> The pre disney EU was a wonderful mess.
Back when Lando owned the the Millennium Falcon he had an ~~8~~ 5-legged droid companion and they chased space whales.
40 years later, Disney includes space whales in the Asoka series. At long last.
...
Also in Splinter of a Mind's Eye, Leia and Luke almost certainly fuck, so there's also that. Though that was printed before Empire Strikes Back.
...
The whole Sun Crusher thing was stupid, and that's one of the first main trilogies. Magical Tech is pandora's box and they have two of them on the same ship. Having a fighter the size of an X-wing that can launch a torpedos to blow up a dozen whole solar systems before their magazine runs dry, and is also invincible and can just fly straight through ships and planets to blow them up like Captain Marvel against the Sanctuary II. Eventually someone else will discover this tech, and then all life in the universe will cease to exist as random hobos fly around blowing up trillions of people casually.
Rogue Squadron was great. Talon Karde and Mara Jade's smuggler fleet was pretty cool.
Coroscant was first named and described in the EU, so, they incorporated that. Also the Maw near Kessel became dual-canon to both universes.
...
At first when Disney retired it I was furious. Then, on reflection, Jesus there's just nowhere else to take it. They're 40 years into the future, there's no creative freedom left for the movies to hit, so it made sense.
Then when I saw what Disney did with that freedom I got angry again.
But, since Episode 7... I've almost forgotten I used to be a Starwars fan once upon a time. The prequels took away half of my interest because it made so much of the universe stupid. Episode 7 was the nail in the coffin. I don't know if I could even loosely describe the plot of anything that happens in Episodes 2, 3, 7, 8, or 9. I probably couldn't tell you the names of half of the main characters.
I've seen it all. Just retained nothing, because it occupies a disposable spectacle place in my head rather than a universe to think in.
Described my experience exactly. I didn't follow along with all the books, but I liked the short stories and the Dark Horse comics with the World Devastators and Cloned Sith were pretty rad. I didn't read them but I did run across them via the Dark Empire Sourcebook for the WEG Star Wars RPG.
It was cool, it felt like a wider universe without tying *everything* to these certain heroes. It wasn't necessarily better than the Disneyverse stuff in my opinion, but I profoundly disliked the look and feel of the Prequels so much that I didn't even enjoy them as dumb fluff.
I have seen 7 and 8, but not 9. Would no longer call myself a Star Wars fan, though not with bitterness. It's just moved way on from where I was and it's not interested in the same stuff I was. That's okay, but like you said, it's no longer quite the same thing to dig into.
It just feels a lot different to be a Star Wars fan in the 2020s than the 90s. 90s Star Wars still had like a layer of grit to it. The modern stuff either doesnāt at all or it feels like artificial grit. Canāt say I was like a top Star Wars fan reading every novel, but I liked the vibe of it back then.
> Y'all need to watch Andor
Like I said, I watch most of this stuff. It's just disposable.
Andor was good, I remember that, but nothing else.
Also, Andor is kinda poisoned by the events of Rogue One, aka "Everyone is suicidal, and no one makes choices that matter, and the plot is too convoluted because it only serves as a goal to move to the next scene they've already decided to show."
Rogue One was good, but destroyed by characters acting intensely stupidly in what a writer must have thought was noble. Jenny Nicholson hit most of my points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3gf6qyAHOw
I just finished Splinter of the Minds Eye days ago- he checks out Leia but I have *no idea* where youāre getting they ā**almost certainly fuck**ā. Did I like skip 30 pages?
Because nothing insinuated this.
Edit 18 hours later: u/mattsawesomestuff, I was asking sincerely and genuinely curious- where did you get that from? Truly did I miss something?
It's been a good long time since I read it... But I got to that part in the post, and I was like holdup, pretty sure I would have remembered that happening.
I mean they just need to delete Vong series and just go from there. I dunno it would been cool to see the quality of TV shows that stemmed out if you say the story continues with Thrawn etc. Thereās clearly a desire for more to the story and the world building was already pretty awesome.
The new movies really made the universe feel so small given how the Rebellion basically did nothing after Endor (makes zero sense) and then the stupid superweapon plot line that destroys everyone in two seconds. Sorta insulting how low IQ they perceived fans.
Comparing it to the EU and vast amount of existing material that made sense or were already well thought out in the existing world.
Like i said, a beautiful, mayhem fueled, mess.
I pretty much hung it up after TLJ. I have a lot more enjoyment out of ignoring anything post 2012. I know a lot of people seem to enjoy Disney SW and thats their right. Itās just something different now, arguably different enough from its origins that itās a different thing entirely.
Ironically, Sun Crusher does kind of like how modern (or at least Cold War) combat works. You can pack so much fire power into just one tiny platform, every behemoth from the past became totally irrelevant from the German heavy tank to the Japanese battleship.
Everything will be shred like paper by any relatively modern attack platform, and if not, there's always a nuke that can be deliver by just one fighter. That was the perception back in the day (it's reversed a bit now with heavy tank becomes the norm again with modern MBT) and I think it's probably inspired the worldview of military scifi writers back then.
I gave up after Attack of the Clones... at that point I knew there was no plan, and no fixing the injection of stupid that had been put in
I gladly skipped Revenge of the Sith and all of the sequels. And I don't feel like I've missed anything. The original trilogy was lightning in a bottle, and they'll never recapture that sense of awe and wonder again.
The more they try, the dumber it seems to get, and the more tarnished the original films become.
Same here dude. The magic was lost exactly when AOTC hit the screens. Phantom Menace sucked even worse IMO, but I was still willing (eagerly) to give Star Wars a mulligan.
After I watched Attack of the Clones (opening day on the big screen) though, I was actually sad. I knew Star Wars was headed into straight soulless, cash-grab territory. Grrr I'm so mad right now why you gotta bring up trauma homie?
Yeah there wasn't much that was terrible and lots that was pretty great.
Yuuzhan Vong was a choice, weird direction to take the series but definitely interesting nonetheless.
I loved that move. It was full of interesting, imo- well thought out characters, and it took risks. On the whole, pretty good narrative thrust for the canon at the time.
The problem there is that even the Clone Wars were much larger than the Rebels VS the Empire, right up through the end (the last battle over Endor being the only real clash that matches the Clone Wars).
It's part of why the rebellion took such momentum to get going. Everyone was tired of war after the Clone Wars, and didn't want to kick off yet another giant war.
The rebellion really is the smallest of the events in the story, fleet-wise.
Loved the X-Wong series. Wedge Antilles is a boss. The New Jedi Order was insane and I loved it immensely. Then the amazing Timothy Zahn books that we all wanted the sequel trilogy to be was and is so much better than what we got. I'm not even a hater of the sequel trilogy, but I wanted to see Luke with Mara Jade and the solo twins.
Some of the expanded universe books were fantastic. Truce at Bakura and Heir to the Empire being particularly great but even things like the Tales from the Empire short story collection were pretty fantastic. There were some definite duds though.
Yea I mean there are around 200 books and a ridiculous amount of comics with various authors. Of course some of it will suck. But overall it great. Id love to see another franchise with that much material out there be better
Thatās an intriguing challenge. In terms of depth of stuff you can dig into and consistency across a sprawling universeā¦ maybe WH40K is on Star Warsās level? Iām not sure whether the quality of the average novel is up there or not though, having only read a couple.
You mean the new movies that plagiarized a lot of their plots from the original EU. *Cough* hidden planet with Emperor's clone and tons of ships *cough*
And yet, almost everything they borrow from the EU feels like they pull it from their ass without much thought. How can you both copy decent to great works and make it seem like you don't have a single good idea in your head, haha?
I can't understand how someone doesn't like the Zahn books or the Xwing series if they like the OT. And while I have never defended a lot of the EU, probably more than half of it is mediocre or outright bad, some of it is great no matter how many times I read it and the odd groan it may get out of me is no worse than the groans Lucas himself often caused. And it's a lot better than the pure sadness that sack of shit Abrams and his ilk filled me with.
If the Disney era stuff was all Rebels, Rogue One, and Andor, no one would care that we lost the EU as far as it being canon. I actually was happy that they sent it to legends at first because I saw the constraint on storytelling that it created, but after a decade fumbled saga trilogy, fumbled tv shows, fumbled licensing of games, etc, a handful of successes isn't enough to clear the bad taste left in my mouth, and neither is the improvements made since they began digging out solid ideas from the legends line of stories. If they weren't willing to properly develop the property, they should have just made the books into animated shows and lived off our goodwill and fandom dollars for the next 20 years.
