The crimes of KJA

[Supreme_Warlord]

I have a question regarding said author. Why does everyone dislike him so much?

Due to financial constraints and a general lack of interest (nothing really compares to the OT films for me), I haven't read many of the EU books myself (and not a single one by KJA), but what could possibly be so bad about what he has written? Any specific examples would be appreciated.



Thanks.

[Darth Garden Gnome]

Darksaber:

Hutts build Death Star.
Crix Madine dies in vain.
What's up with KJA and Hoth?

That's pretty much the plot. Writing quality, well, that's an entirely different story.

[Ghost Rider]

Poor characterizations: He makes Luke, Leia, Han, and anyone he didn't create into inept oafs while his chracters are supreme.

Lack of any sort of research: His Dune material if rife with just things that are wrong and contradicts much of the original books.

Villains lack any sort of fear: Usually they are Scooby-Doo level of villainy, Daala? Also the size of conflicts are dreadfully small(though that could be said of many EU authors)

[SHODAN]

Dont forget suncrusher, stupidest superweapon ... ever?

[God Emperor]

Dont forget suncrusher, stupidest superweapon ... ever?

Yep a fighter sized craft with specail missiles that can make a star go super nova

Edited for spelling

[Master of Ossus]

His writing style is okay, but he really didn't do his homework when he was writing his books. The characters all seem weird, and the technology that he portrays is some of the worst I've ever seen. For example, according to Mr. Anderson, a small starfighter-sized object can effortlessly ram its way through the bridge of an Imperator class Star Destroyer, and eventually destroy the ship as it falls into a nearby black hole. According to Mr. Anderson, the Hutts can build a Death Star that's orders of magnitude smaller than a regular Death Star (losing all of the defenses and such) using a slave labor force that pays little attention to what it's doing and has no quality control standards. All that the New Republic can throw against this threat to Galactic security is a couple of frigates. The best description Mr. Anderson can come up with for an Executor class ship opening up on a planet is to briefly mention forest fires that begin as a result of it.

Now, by no means the largest crime of his, but for some strange reason the one that annoys me the most is his use of the pun between "knight" and "night." It's not clever. It's been done lots of times in the past. Yet he uses it not once, but in almost every single one of his books! He can't come up with anything better.

[PainRack]

I have a question regarding said author. Why does everyone dislike him so much?

Due to financial constraints and a general lack of interest (nothing really compares to the OT films for me), I haven't read many of the EU books myself (and not a single one by KJA), but what could possibly be so bad about what he has written? Any specific examples would be appreciated.



Thanks.

Incompetence at every single level?

I hate to say this but I actually purchased and read his other novelisation before. The X-files series as well as his own universe. Sooner or later, you realise one thing. You're not reading X-files, but KJA own novelisation. He superimpose his reality, his vision and his facts into the genre, totally overriding the parent genre.

Add up the fact that his plot is weak, its doesn't make sense logically, too large a leap in logic is required, thus removing suspension of belief and you get the idea.

[Supreme_Warlord]

• A small starfighter-sized object can effortlessly ram its way through the bridge of an Imperator class Star Destroyer and eventually destroy the ship as it falls into a nearby black hole.
• The Hutts can build a Death Star that's orders of magnitude smaller than a regular Death Star (losing all of the defenses and such), using a slave labor force that pays little attention to what it's doing and has no quality control standards.
• All that the New Republic can throw against this threat to Galactic security is a couple of frigates.
• The best description Mr. Anderson can come up with for an Executor class ship opening up on a planet is to briefly mention forest fires that begin as a result of it.

, , , respectively.

Ah, now I see why the man is ridiculed so much. This here in itself is enough to put me off off any thoughts I might have of reading a SW book by him.

.......between "knight" and "night." It's not clever. It's been done lots of times in the past. Yet he uses it not once, but in almost every single one of his books! He can't come up with anything better.

Curious. Can you quote an example from a book please?

[Supreme_Warlord]

Poor characterizations: He makes Luke, Leia, Han, and anyone he didn't create into inept oafs while his chracters are supreme.

The only books I have read with OT characters in them are Shadows Of The Empire, Heir To The Empre, Dark Force Rising. As far as I am aware, Steve Perry and Timothy Zahn are considered good writers, but I was perplexed by some of the characterization from these books as well. e.g. why the hell would Vader even give a rat's ass about a pretender like Xixor?

[Master of Ossus]

Curious. Can you quote an example from a book please?

Sure. For one thing, my title (user rank) actually comes from one of his books. One of the Dark Jedi in Jedi Under Seige is named "the Darkest Knight," and is thus the leader of the Dark Jedi for the Second Battle of Yavin. However, in Darksaber he's already used the same joke when he has Admiral Daala rename her flagship from the "Night Hammer" to the "Knight Hammer." How clever. Here's the relevant passage:

As her last order before launching, Daala took the time to rechristen her dark ship, adding a letter to call the Super Star Destroyer the Knight Hammer, just to prove that she did indeed have a sense of humor... so long as it involved the ultimate defeat of the Rebel Alliance.

