Durandal wrote:I saw the top half of the cover, and my first thought was that it was some piece-of-shit fan fic or fan film. Instead, it's a piece-of-shit Dark Horse comic.
One of the alluring things about writing in the Star Wars Universe is that it's huge. You can tell any story you want. All we've been getting from these writers is the same fucking story with the same fucking characters over and over again.
Here's a novel idea. How about a story that doesn't involve the Jedi, Skywalkers, a new Empire, the Sith or the Force at all?
Hear, hear. I thought it was fanfiction, too.
nightmare wrote:Addendum: Oh dear God* and the fanboys are already all over it. Including Nathan "Long-Winded" Chronoradio.
*There just isn't a good substitute for that expression.
What did Chronoradio say?
You know, things like this make me angry. I write SW fanfic. I do not create new empires, superweapons, Sith lords, and the like.
I don't have to. I can give ten ideas right now that are more original than this. The idea that this is all that
professional writers could come up with...
We can only hope that this will be a one-time issue, and will not be expanded upon in multiple novels.
However, the roots of this problem lie far in the past. The major problem is that EU writers have locked themselves into a pattern where major novels always center around major movie chararters (Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace, and Yoda in the PT era, and Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and Lando in the post-ROTJ era). The rule was broken twice: the
X-wing series by Stackpole and Allston, and the
Medstar duology by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. Not coinicidentally, these are among my favorite novels (not the favorites, but that's just because I'm a big Mara Jade fan). The Stackpole novels in particular have been flamed for their
technical aspects, chiefly fighter-wanking, but they did depart from the traditional SW novel
dramatically because they focused on minor movie characters, and major characters made short cameo appearances. Ditto for the Reaves-Perry duology, and, to a lesser extent,
Yoda: Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart, where the stage belongs to Yoda and several EU and minor movie characters, with only a cameo appearance by Anakin and Obi-Wan at the end.
Reusing the same characters leads to lazy writers reusing the same concepts (superweapons, Sith lords, evil empires). This is why some feel one EU novel is pretty much like the other--because, to a degree, it is. Zahn's Thrawn was a rather intriguing and original idea. Anderson's Daala was a poorly executed ripoff (in the JAT, at least. I sort of liked her in
Darksaber.
Suppose that novels such the
X-Wing series, the
Medstar duology and
Yoda: Dark Rendezvous, involving none, or perhaps just one, of the major movie characters, would have been more prevalent, maybe even the norm, rather than the exception (as they should by pure logic: it's a big galaxy, it shouldn't involve Obi-Wan and Anakin (and later, Luke, Han, and Leia) in everything). I have no doubt that had that been the case, we would be seeing more originality and a better overall quality in the EU.
I repeat: the galaxy is a big place. There's plenty of stuff to write about, in any era. It's that the writers are locked in that mentality of "we must include major movie character who blow up superweapons and fight Sith lords in charge of evil empires." Please. Lucas did that better than anyone else could ever hope to, and rightly so. Think of something new.
Some may complain that such novels wouldn't be "real Star Wars." Bullshit.
X-Wing is real Star Wars.
Medstar is real Star Wars.
KOTOR is real Star Wars. This "Legacy" crap?
That's not real Star Wars. That's a cynical attempt to make money of the trademark without putting any real effort into it. "Real Star Wars" (I am not talking about the Lucasfilm canon definitions, I am talking about general acceptance of the material as "real") is whatever the fans decide it to be. Witness how many do not consider
Enterprise and
Voyager to be "real Star Trek". SW EU appears to be going the same route. That's not good.
I have never been a SW movie purist, and I never really understood them. Until now. Thank you, morons (not the purists, the creators of this dreck).
One more thing: something just caught my eye:
There have been lots of wild theories bandied about regarding the "secret" project that John Ostrander and Jan Duursema (and Dan Parsons and Brad Anderson) have been cooking up.
Any relation to KJA?