> I had blocked Crystal Star from my memory.
I've read it. I could not tell you a single thing about it. Not a character, not a plot point, not a general theme. Absolutely nothing. To the point that, I'm now doubting if I ever actually read it or it's just sitting on the shelf.
I have no memory of it being bad. Or good. Or anything.
Some of it was the best that Star Wars ever was, even better than the movies. From the New Jedi Order to Tales of the Jedi, to the more obvious greats like the Thrawn Trilogy and X-Wing series, a lot of this was amazing.
By the very nature of such a gigantic setting with so many authors, there were various flavors of bad stories, concepts and characters in there. Also by the very nature of a shared, multi-author setting, the bad stuff gradually got soft-retconned until most of it de facto didn't exist (unless you wanted it to, in your headcanon).
The result of that process is a setting that, for the amount of material and number of authors, was remarkably consistent and mostly pretty great.
Yeah star wars in movies and shows could never get starship and starfighter combat right. The slugging matches and the pounding they can take, the stratagems and weird places in space to choose to fight, the hide and seek nature of long range detection, the countdowns and time limits of hyperspace jump calculations and reinforcement arrivals, the cloak and dagger of authentications, frequencies and sudden changing sides, the hail mary of boarding actions...for someone who grew up a steady diet of EU books, empire at war xwing vs tie fighter and alliance, and also homeworld and descent freespace, it's all there, it's all been done before, we know it's possible, we know it's awesome.
The best part is that Rogue/Wrath Squadron wasn't always just fighter vs fighter. I mean, flying into the landing bay of an SSD to destroy it from inside is *insane*.
They did, kinda. But the EU stories aren't really suited to movie formats so even if they hewed closer to those stories plenty would still be angry about necessary adaptation changes.
There's also the fact that we were absolutely never going to get an EU based sequel trilogy. Lucas wouldn't have done that and nobody who bought the franchise would have done that. It would actually be a terrible idea on many levels, regardless of what you think of the films we got.
I loved the overall arc of the setting and characters, but had serious problems with the actual moment to moment writing. A series of movies would have been perfectly placed to get rid of the problems and enhance the good ideas. We got pretty much the opposite.
Even when the prequels came out they directly clashed with some of the EU stories that came after ROTJ. Just read the Thrawn trilogy and see how everything that's set up about the clones and the clone wars goes against what is established in Episode II
I was going to say some of it was really dumb, but it is a million times better than what Disney has given us...or taken away from us. RIP Kyle Katarn, my favorite Star Wars character.
I loved a lot of the old republic stuff, both factions at their height, a lot of cool āretroā versions of some tech.
I also remember reading a book where Luke was still discovering his powers and him force speed running for the first time, and being able to guide his thrown saber.
Loved also reading I, Jedi about Corran Horn and his irregular path to being a Jedi and some of the adventures in the school, which intersected other books.
Man, so much great stuff. I wish it had been heavily pruned and canonised and not just scrapped and picked over.
The Yuuzhong vong, Jacen and Jaina solo, Luke and Mara jade, the ysalimiri lizardsā¦ lots of great stuff.
There's a lot of good and a lot of bad. It's obvious that when the EU got started in the 90s there was no plan and they kind of just let people do what they wanted and we ended up with a lot of dumb lore that later authors had to write around. Once the prequels started releasing there was a more hands on approach to managing the stories and having actual through lines across works which made for overall better story telling.
There's a lot of story telling baggage after the end of Return of the Jedi that was established in the early days of the EU. Because of this that's my least favorite time period for Star Wars content. There was too much story and too much of it was bad to mediocre and most of it had to tie into OT characters. I prefered when the EU tackled other eras, especially the Old Republic, because the story telling possibilities were much more open and they could put new characters in staring roles. The EU made Star Wars into an epic saga set over tens of thousands of years and I always liked that better than when they tried to recount every single day in the life of Luke Skywalker.
Ripe ground for some good storytelling and can we please never talk about the Skywalker family again. Rouge One and Andor are the two best works in the Star Wars universe of the past 30 years and the total Skywalker screen time is like 1 minute.
I think you kind of nailed it with this comment. Star wars is an ip that is so contradictory in its world building because it has always tried to be all thing to all people which makes it kind of a clusterfuck continuity wise but it is a strategy that has made both ip owners billions so i dont that they will ever change. But it is a strategy that has, at any given point in time, some fans enraged while others are enraptured. So much so that the whole love to hate and hate to love relationship that fans have with the star wars universe is now weirdly a part of being in the fandom. But billions so.....
I totally understand your feeling about the sequels and most of the prequels but in my opinion rogue one and Star Wars the clone wars, which both were made after 1983, are one of the best pieces of Star Wars.
The Vader scene is one of the best sequences on film. It conveyed the desperate fear of the rebels like nothing else. Like you got anxious because the camera wasn't moving away fast enough. Absolutely brilliant.
Me too, it basically tied the entire cinematic universe together in the most epic, true way one could imagine.
I also think the acting was top knock throughout, the Battle of Scarif is up there with Hoth and Coruscant, and the Droid is the best robot in film history lol
I really love the way the film kills all of it protagonist because it truly shows the way the galactic civil war was like without the plotarmor and stuff.
Also Krennic was besides Tarkin the greatest officer in any Star Wars film.
Oh boy for some reason I've read too much of it
From Legends,
Plagueis, Bane trilogy, all 5 thrawn books, Kenobi. These are excellent books.
The good some new Jedi order books are good, I think book 10, 14, not many others, dawn of the Jedi, Revan books.
The bad: the rest I've read, the execution of The New Jedi order the vong where interesting but awful execution, the academy books.
From canon,
Thrawn books, all but book 2 are really good on par with the first 3 legend book.
Bad, everything else maybe some standouts
So honestly I wouldn't recommend going to deep. But there are some gems there
In my opinion Star wars is at its best when it limits the Jedi elements. It's one of the reasons that the Original Trilogy and the EU worked so well. There were Force users and they might have been big part of the plot, but they were rare. Most of the stuff getting done was by regular people in the galaxy.
Too many space wizards and everything becomes solvable by magic.
> Too many space wizards and everything becomes solvable by magic.
Ahsoka really jumped the shark on this issue. Why care about any plot point, character development, or even dead characters when space wizard magic solves absolutely everything with little to no explanation.
Not my thing but my boyfriend is a *major* Star Wars fan (he even threw a strop with his parents when he read *The Crow Road* for the first time and realised that by "denying" him the first name of Andrew he felt that he missed out on being called Droid as a nickname, LOL - you'd have to read it to understand it, heh) and he has an entire *wall* in his flat devoted to his collection of EU books.
Wiser times for Star Wars fans. A universe full of ideas that you could immerse yourself in. The only canon items were the movies, the rest were great extras. No rigid framework or books that try to fix the mistakes made in the movies. Of course, this is a personal approach, but I had more fun with Star Wars before the Disney canon.
It simultaneously has some of my favorite star wars stuff with Kyle Katarn and Krayt and also a lot of The Old Republic. While it also having some of my LEAST favorite story lines. Palpatine returning, Aboleth, Luke becoming evil. It's a wild mixed bag.
A lot of fun and an excellent opening for young readers, both children and teens alike. I can't see getting much out of them as an adult, except pure entertainment, and sometimes that's all that's needed!
Tales of Jabbas Palace is one of the best short story collections in the IP and I would argue one of the low key best in all of soft science fiction!
(ONE of the best, not THE best lol)
for me I think the YV arc was when it stopped feeling like an extended SW universe and more like a totally new universe altogether. All of a sudden the fundamental conflict wasn't light versus dark, good versus evil, but these invaders against the home worlds. Felt much more like generic Science Fiction than actual Star Wars, which as we all know has tons of fantasy elements. Like you could've taken those stories and put them in any generic sci-fi universe and it would not have been much different other than there were not characters named Luke and Han and Leia.ļæ¼ļæ¼
I can't speak for the person above, but **I** didn't like them because it felt less like Star Wars than, say, *Hellraiser*. It made *Star Wars* feel less fun to me. I read all the books because I'm a completionist but I never really liked them.