Okay, maybe it was mildly amusing the first time, but he just keeps using it. I think I remember I was reading another book of his when he used the same joke yet again, and thinking to myself that it was the third time he tried the same tired thing. I can't really explain why this annoys me so much, but it does.

[Supreme_Warlord]

Curious. Can you quote an example from a book please?

Sure. For one thing, my title (user rank) actually comes from one of his books. One of the Dark Jedi in Jedi Under Seige is named "the Darkest Knight," and is thus the leader of the Dark Jedi for the Second Battle of Yavin. However, in Darksaber he's already used the same joke when he has Admiral Daala rename her flagship from the "Night Hammer" to the "Knight Hammer." How clever. Here's the relevant passage:

As her last order before launching, Daala took the time to rechristen her dark ship, adding a letter to call the Super Star Destroyer the Knight Hammer, just to prove that she did indeed have a sense of humor... so long as it involved the ultimate defeat of the Rebel Alliance.

Okay, maybe it was mildly amusing the first time, but he just keeps using it. I think I remember I was reading another book of his when he used the same joke yet again, and thinking to myself that it was the third time he tried the same tired thing. I can't really explain why this annoys me so much, but it does.

Having read that passage, I agree that it is quite clever and amusing when used the first time (in Darksaber if I understand correctly), but after that it does get a bit old.

[FTeik]

It also assumes, that night and knight are pronounced and written similary in basic, than in english and that one letter is able to change the one into the other.

I thought it laughable the first time.

His other crimes:

-Lots of superweapons. Just when you breathed in relief after DarkEmpire, you get a DeathStar-prototype, a suncrusher with superduper-armor, not to mention the ability to destroy stars.

In addition in DarkSaber we have DeathStar the sixt or seventh paid for by the Hutts and designed by Bevel Lemelisk who inhabited his tenth clone-body (every time he failed somehow, the emperor killed him in a very original way and transferred his spirit or mind into a new body). No wonder the man sooner or later lost it more and more.

I, in Palpartines place would have cloned Lemelisk a few dozen times and used mind-imprit-technology to give every of those clones the same knowledge and basic abilities/scientific genious of the original. If one of them should fail, he would be killed and stay dead.

Luke, from a promising Jedi-Knight and possible Master seen in TTT and DE, the son of the chosen one is turned into a New-Age-preaching whacko, who assembles his desciples on an isolated spot that happens to be Yavin IV, as if there weren´t thousands of other (better) places to set up his new academy. Not only gives this the new Jedi a touch of being sectarian, the training-ground is hunted by a Sith-spirit (and nobody noticed).

Add that Luke nearly gets his ass whipped by nearly every of his new students, who has the guts to challange him, one has to wonder, how he was ever able to defeat Darth Vader and the emperor in ROTJ and DE.

More to come.

[Lord Pounder]

Just the very idea that 15 or so untrained jedi and a few recent graguates can pool togeather and physically throw a fleet of 30 ISD's to the very edges of a star system.

Or the whole shitty idea he has about removed brains and those said brains being put in Mech's.

The entire anal raping of The Butlerian Jihad.

If i was to ever meet the guy i'd offer him every penny i own, quite a few i might add, to retire and leave my belived universes the fuck alone. It's all sumed up for me with one word "Agamemnon"

[Tribun]

OH MY GOD!

After all I read here, I'm really glad, I never read any of his books. Otherwise, I would be in a rubber cell now. At the moment, I was writing an AU, were ROTJ never happend, but something different. I will include:

• "These were tries to build a weapon which could destroy stars. But in the end, it was only a dream. Only the ancient sith knew this secret."
  
  "This here is a simple sector fleet for a secor in the outer rim. Try to avoid them. Even here in the backwater, a sector fleet consists of thousands of ships, at least 10 Star Destroyers in it"
  
  "The Empire is big, ever thought about that? It spans nearly the entire Galaxy, consists of thousands of sectors and miilions of inhabitated worlds. You must thing on the big scale, to win them over."
  
  "We made the big mistake, to server ourselves from the people and and becoming a closed society. The Jedi erased themself from peoples mind even before they were physically destroyed. Do not make this mistake again!"
  
  "You want to rebuild the Republic with the same old faults and rotten core. Impressive. Naivite and stupidness are really centered in the leadership of the Rebellion."

[Jim Raynor]

How's about his IG-88 story in Tales of the Bounty Hunters? KJA seems to be trying to butcher everything in the SW universe:

-IG-88, a mere bounty hunter/assassin droid is turned into a would-be galactic conquerer.

