's nearly 40,000.. etc etc. I know, maybe the numbers are too big to really emphasize with, but still.. sometimes just the impact of death is left out altogether.

[Silver]

The characters have been in a galaxy spanning war that has lasted for years. Whole populations of planets have been wiped out casually over the span of a few hours (DBZs) or even in an instant (Death Star, anybody?). I doubt they'd get very much worked up over a single corvette crew. Casualties are a reality of war, and the figures for casualties in Star Wars boggles the mind. Galaxy spanning conflicts! Ships that can kill everything on a planet in a matter of hours! I think just about everybody is jaded to loss of life. If you want to see what happens when people get overly sensitive about people dying, see the New Republic's stupid reaction in the beginning of the NJO war.

[Jason von Evil]

It's BDZ, not DBZ.

[Eframepilot]

It's BDZ, not DBZ.

"Captain Nappa, prepare to send Nar Shaddaa... to ANOTHER DIMENSION!!!!!"

yeah I know it's just the dub

[Stormbringer]

I think some of the authors of the EU handle death pretty poorly in their books. They throw around tens of thousands of lives in a single engagement and have the characters act rather blase about it. When a corvette blows up, that's over a hundred lives lost. When a SD goes up, that's nearly 40,000.. etc etc. I know, maybe the numbers are too big to really emphasize with, but still.. sometimes just the impact of death is left out altogether.

When ten of thousands of lives lost is an average battle it's not suprising. "The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." It's like Patton weeping over a tank crew lost in the Battle of the Bulge.

A lot of the characters are aware of the consequences of the war but it's simply not human to mourn a bunch of abstract people. It's simple a ship and a numbers.

[Master of Ossus]

Actually, that's part of the SW saga. The point of the entire series of six movies is to show how a single family--the Skywalkers--can influence the fate of the entire Galaxy. Part of the "lesson" of SW is to show how a few extraordinary individuals can raise themselves, and become important beyond a local sense, beyond a planetary sense, beyond even a Sectorial sense, but important in a Galactic sense. While I agree with you that there are countless millions of others who die, I find it more interesting to focus on a few select individuals and follow their lives more closely. This is a common technique in literature and film, and in fact in humanity. People seem to find TE Lawrence more interesting than the armies of Arabs he helped raise, or the English overseers he duped. People find Patton more interesting than the countless soldiers he led into combat. People find Saddam Hussein more interesting than other people. In art, look at Babylon 5. The show focuses almost exclusively on the characters that are on the station or those who have very close ties to it. Other characters come in to tell the backstory, and to advance the plot, but the actual decisions are always made by the same few people, and so we must learn about their characters in greater detail than about the people who actually follow their instructions.

You can look at this as being cold and callous to the sufferings of untold thousands (or even billions, in the SW case), and in fact your concerns have more recently been addressed in the NJO by the astonishingly unpopular Jacen Solo. His less than warm reception, IMO, is due in no small part to his alteration of the philosophy of the original movies due to his views on the "average denizens" of the SW Galaxy.

It is very difficult, as an author, to teach a reader about the motivations of the average person. While it might be possible to go through the lives of a few people who are REPRESENTATIVE of the total population (like they do in many modern war documentaries, using letters and diary entries to tell the story), it is generally more interesting to focus on the character of people who have to make crucial decisions at critical times. Even the Civil War buffs, who generally stress the importance of the individual soldier more than any other group, inherently find the actions of the officers in charge of the Battle of Gettysburg (or Shiloh, or any other battle) more interesting than the actions of the people they led. That's why it's "Pickett's Charge." That's why it's "Sherman's March to the Sea." Going later into history, that's why it's "Custer's Last Stand."

In all of these instances, the general who actually oversaw the action did only a TINY fraction of the charging, marching, and standing, yet has had his name indelibly linked to the operations that he led. Yes, it's elitist, but it's also natural. An old teacher of mine had an excellent phrase regarding this subject. He explained that it was human nature "To bond with an individual person and their struggles even when they are strangers, and [by extension] it was against human nature to bond with groups unless we are a part of them." While I sometimes find it unfortunate that the soldiers who actually do the fighting are forgotten, it is also part of our base instincts to ignore them and focus on the personalities of those whom those soldiers choose to follow into battle.

[Kurgan]

It's only human to be saddened more by the deaths of close family members and friends than people you don't even know.

Other than that, it's the "redshirt syndrome" common to a lot of sci fi. The nameless characters get killed to make it seem dangerous, but the main characters hardly ever die, if they do its a big big event (and usually some deus ex machina will bring them back for one more adventure).

[Lord Pounder]

does that mean the Genral who died in Darksaber can come back coz he was good.