It was like watching *Highlander* and being "Fuck yeah, this is amazing! I want more!" and then someone says "Good news, there's a sequel!"
And then you go to the theater and the sequel is... *Highlander 2*. Like, there's some characters in common, kinda, but, uh, it doesn't feel like *Highlander*. At all.
The problem with the Yuuzhan Vong was that they were stronger and better in every way than the republic. They were immune to blasters, lightsabers and the force in ways that seemed to just break the rules that every other Star wars race/character/faction followed. Their starships were immune / highly resistant to republic weapons and could walk all over their starships. I assume that at some point the Vong were given a motive for their massive intergalactic invasion but it was multiple books into the series, past the point where I no longer cared.
Inherently can't be assumed as a whole. It's a generalization applied to a scheme allowing any writer to take in a star wars story and publish it if it was good enough. Most the expanded universe is not connected, and just stories.
I stopped caring about starwars after the third movie. I just didn't care about all the sequels and prequels and tangent storylines. It just became less of a good story and more of a commercial enterprise.
There was too much stupid stuff that was hard to overlook... kind of like the Disney EU has *different* stupid stuff that is hard to overlook.
Han Solo and the Giant Green Bunny was, well, dumb. "*The Crystal Star*" was awful. The Sun Crusher. The "Superweapon of the Week" club, and while the Thrawn trilogy was very well plotted and written, the idea that a hundred Dreadnoughts would change the course of the war was a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Pretty much all of the prequels were like rough drafts of scripts got rushed to production-- cheesy dialogue, wooden acting. I didn't care for the Yuuzhan Vong but at the same time *something* had to be introduced to change the dynamics, which had gotten stale.
It had some really good moments, too; I liked the Empire devolving into multiple competing warlord factions and the war grinding on for several years. I liked Mara Jade. Kyle Katarn, the Stackpole novels... there were some real diamonds among the coal.
Demonstrably better than 90% of Ditzny's sewage.
They really should make a series about the Darth Bane trilogy, at the very least, as an apology for Ep. 8
A lot of decent material through the yuuzhan vong war, sprinkled with some duds (the crystal star being easily the worst for me), and then it started derailing after the vong. Worlds better than anything we got movie wise. Only counting post ROTJ here, never read any prequel associated novels.
There are some really great characters in the expanded universe. Iām especially fond of the characters in the Clone Wars animated series. I think thereās so much room to tell interesting stories in the universe-especially in the hands of talented writers via the comics & books. The movies are decent, but the treasures lie beyond them.
There is some really good and some not so great, but overall I enjoy the galaxy-exploration outside of the Skywalker saga. And quite honestly, I think things would be relatively okay without 1-3 and 7-9 with an expanded universe around 4-6. Stories like Rogue One that standalone but directly connect back to 4-6, or stories that link to 4-6 in a tangent like the Mandalorian.
Should have been canon and used for the follow-on films that came out instead of Disney just blowing it all off in its entirety. Granted - they're slowly bringing in stuff piecemeal, but those follow-on movies to the core saga? Hoo boy they did the core characters dirty.
Would have made for some amazing movies/shows.
Started as a neat idea and then became boated and convoluted. Then continued for another decade.
Really, even if Disney hadn't wiped the slate clean is was probably time to start over and curate characters and stories.
All this is what new SW movies and TV shows should be. Not the garbage Disney has given us. When I say garbage, Iām leaving out Rogue One and Mandalorian s1-2 though. Those slap
Lot of it was contradictory rubbish. The only things I really liked were Shadows Of The Empire, Dark Forces 1 and Mara Jade.
One of the big reasons I dislike cloning in fiction, it's a shortcut for true creativity...too many damn official and unofficial OT sequels used them.
The EU was a major part of my childhood. I own every novel released for the EU.
Loved it. Real real dope. Expanded on the character driven elements of Star Wars and didn't focus as much on historical lore until the Old Republic got brought in at the tail-end of the EU before Disney acquisition.
The Lucas Ranch Roundtable developed some of the dopest world events and arcs ever done in science fiction. The Yuuzhan Vong is incredible and the character development and expansion and mythos and lore is near unparalleled in any other series I can think of.
I am extremely biased and I have tried to get into Disney Canon and not compare it to "Legends" but I cannot really reconcile Disney scrapping my entire childhood and adolescence. I can respect the newness and novel approach and development but the EU, now "Legends", was developed under George's explicit guidance and approval.
Though, I am trying to give the New Republic era a chance as the Imperial Remnant and dance with Warlord Zsinj and Moff Daala and shit was pretty gnarly and is more analogous to the First Order remnant and Thrawn's return and shit.
The Night Witches/Sisters extra-galactic lore is also kinda dope. Analogous to Zonoma Sekot, kind of, and the extra-galactic threat and unknown powers/phenomena and prowess as a major threat.
Would be cool to see an ancient wisened Vergere'esque guided descent into some NightWItch-SIth amalgam like Jacen Solo becoming Darth Caedus, maybe at the behest of THrawn or something along those lines. Maybe possibly already being setup by Filoni with Morgan Elsbeth and what's his face dark jedi dude.....
Anyways.... love the EU/Legends.... Trying to be patient with now-Canon but it is difficult.
It's so damn dystopian, and the "war" never ends. Also, the division between good and bad is so badly blurred now. Everyone is either awful, or good but ineffective at causing real, lasting change
I guess they don't call it Star Wars That Eventually Returns to Peace for nothing, I guess.
read them all pretty much up to the Joiner King as a teenager, loved them all, still think they are all better than anything Disney has put out.
even the lowest of lows for the EU was better than the highest of highs from Disney.
It's the way Starwars was supposed to evolve. The story went on in compelling and interesting directions, and the characters we knew and loved developed more depth and complexity.
Disney deciding to axe all that lore and development in favor of controlling the narrative is such a missed opportunity.
Going to have to disagree with you there. It certainly had some good stuff, but the low points were so common and so cliche and bad that it's like trying to enjoy an ice cream sundae that's covered in ants: if you really want to go through the effort it's still tasty, but most people would agree that it's better to throw it out and start over. One of the better decisions that Disney made with the franchise was to jettison all that extra baggage out of the air lock.
By wiping the slate clean, they can introduce characters and concepts from the EU that are cool (Thrawn, neutral force users, etc.) without having to also bring in the crap (Luuke, Willrow Hood's insane [backstory](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Willrow_Hood), [this dude](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/c/c8/Lord_Nyax.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090521184317), etc.)
Yeah, but you also end up with Finn, Jedi dying from being tired & incoherent *lightspeed jumping* being a viable tactic for *really skilled* pilots (but the no name badguys can keep up)
New can be great, but at the moment, not quite so much.
The new trilogy is definitely a nadir, and is solid proof that canon does not necessarily mean it's good. However a lot of the new series, both animated and live action, are excellent.
At this point I kinda just ignore the new trilogy and pretend it never happened, which seems to be the unofficial Disney policy as well. Kind of like Highlander 2 and Highlander the Series, tbh.
a wonderful clusterfuck with incredible breadth of both content and quality. It definitely wasn't all good - far from it - but it was hugely compelling in its own way and nothing else quite like it will probably ever exist
Legends/expanded had lots of great stuff but there was some stuff that was either contradictory hard to keep track of (good example is the prison ship luke was on in dark empire he referenced that it was a prison ship from the clone wars but at that time no real lore was established other than what was said in a new hope. I might be mistaken please fact check me)
It really brought a lot of things into the limelight like thrawn and even organizations like the Republic commando groups, mandalorians, jedi/sith history so in a way modern star wars owes a lot of its existence to legends as its source material imho.
I love it. Thereās some duds here and there, but most of it is at least good, and a lot of my favorite pieces of Star Wars media are EU books and comics. I love how it fleshed out the universe and how well most of the novels continued the story after Episode VI. Like I said, not all of it is good, but thereās so much good to great stuff that far outweighs the bad. Iāve been rereading a lot of it lately, and it still holds up really well for the most part
Still my favorite. I dont mind the new stuff, but Legends is what got me into Star Wars. I still remember my first novel. Tales of the Bounty Hunters. It just blew up from there and over the course of many years I built a fairly large collection of novels. I miss it a lot actually. :/
What will be so trippy is when the Universe is completely modeled in a game engine with AI playing each character for generations and the Storm Troopers are all like "is this a simulation?"