-IG-88 isn't even a single character anymore, but a group of several similar droids.

-KJA commits yet another crime against proper scaling, as he would have us believe that a single world, Mechis III, is responsible for a significant part of the droid industry for the entire galaxy. Even more ridiculous is how poorly defended such a supposedly important planet is (73 total humans, apparently no military forces, defensive systems which were explicitly described as antiquated).

-KJA doesn't seem to realize just how far he's butchered IG-88, and makes up a flimsy excuse for why the would-be rulers would even bother with bounty hunting. Apparently, the droids did it as a cover for their plot to overthrow human civilization, since everyone in the Empire would care or even notice if four droids went renegade and just disappeared somewhere .

-Forget what was at stakes at the epic Battle of Endor, KJA has his own vision of the SW universe. Now EVERYONE was going to die, not just the Rebels. The Empire's ultimate weapon would its own undoing. While the other writers in that anthology wrote little side-stories, knowing that their main characters were only bit players in the films, KJA writes his story so that the events in the films are downright trivial in comparison.

-Everyone in the Empire has been pussified or reduced to an idiot. Vader senses that all is not right on Mechis III, but chooses not to act on his own instincts, despite the fact that years of being a Force user should tell him otherwise. Neither Jerjerrod or anyone else on the Death Star II pick up on the fact that a bunch of Stormtroopers have been replaced by androids, and no one suspects anything after one of the droids self-destructs and takes out an entire crew. The Emperor himself is unable to force open a door.

[Jim Raynor]

Crap, forgot to put this one in my last post.

-The Death Star's computer core is transported by an unarmed freightor, escorted only by two starfighters.

[Connor MacLeod]

Poor characterizations: He makes Luke, Leia, Han, and anyone he didn't create into inept oafs while his chracters are supreme.

Lack of any sort of research: His Dune material if rife with just things that are wrong and contradicts much of the original books.

Villains lack any sort of fear: Usually they are Scooby-Doo level of villainy, Daala? Also the size of conflicts are dreadfully small(though that could be said of many EU authors)

The only really redeeming qualities are that he at least can acknowledge a few correct things about SW (Star destroyers can reduce planets to molten slag, Jedi capabilities, a few other minor details.) Its not really enough to rate the books as remotely average.

I'd still have to say the Crystal Star or Balance Point are the worst offenders, though.

[YT300000]

e.g. why the hell would Vader even give a rat's ass about a pretender like Xixor?

Because Xixor could ruin him, and was annoying.

[Tribun]

He is written "Xizor" not "Xixor".

[His Divine Shadow]

According to Mr. Anderson, the Hutts can build a Death Star that's orders of magnitude smaller than a regular Death Star (losing all of the defenses and such) using a slave labor force that pays little attention to what it's doing and has no quality control standards.

This I have little problems with as they did have the guy who designed alot of the Death Star working for them, and it didn't work either because it was so shoddily put together.
As for it's true size, well we don't know that, it could have been the rough size of the first DS's superlaser shaft.

[Lord Poe]

And come on, the Darksaber resembles a lightsaber when completed, with the beam coming out one end like a blade. So it's cleverly called DARKsaber instead of LIGHTsaber...

[Kuja]

As for it's true size, well we don't know that, it could have been the rough size of the first DS's superlaser shaft.

Well, it was large enough that when Crix was standing on its surface, he couldn't tell that it was a curve. (IIRC)

[Joe Momma]

-KJA commits yet another crime against proper scaling, as he would have us believe that a single world, Mechis III, is responsible for a significant part of the droid industry for the entire galaxy.

My favorite KJA scaling idiocy: When describing the Executor-class Star Destroyer Knight Hammer, he mentions how incredible these ships are by claiming that the creation of the original Executor alone almost bankrupted the Empire. Yeah, the Empire could easily build two moon-sized battle stations in less than a decade but an oversized Star Destroyer nearly broke the bank. You know, the ships so incredibly rare and expensive that Han blew its presence off at the Death Star II as just one of many command ships.

His characterization tends to suck (I did like some of Han's dialogue during the Jedi Academy Trilogy, though), he revisits old locales without rhyme or reason (Yavin IV, Hoth, etc.) without contributing anything new, his only way of making the Jedi seem impressive is giving them ridiculous levels of power (as noted with the "flinging the ISD fleet for light years" trick above), and his grammar sucks the big one.

-- Joe Momma

[Captain Cyran]

I heard bad things here about KJA, and I decided to never read any of his cra-....I mean works.

But I never thought he could possibly be THAT bad, until I read this thread.

[YT300000]

He is written "Xizor" not "Xixor".

Typing error. zxcvbnm,./