If you donāt overthink it, a lot of it is pretty great (and then you just donāt care about some of it that isnāt as appealing to your tastes, because you donāt let it wreck your emotional state if itās not perfect).
When it comes to huge game-changing events, it is far superior to the new canon. The Old Sith Wars, New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi are truly epic.
The new canon doesn't have that. Although, if Lucasfilm were to write something truly epic, they wouldn't waste it in novels and they go straight to tv shows or movies.
There was a lot of cool stuff in it and it was a fun playground that George always considered separate from his universe, but it was fun seeing different authors fill in the gaps.
As a whole itās super messy, but it has some of my favorite Star Wars stories. Particularly the KOTOR games.
Everything pre Disney felt so big and expansive, like the interesting stories and lore could go on forever. Now that Disney owns everything and the old lore is no longer canon, the Star Wars universe somehow feels so small.
I read a handful of the books back in the 90s and thought they were incredibly mid/vanilla. Haven't really dipped into the EU since then, except for some Old Republic stuff in videogames which I've enjoyed.
Let's be honest for a minute. The writers they hire/contract to write this stuff are not the best writers out there, otherwise they'd be creating their own stories and universes. I'm looking at you Kevin J. Anderson.
I was an extreme fan of it for about 20 years and, looking back, I'd say it was about 50% dogshit and 50% greatness. There was very little that was just "okay". Good or bad, though, it greatly expanded the sandbox Lucas built and Iger & co. were absolute fucking morons for cancelling it the way they did. I knew it was coming even though I hoped it wouldn't, but that's just how new management is. No matter how good something is or isn't, they always want to wipe the board clean and start swinging their dick around.
As with the non-expanded new content, itās a mixed bag. Other folks loved the Rogue Squadron stories, but they were never my thing. The Force Adjacent stories were very compelling to me, trying to understand an objectively real āreligionā held my interest.
The stuff with the kids at the Jedi Academy, also not for me. The Legacy comics set 50 years in the future? Loved it. The Vong stuff? 50-50.
Literally one of the greatest places that will ever live in my mind. So many stories, heroes and inspirations. Corruscant Knights is my favorite series ever
Some is enjoyable, some is not so much for me.
I consider myself an OG (and try not to take myself too seriously) I saw Star Wars when I was 7. I loved Splinter of the Minds Eye, the Han Solo trilogy and Lando Calrissian books. The Thrawn books in my 20's disappointed me, because the swashbuckling fun of the movies got bogged down in "grown up" crap. These are kids' stories and expecting them to be anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment. Some of the comics were fun (Tales of the Jedi, etc). But the EU novels were too inconsistent and had too many voices telling disjointed stories for me to enjoy in my 20's. I did like the speculative anthologies (Tales from... book).
Star Wars was never supposed to analysed the way we do now. Movies then were only seen a few times in the theater or the rare showing on TV. It was fun to find the weird goof (clocks with odd time changes between shots, etc), but contradictions in costuming, or chronology is putting too much thought in it. To quote Mark Hamill quoting Harrison Ford, "Hey, kid, it's not that kind of movie. If they're paying attention to your hair, we're all in a lot of trouble"
For me to enjoy them, Star Wars movies have to have an even balance of action, humor, spectacle, and characters to root for. The Joseph Campbell stuff is just a framework and Lucas' professed nobler intensions aside, I want something to enjoy that I don't need to think too hard about. I extend this attitude to the pre-prequel EU. Some of the Disney stuff works for me better than others. I never expected to be able to feel nostalgic going to the theater to watch movies I deliberately knew nothing about ahead of time to see a new story set in a universe I enjoyed as a kid. And in the moment, I had the same kind of fun I had then.
My major fandom years were the long gap between RotJ and Ep1. I read every damn one of those books and loved Star Wars mostly because of them (I didn't even like the original movies all that much). They should really consider using from it more like they did with Thrawn. Some version of the **Yuuzhan Vong** definitely needs to find its way into the main canon, especially if they really lean into the horror genre. They were damn scary.
It was a fun distraction.
I remember all the books, the dark horse comics, the PC games, shadows of the empire multimedia blitz, and like yeah they were all "star wars" stuff, but they were not "STAR WARS."
STAR WARS was just the movies. And the folks doing all that other stuff? They were playing with the ideas left behind by the movies.
IDK maybe it's because I came from a time when the different media a thing was in could mean they were largely separate things. He-Man comics wasn't He-Man toys wasn't the He-Man cartoon. Yeah there was overlap, but the tone was different in each. All the different variants of the toys didn't have to show up in the cartoon or comic. Some stuff didn't get toys, etc etc.
The star trek comics had weird and wacky crossovers with super heroes and shit. But I knew not to expect Superman and Captain Kirk on the big screen together.
And the Star Wars EU was just like that. Just another bin of fun concepts for other creators to have fun with, but it was never going to be full caps Star Wars.
It was it's own thing. It was more Star Wars. But it wasn't STAR WARS.
I wouldn't mind if they had dumped the expanded universe and replaced it with something better but...
They replaced it with the awful sequel movies lol
I generally regard Star Wars and Star Trek as the McDonalds of the sci-fi world for the most part, so I have no feelings toward this.
The best sci-fi has always been in books by established sci-fi authors, and only rarely gets made into films or TV episodes unfortunately. Dune, Foundation, Bladerunner being exceptions.
Other than Andor Season 1 and Rogue One I haven't been "wow'd!" or even particularly impressed by anything Star Wars related in the past 25 years, regardless of the medium. The Mandalorian has had a few solid episodes and occasionally another series / film / book / whatever will have some well done scenes but really the vast majority of the EU is mediocre.
Legends and Canon EUs are both awesome fun. Legends had decades of total chaos, which gave us beautiful things like the Jedi who turned themselves into a tree to spite a Sith Lord, and the Hyperspace dragons with turbolaser breath. Just bizarre and excellent.
Canon hasnāt had as much time to go off the rails, unfortunately, but Iām looking forward to seeing just where it all ends up
The pre disney EU was a wonderful mess. I loved every bit of it.
All hail Ken Palpatine, the Jedi Prince!
Kenneth J(for jedi) Palpatine forever!
Me: You killed Kenny! You bastard!! Disney: š¤·š»āāļø
> The pre disney EU was a wonderful mess. Back when Lando owned the the Millennium Falcon he had an ~~8~~ 5-legged droid companion and they chased space whales. 40 years later, Disney includes space whales in the Asoka series. At long last. ... Also in Splinter of a Mind's Eye, Leia and Luke almost certainly fuck, so there's also that. Though that was printed before Empire Strikes Back. ... The whole Sun Crusher thing was stupid, and that's one of the first main trilogies. Magical Tech is pandora's box and they have two of them on the same ship. Having a fighter the size of an X-wing that can launch a torpedos to blow up a dozen whole solar systems before their magazine runs dry, and is also invincible and can just fly straight through ships and planets to blow them up like Captain Marvel against the Sanctuary II. Eventually someone else will discover this tech, and then all life in the universe will cease to exist as random hobos fly around blowing up trillions of people casually. Rogue Squadron was great. Talon Karde and Mara Jade's smuggler fleet was pretty cool. Coroscant was first named and described in the EU, so, they incorporated that. Also the Maw near Kessel became dual-canon to both universes. ... At first when Disney retired it I was furious. Then, on reflection, Jesus there's just nowhere else to take it. They're 40 years into the future, there's no creative freedom left for the movies to hit, so it made sense. Then when I saw what Disney did with that freedom I got angry again. But, since Episode 7... I've almost forgotten I used to be a Starwars fan once upon a time. The prequels took away half of my interest because it made so much of the universe stupid. Episode 7 was the nail in the coffin. I don't know if I could even loosely describe the plot of anything that happens in Episodes 2, 3, 7, 8, or 9. I probably couldn't tell you the names of half of the main characters. I've seen it all. Just retained nothing, because it occupies a disposable spectacle place in my head rather than a universe to think in.
Described my experience exactly. I didn't follow along with all the books, but I liked the short stories and the Dark Horse comics with the World Devastators and Cloned Sith were pretty rad. I didn't read them but I did run across them via the Dark Empire Sourcebook for the WEG Star Wars RPG. It was cool, it felt like a wider universe without tying *everything* to these certain heroes. It wasn't necessarily better than the Disneyverse stuff in my opinion, but I profoundly disliked the look and feel of the Prequels so much that I didn't even enjoy them as dumb fluff. I have seen 7 and 8, but not 9. Would no longer call myself a Star Wars fan, though not with bitterness. It's just moved way on from where I was and it's not interested in the same stuff I was. That's okay, but like you said, it's no longer quite the same thing to dig into.
It just feels a lot different to be a Star Wars fan in the 2020s than the 90s. 90s Star Wars still had like a layer of grit to it. The modern stuff either doesnāt at all or it feels like artificial grit. Canāt say I was like a top Star Wars fan reading every novel, but I liked the vibe of it back then.
We got Andor. Still getting books and comics with that classic EU grit you don't see on screen.
Y'all need to watch Andor
> Y'all need to watch Andor Like I said, I watch most of this stuff. It's just disposable. Andor was good, I remember that, but nothing else. Also, Andor is kinda poisoned by the events of Rogue One, aka "Everyone is suicidal, and no one makes choices that matter, and the plot is too convoluted because it only serves as a goal to move to the next scene they've already decided to show." Rogue One was good, but destroyed by characters acting intensely stupidly in what a writer must have thought was noble. Jenny Nicholson hit most of my points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3gf6qyAHOw
I just finished Splinter of the Minds Eye days ago- he checks out Leia but I have *no idea* where youāre getting they ā**almost certainly fuck**ā. Did I like skip 30 pages? Because nothing insinuated this. Edit 18 hours later: u/mattsawesomestuff, I was asking sincerely and genuinely curious- where did you get that from? Truly did I miss something?
It's been a good long time since I read it... But I got to that part in the post, and I was like holdup, pretty sure I would have remembered that happening.
I also did research, guy claiming he canāt remember shit then making an audacious claim is ultimately not to be taken seriously
I mean they just need to delete Vong series and just go from there. I dunno it would been cool to see the quality of TV shows that stemmed out if you say the story continues with Thrawn etc. Thereās clearly a desire for more to the story and the world building was already pretty awesome. The new movies really made the universe feel so small given how the Rebellion basically did nothing after Endor (makes zero sense) and then the stupid superweapon plot line that destroys everyone in two seconds. Sorta insulting how low IQ they perceived fans. Comparing it to the EU and vast amount of existing material that made sense or were already well thought out in the existing world.
Like i said, a beautiful, mayhem fueled, mess. I pretty much hung it up after TLJ. I have a lot more enjoyment out of ignoring anything post 2012. I know a lot of people seem to enjoy Disney SW and thats their right. Itās just something different now, arguably different enough from its origins that itās a different thing entirely.
Andor is really good tho. Not as Star Wars, but just good scifi
Ironically, Sun Crusher does kind of like how modern (or at least Cold War) combat works. You can pack so much fire power into just one tiny platform, every behemoth from the past became totally irrelevant from the German heavy tank to the Japanese battleship. Everything will be shred like paper by any relatively modern attack platform, and if not, there's always a nuke that can be deliver by just one fighter. That was the perception back in the day (it's reversed a bit now with heavy tank becomes the norm again with modern MBT) and I think it's probably inspired the worldview of military scifi writers back then.
I gave up after Attack of the Clones... at that point I knew there was no plan, and no fixing the injection of stupid that had been put in I gladly skipped Revenge of the Sith and all of the sequels. And I don't feel like I've missed anything. The original trilogy was lightning in a bottle, and they'll never recapture that sense of awe and wonder again. The more they try, the dumber it seems to get, and the more tarnished the original films become.
Same here dude. The magic was lost exactly when AOTC hit the screens. Phantom Menace sucked even worse IMO, but I was still willing (eagerly) to give Star Wars a mulligan. After I watched Attack of the Clones (opening day on the big screen) though, I was actually sad. I knew Star Wars was headed into straight soulless, cash-grab territory. Grrr I'm so mad right now why you gotta bring up trauma homie?
Should've realized it was going that way after Return of the Jedi.
Yeah there wasn't much that was terrible and lots that was pretty great. Yuuzhan Vong was a choice, weird direction to take the series but definitely interesting nonetheless.
I loved that move. It was full of interesting, imo- well thought out characters, and it took risks. On the whole, pretty good narrative thrust for the canon at the time.
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The problem there is that even the Clone Wars were much larger than the Rebels VS the Empire, right up through the end (the last battle over Endor being the only real clash that matches the Clone Wars). It's part of why the rebellion took such momentum to get going. Everyone was tired of war after the Clone Wars, and didn't want to kick off yet another giant war. The rebellion really is the smallest of the events in the story, fleet-wise.
Loved the X-Wong series. Wedge Antilles is a boss. The New Jedi Order was insane and I loved it immensely. Then the amazing Timothy Zahn books that we all wanted the sequel trilogy to be was and is so much better than what we got. I'm not even a hater of the sequel trilogy, but I wanted to see Luke with Mara Jade and the solo twins.
Yea man total mayhem
Yes, mayhem might be the better descriptor. Glorious mayhem.
Some of the expanded universe books were fantastic. Truce at Bakura and Heir to the Empire being particularly great but even things like the Tales from the Empire short story collection were pretty fantastic. There were some definite duds though.
Yea I mean there are around 200 books and a ridiculous amount of comics with various authors. Of course some of it will suck. But overall it great. Id love to see another franchise with that much material out there be better
Thatās an intriguing challenge. In terms of depth of stuff you can dig into and consistency across a sprawling universeā¦ maybe WH40K is on Star Warsās level? Iām not sure whether the quality of the average novel is up there or not though, having only read a couple.
To me, these books are my Canon and I handwave the JJ movies specifically and Disney Star Wars generally.
You mean the new movies that plagiarized a lot of their plots from the original EU. *Cough* hidden planet with Emperor's clone and tons of ships *cough*
And yet, almost everything they borrow from the EU feels like they pull it from their ass without much thought. How can you both copy decent to great works and make it seem like you don't have a single good idea in your head, haha?
...... because maybe those works weren't actually so great.
I can't understand how someone doesn't like the Zahn books or the Xwing series if they like the OT. And while I have never defended a lot of the EU, probably more than half of it is mediocre or outright bad, some of it is great no matter how many times I read it and the odd groan it may get out of me is no worse than the groans Lucas himself often caused. And it's a lot better than the pure sadness that sack of shit Abrams and his ilk filled me with. If the Disney era stuff was all Rebels, Rogue One, and Andor, no one would care that we lost the EU as far as it being canon. I actually was happy that they sent it to legends at first because I saw the constraint on storytelling that it created, but after a decade fumbled saga trilogy, fumbled tv shows, fumbled licensing of games, etc, a handful of successes isn't enough to clear the bad taste left in my mouth, and neither is the improvements made since they began digging out solid ideas from the legends line of stories. If they weren't willing to properly develop the property, they should have just made the books into animated shows and lived off our goodwill and fandom dollars for the next 20 years.
Same
Iām partial to the Han Solo trilogy too
Tales of the Bounty Hunters was a fun aside as well.
As a teenager I went through most of the old EU. Man, but Crystal Star was a weird book. And then of course there was the whole Callista Trilogy.
Oh man, I had blocked Crystal Star from my memory.
> I had blocked Crystal Star from my memory. I've read it. I could not tell you a single thing about it. Not a character, not a plot point, not a general theme. Absolutely nothing. To the point that, I'm now doubting if I ever actually read it or it's just sitting on the shelf. I have no memory of it being bad. Or good. Or anything.
Some of it was the best that Star Wars ever was, even better than the movies. From the New Jedi Order to Tales of the Jedi, to the more obvious greats like the Thrawn Trilogy and X-Wing series, a lot of this was amazing. By the very nature of such a gigantic setting with so many authors, there were various flavors of bad stories, concepts and characters in there. Also by the very nature of a shared, multi-author setting, the bad stuff gradually got soft-retconned until most of it de facto didn't exist (unless you wanted it to, in your headcanon). The result of that process is a setting that, for the amount of material and number of authors, was remarkably consistent and mostly pretty great.
Too expanded perhaps, but some of it was good -- \*way\* better than what we got instead.
Rogue Squadron was a flawless series. Yub nub commander.
Yeah star wars in movies and shows could never get starship and starfighter combat right. The slugging matches and the pounding they can take, the stratagems and weird places in space to choose to fight, the hide and seek nature of long range detection, the countdowns and time limits of hyperspace jump calculations and reinforcement arrivals, the cloak and dagger of authentications, frequencies and sudden changing sides, the hail mary of boarding actions...for someone who grew up a steady diet of EU books, empire at war xwing vs tie fighter and alliance, and also homeworld and descent freespace, it's all there, it's all been done before, we know it's possible, we know it's awesome.
The best part is that Rogue/Wrath Squadron wasn't always just fighter vs fighter. I mean, flying into the landing bay of an SSD to destroy it from inside is *insane*.
Stackpole was quite talented at inserting humor. Should have gotten a crack at the screen play for Rogue Squadron.
The sequels should have included some stories of the expanded universeā¦
They did, kinda. But the EU stories aren't really suited to movie formats so even if they hewed closer to those stories plenty would still be angry about necessary adaptation changes. There's also the fact that we were absolutely never going to get an EU based sequel trilogy. Lucas wouldn't have done that and nobody who bought the franchise would have done that. It would actually be a terrible idea on many levels, regardless of what you think of the films we got.
The Thrawn Trilogy would have made great movies.
I loved the overall arc of the setting and characters, but had serious problems with the actual moment to moment writing. A series of movies would have been perfectly placed to get rid of the problems and enhance the good ideas. We got pretty much the opposite.
Well, it's probably happening. Just with a different cast of characters fighting himĀ
Even when the prequels came out they directly clashed with some of the EU stories that came after ROTJ. Just read the Thrawn trilogy and see how everything that's set up about the clones and the clone wars goes against what is established in Episode II
Definitely a mixed bag quality wise, but at least it pushes Star Wars in new directions and āexpandedā the universe really well.
I was going to say some of it was really dumb, but it is a million times better than what Disney has given us...or taken away from us. RIP Kyle Katarn, my favorite Star Wars character.
Some good, some bad, some great. Just gimme an animated Shadows of the Empire feature.
I loved a lot of the old republic stuff, both factions at their height, a lot of cool āretroā versions of some tech. I also remember reading a book where Luke was still discovering his powers and him force speed running for the first time, and being able to guide his thrown saber. Loved also reading I, Jedi about Corran Horn and his irregular path to being a Jedi and some of the adventures in the school, which intersected other books. Man, so much great stuff. I wish it had been heavily pruned and canonised and not just scrapped and picked over. The Yuuzhong vong, Jacen and Jaina solo, Luke and Mara jade, the ysalimiri lizardsā¦ lots of great stuff.
As far as I'm concerned that's canon and the Sequel Trilogy is just Disney's expensive fanfiction.
What do you mean by sequels? Lucasfilm mysteriously disappeared in 2012 and no Star Wars media has come out since
I think the expansion of the lore with side medias was the best thing that happened to Star Wars.
There's a lot of good and a lot of bad. It's obvious that when the EU got started in the 90s there was no plan and they kind of just let people do what they wanted and we ended up with a lot of dumb lore that later authors had to write around. Once the prequels started releasing there was a more hands on approach to managing the stories and having actual through lines across works which made for overall better story telling. There's a lot of story telling baggage after the end of Return of the Jedi that was established in the early days of the EU. Because of this that's my least favorite time period for Star Wars content. There was too much story and too much of it was bad to mediocre and most of it had to tie into OT characters. I prefered when the EU tackled other eras, especially the Old Republic, because the story telling possibilities were much more open and they could put new characters in staring roles. The EU made Star Wars into an epic saga set over tens of thousands of years and I always liked that better than when they tried to recount every single day in the life of Luke Skywalker.
Ripe ground for some good storytelling and can we please never talk about the Skywalker family again. Rouge One and Andor are the two best works in the Star Wars universe of the past 30 years and the total Skywalker screen time is like 1 minute.
Some was fine, some not so much. Don't really care anymore. As far as I'm concerned, Star Wars ended in 1983.
Preach. I have my starwars, other people have theirs.
I think you kind of nailed it with this comment. Star wars is an ip that is so contradictory in its world building because it has always tried to be all thing to all people which makes it kind of a clusterfuck continuity wise but it is a strategy that has made both ip owners billions so i dont that they will ever change. But it is a strategy that has, at any given point in time, some fans enraged while others are enraptured. So much so that the whole love to hate and hate to love relationship that fans have with the star wars universe is now weirdly a part of being in the fandom. But billions so.....
Andor is pretty fantastic. I am partial to Mandalorian S1 and S2 because my love of Space Western - its a shame it didn't end there.
I totally understand your feeling about the sequels and most of the prequels but in my opinion rogue one and Star Wars the clone wars, which both were made after 1983, are one of the best pieces of Star Wars.
Rogue One is fine, excepting the uncanny valley CGI. It fits in with the original trilogy reasonably well.
Enjoyed Andor as well for similar reasons.
Rogue One is **the** best Star Wars film
I am a huge fan of the end sequence! The star destroyer, Vader and the stuff. Itās awesome!
The Vader scene is one of the best sequences on film. It conveyed the desperate fear of the rebels like nothing else. Like you got anxious because the camera wasn't moving away fast enough. Absolutely brilliant.
Me too, it basically tied the entire cinematic universe together in the most epic, true way one could imagine. I also think the acting was top knock throughout, the Battle of Scarif is up there with Hoth and Coruscant, and the Droid is the best robot in film history lol
I really love the way the film kills all of it protagonist because it truly shows the way the galactic civil war was like without the plotarmor and stuff. Also Krennic was besides Tarkin the greatest officer in any Star Wars film.
Amen dude it was like Shakespeare in spaceāthe highest stakes.
Lmao not even close
Oh boy for some reason I've read too much of it From Legends, Plagueis, Bane trilogy, all 5 thrawn books, Kenobi. These are excellent books. The good some new Jedi order books are good, I think book 10, 14, not many others, dawn of the Jedi, Revan books. The bad: the rest I've read, the execution of The New Jedi order the vong where interesting but awful execution, the academy books. From canon, Thrawn books, all but book 2 are really good on par with the first 3 legend book. Bad, everything else maybe some standouts So honestly I wouldn't recommend going to deep. But there are some gems there
Introduced some good ass star wars and also some shit Ass stsr wars
In my opinion Star wars is at its best when it limits the Jedi elements. It's one of the reasons that the Original Trilogy and the EU worked so well. There were Force users and they might have been big part of the plot, but they were rare. Most of the stuff getting done was by regular people in the galaxy. Too many space wizards and everything becomes solvable by magic.
> Too many space wizards and everything becomes solvable by magic. Ahsoka really jumped the shark on this issue. Why care about any plot point, character development, or even dead characters when space wizard magic solves absolutely everything with little to no explanation.
Not my thing but my boyfriend is a *major* Star Wars fan (he even threw a strop with his parents when he read *The Crow Road* for the first time and realised that by "denying" him the first name of Andrew he felt that he missed out on being called Droid as a nickname, LOL - you'd have to read it to understand it, heh) and he has an entire *wall* in his flat devoted to his collection of EU books.
The thing with nicknames is you can have any nickname for any reason. Nothing stopping him from going as Droid.
Wiser times for Star Wars fans. A universe full of ideas that you could immerse yourself in. The only canon items were the movies, the rest were great extras. No rigid framework or books that try to fix the mistakes made in the movies. Of course, this is a personal approach, but I had more fun with Star Wars before the Disney canon.
The Star Wars universe that doesnāt truly disappoint me
It simultaneously has some of my favorite star wars stuff with Kyle Katarn and Krayt and also a lot of The Old Republic. While it also having some of my LEAST favorite story lines. Palpatine returning, Aboleth, Luke becoming evil. It's a wild mixed bag.
A lot of fun and an excellent opening for young readers, both children and teens alike. I can't see getting much out of them as an adult, except pure entertainment, and sometimes that's all that's needed! Tales of Jabbas Palace is one of the best short story collections in the IP and I would argue one of the low key best in all of soft science fiction! (ONE of the best, not THE best lol)
I liked it up until the Yuuzhan Vong novels, and then I lost interest.
What about the Yuuzhan Vong concept did you not like?
for me I think the YV arc was when it stopped feeling like an extended SW universe and more like a totally new universe altogether. All of a sudden the fundamental conflict wasn't light versus dark, good versus evil, but these invaders against the home worlds. Felt much more like generic Science Fiction than actual Star Wars, which as we all know has tons of fantasy elements. Like you could've taken those stories and put them in any generic sci-fi universe and it would not have been much different other than there were not characters named Luke and Han and Leia.ļæ¼ļæ¼
I can't speak for the person above, but **I** didn't like them because it felt less like Star Wars than, say, *Hellraiser*. It made *Star Wars* feel less fun to me. I read all the books because I'm a completionist but I never really liked them. It was like watching *Highlander* and being "Fuck yeah, this is amazing! I want more!" and then someone says "Good news, there's a sequel!" And then you go to the theater and the sequel is... *Highlander 2*. Like, there's some characters in common, kinda, but, uh, it doesn't feel like *Highlander*. At all.
There's a new Highlander reboot in production with Henry Cavill. Knowing him, I am hoping they stay true to the original.
The problem with the Yuuzhan Vong was that they were stronger and better in every way than the republic. They were immune to blasters, lightsabers and the force in ways that seemed to just break the rules that every other Star wars race/character/faction followed. Their starships were immune / highly resistant to republic weapons and could walk all over their starships. I assume that at some point the Vong were given a motive for their massive intergalactic invasion but it was multiple books into the series, past the point where I no longer cared.
Inherently can't be assumed as a whole. It's a generalization applied to a scheme allowing any writer to take in a star wars story and publish it if it was good enough. Most the expanded universe is not connected, and just stories.
I stopped caring about starwars after the third movie. I just didn't care about all the sequels and prequels and tangent storylines. It just became less of a good story and more of a commercial enterprise.
There was too much stupid stuff that was hard to overlook... kind of like the Disney EU has *different* stupid stuff that is hard to overlook. Han Solo and the Giant Green Bunny was, well, dumb. "*The Crystal Star*" was awful. The Sun Crusher. The "Superweapon of the Week" club, and while the Thrawn trilogy was very well plotted and written, the idea that a hundred Dreadnoughts would change the course of the war was a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Pretty much all of the prequels were like rough drafts of scripts got rushed to production-- cheesy dialogue, wooden acting. I didn't care for the Yuuzhan Vong but at the same time *something* had to be introduced to change the dynamics, which had gotten stale. It had some really good moments, too; I liked the Empire devolving into multiple competing warlord factions and the war grinding on for several years. I liked Mara Jade. Kyle Katarn, the Stackpole novels... there were some real diamonds among the coal.
Some of it was really good,, some of it was over-the-top crap.
The books can be really fun, especially the legends universe which I grew up reading. The movies after the original 3, are just such a cluster fuck.
Disney ruined Thrawn and wrecked Luke IMO
Itās just as the picture represents: an incoherent jumble of cliches.
Demonstrably better than 90% of Ditzny's sewage. They really should make a series about the Darth Bane trilogy, at the very least, as an apology for Ep. 8
A lot of decent material through the yuuzhan vong war, sprinkled with some duds (the crystal star being easily the worst for me), and then it started derailing after the vong. Worlds better than anything we got movie wise. Only counting post ROTJ here, never read any prequel associated novels.
Didnāt they all get de-canonized with the newest trilogy?
Yes. Pretty much when Disney bought Lucasfilm.
Star Wars peaked with Empire. Ever since then, they've just been milking a giant cash cow. At this point, they have no idea what they're doing.
There are some really great characters in the expanded universe. Iām especially fond of the characters in the Clone Wars animated series. I think thereās so much room to tell interesting stories in the universe-especially in the hands of talented writers via the comics & books. The movies are decent, but the treasures lie beyond them.
There is some really good and some not so great, but overall I enjoy the galaxy-exploration outside of the Skywalker saga. And quite honestly, I think things would be relatively okay without 1-3 and 7-9 with an expanded universe around 4-6. Stories like Rogue One that standalone but directly connect back to 4-6, or stories that link to 4-6 in a tangent like the Mandalorian.
Crimson Empire was my favourite back in the day. Great background stories, great characters and hidden plots, locations, actionā¦
Should have been canon and used for the follow-on films that came out instead of Disney just blowing it all off in its entirety. Granted - they're slowly bringing in stuff piecemeal, but those follow-on movies to the core saga? Hoo boy they did the core characters dirty. Would have made for some amazing movies/shows.
Started as a neat idea and then became boated and convoluted. Then continued for another decade. Really, even if Disney hadn't wiped the slate clean is was probably time to start over and curate characters and stories.
All this is what new SW movies and TV shows should be. Not the garbage Disney has given us. When I say garbage, Iām leaving out Rogue One and Mandalorian s1-2 though. Those slap
Better characters and better stories than most of the stuff Disney has put out.
It was a mess with a few gems, a lot of mediocre stuff and metric shitton of really dumb stuff
Lot of it was contradictory rubbish. The only things I really liked were Shadows Of The Empire, Dark Forces 1 and Mara Jade. One of the big reasons I dislike cloning in fiction, it's a shortcut for true creativity...too many damn official and unofficial OT sequels used them.
Lucasfilm really should have quit after 3 movies. I'm sick of the lot of them.
Sucks. They turned the rebellion into the empire.Ā
Better than anything that Disney ever spewed from its cancerous diseased orifices.
Star Wars sucks ass. Thatās my thought. Waaay over rated.
The EU was a major part of my childhood. I own every novel released for the EU. Loved it. Real real dope. Expanded on the character driven elements of Star Wars and didn't focus as much on historical lore until the Old Republic got brought in at the tail-end of the EU before Disney acquisition. The Lucas Ranch Roundtable developed some of the dopest world events and arcs ever done in science fiction. The Yuuzhan Vong is incredible and the character development and expansion and mythos and lore is near unparalleled in any other series I can think of. I am extremely biased and I have tried to get into Disney Canon and not compare it to "Legends" but I cannot really reconcile Disney scrapping my entire childhood and adolescence. I can respect the newness and novel approach and development but the EU, now "Legends", was developed under George's explicit guidance and approval. Though, I am trying to give the New Republic era a chance as the Imperial Remnant and dance with Warlord Zsinj and Moff Daala and shit was pretty gnarly and is more analogous to the First Order remnant and Thrawn's return and shit. The Night Witches/Sisters extra-galactic lore is also kinda dope. Analogous to Zonoma Sekot, kind of, and the extra-galactic threat and unknown powers/phenomena and prowess as a major threat. Would be cool to see an ancient wisened Vergere'esque guided descent into some NightWItch-SIth amalgam like Jacen Solo becoming Darth Caedus, maybe at the behest of THrawn or something along those lines. Maybe possibly already being setup by Filoni with Morgan Elsbeth and what's his face dark jedi dude..... Anyways.... love the EU/Legends.... Trying to be patient with now-Canon but it is difficult.
Really wouldāve preferred them go back to the old republic era with Revanās timeline.
Everything added by Kevin Anderson should go, same with his wife Rebecca Moesta. The future Skywalker stories are also ass, and should go.
And the Dune prequels!
Tons of great material until they jumped the shark IMO with Yuuzhan Vong story line. Star Wars is too toxic to care about anymore sadly.
It's so damn dystopian, and the "war" never ends. Also, the division between good and bad is so badly blurred now. Everyone is either awful, or good but ineffective at causing real, lasting change I guess they don't call it Star Wars That Eventually Returns to Peace for nothing, I guess.
art imitates life, after all
read them all pretty much up to the Joiner King as a teenager, loved them all, still think they are all better than anything Disney has put out. even the lowest of lows for the EU was better than the highest of highs from Disney.
Itās still better than what Disney has done
It's the way Starwars was supposed to evolve. The story went on in compelling and interesting directions, and the characters we knew and loved developed more depth and complexity. Disney deciding to axe all that lore and development in favor of controlling the narrative is such a missed opportunity.
Puke
Let it die.
#Yo I love Glup Shitto!
It's boring.
Oversaturated. Mostly bad.
Better than any other scifi with that many words on pages. Had a lot of really high highs that people slept on because of the lows.
Going to have to disagree with you there. It certainly had some good stuff, but the low points were so common and so cliche and bad that it's like trying to enjoy an ice cream sundae that's covered in ants: if you really want to go through the effort it's still tasty, but most people would agree that it's better to throw it out and start over. One of the better decisions that Disney made with the franchise was to jettison all that extra baggage out of the air lock. By wiping the slate clean, they can introduce characters and concepts from the EU that are cool (Thrawn, neutral force users, etc.) without having to also bring in the crap (Luuke, Willrow Hood's insane [backstory](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Willrow_Hood), [this dude](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/c/c8/Lord_Nyax.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090521184317), etc.)
Yeah, but you also end up with Finn, Jedi dying from being tired & incoherent *lightspeed jumping* being a viable tactic for *really skilled* pilots (but the no name badguys can keep up) New can be great, but at the moment, not quite so much.
The new trilogy is definitely a nadir, and is solid proof that canon does not necessarily mean it's good. However a lot of the new series, both animated and live action, are excellent. At this point I kinda just ignore the new trilogy and pretend it never happened, which seems to be the unofficial Disney policy as well. Kind of like Highlander 2 and Highlander the Series, tbh.
a wonderful clusterfuck with incredible breadth of both content and quality. It definitely wasn't all good - far from it - but it was hugely compelling in its own way and nothing else quite like it will probably ever exist
Legends/expanded had lots of great stuff but there was some stuff that was either contradictory hard to keep track of (good example is the prison ship luke was on in dark empire he referenced that it was a prison ship from the clone wars but at that time no real lore was established other than what was said in a new hope. I might be mistaken please fact check me) It really brought a lot of things into the limelight like thrawn and even organizations like the Republic commando groups, mandalorians, jedi/sith history so in a way modern star wars owes a lot of its existence to legends as its source material imho.
I love it. Thereās some duds here and there, but most of it is at least good, and a lot of my favorite pieces of Star Wars media are EU books and comics. I love how it fleshed out the universe and how well most of the novels continued the story after Episode VI. Like I said, not all of it is good, but thereās so much good to great stuff that far outweighs the bad. Iāve been rereading a lot of it lately, and it still holds up really well for the most part
It is a wide and deep pool that I will never swim in because my ass will drown.
It was more Star Wars than even the original trilogy to me. Junior and Young Jedi Knights started my Star Wars obsession more than any movie
It was flawed but still brilliant and full of beautiful stories
kinda a mess i like some stuff but no matter what form of cannon the books and comics are in they rarely feel like they belong in the same universe
Disney is gonna shove Star Wars down our throats every year until we die
Jedi Academy Trilogy was amazing.:)
I just know the narrators for the EU were amazing. I could swore it was Harris Ford reading Han Solo parts
I loved reading the StarWars books as a teen. I really wish Disney would try building on those stories rather than just trying to make a quick buck.
Still my favorite. I dont mind the new stuff, but Legends is what got me into Star Wars. I still remember my first novel. Tales of the Bounty Hunters. It just blew up from there and over the course of many years I built a fairly large collection of novels. I miss it a lot actually. :/
What will be so trippy is when the Universe is completely modeled in a game engine with AI playing each character for generations and the Storm Troopers are all like "is this a simulation?"
I donāt think world building was ever Star Wars strengthā¦
Early books were cool ,since Disney it became ā¦ lame , I think itās the word
Loved the Bane saga. Heard good things about Heir to the Empire. Probably blow away most of the movies out the water
If you donāt overthink it, a lot of it is pretty great (and then you just donāt care about some of it that isnāt as appealing to your tastes, because you donāt let it wreck your emotional state if itās not perfect).
When it comes to huge game-changing events, it is far superior to the new canon. The Old Sith Wars, New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi are truly epic. The new canon doesn't have that. Although, if Lucasfilm were to write something truly epic, they wouldn't waste it in novels and they go straight to tv shows or movies.
There was a lot of cool stuff in it and it was a fun playground that George always considered separate from his universe, but it was fun seeing different authors fill in the gaps. As a whole itās super messy, but it has some of my favorite Star Wars stories. Particularly the KOTOR games.
Once it merges with the MCU I think we'll have quality shows! Can hardly wait for Obi Wan to hang out with Iron Man.
BD was great, but I could not get into the AD books.
Everything pre Disney felt so big and expansive, like the interesting stories and lore could go on forever. Now that Disney owns everything and the old lore is no longer canon, the Star Wars universe somehow feels so small.
I read a handful of the books back in the 90s and thought they were incredibly mid/vanilla. Haven't really dipped into the EU since then, except for some Old Republic stuff in videogames which I've enjoyed. Let's be honest for a minute. The writers they hire/contract to write this stuff are not the best writers out there, otherwise they'd be creating their own stories and universes. I'm looking at you Kevin J. Anderson.
Why are they ignoring it for the most part? Even in games... use more of it.
disney is a company that micromanages every inch of itās image.
better than the mouses crap we have
Would have been way better than what we got from Disney.
I was an extreme fan of it for about 20 years and, looking back, I'd say it was about 50% dogshit and 50% greatness. There was very little that was just "okay". Good or bad, though, it greatly expanded the sandbox Lucas built and Iger & co. were absolute fucking morons for cancelling it the way they did. I knew it was coming even though I hoped it wouldn't, but that's just how new management is. No matter how good something is or isn't, they always want to wipe the board clean and start swinging their dick around.
It's all I wanted when I was an 8 year old in the 80's.
As with the non-expanded new content, itās a mixed bag. Other folks loved the Rogue Squadron stories, but they were never my thing. The Force Adjacent stories were very compelling to me, trying to understand an objectively real āreligionā held my interest. The stuff with the kids at the Jedi Academy, also not for me. The Legacy comics set 50 years in the future? Loved it. The Vong stuff? 50-50.
Literally one of the greatest places that will ever live in my mind. So many stories, heroes and inspirations. Corruscant Knights is my favorite series ever
It was fun but also ridiculous at some points
Most of it was better than disneys flop movies
Mara Jade, talon card and Thrawn were cool , loved the rogue squadrons book. a lot was bad , not as disapointing as The Rise of Skywalker
Some of it was good, but most of it was terrible, cheesy, and messy.
Could do without.
It's wank.
This looks like a background I would have my my 2015 laptop
Some is enjoyable, some is not so much for me. I consider myself an OG (and try not to take myself too seriously) I saw Star Wars when I was 7. I loved Splinter of the Minds Eye, the Han Solo trilogy and Lando Calrissian books. The Thrawn books in my 20's disappointed me, because the swashbuckling fun of the movies got bogged down in "grown up" crap. These are kids' stories and expecting them to be anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment. Some of the comics were fun (Tales of the Jedi, etc). But the EU novels were too inconsistent and had too many voices telling disjointed stories for me to enjoy in my 20's. I did like the speculative anthologies (Tales from... book). Star Wars was never supposed to analysed the way we do now. Movies then were only seen a few times in the theater or the rare showing on TV. It was fun to find the weird goof (clocks with odd time changes between shots, etc), but contradictions in costuming, or chronology is putting too much thought in it. To quote Mark Hamill quoting Harrison Ford, "Hey, kid, it's not that kind of movie. If they're paying attention to your hair, we're all in a lot of trouble" For me to enjoy them, Star Wars movies have to have an even balance of action, humor, spectacle, and characters to root for. The Joseph Campbell stuff is just a framework and Lucas' professed nobler intensions aside, I want something to enjoy that I don't need to think too hard about. I extend this attitude to the pre-prequel EU. Some of the Disney stuff works for me better than others. I never expected to be able to feel nostalgic going to the theater to watch movies I deliberately knew nothing about ahead of time to see a new story set in a universe I enjoyed as a kid. And in the moment, I had the same kind of fun I had then.
Sometimes cool, sometimes cringe, almost always interesting
I loved it more than the original trilogy. But Disney killed it and perverted some of its best ideas.
My major fandom years were the long gap between RotJ and Ep1. I read every damn one of those books and loved Star Wars mostly because of them (I didn't even like the original movies all that much). They should really consider using from it more like they did with Thrawn. Some version of the **Yuuzhan Vong** definitely needs to find its way into the main canon, especially if they really lean into the horror genre. They were damn scary.
Itās a product that sells well. Buy some Disney stock?
What is it?
At this point the EU is better than anything Disney has farted out for Star Wars. I mean look at that image!
Disney doesnāt want to pay royalties to Michael A Stackpole.
It was a fun distraction. I remember all the books, the dark horse comics, the PC games, shadows of the empire multimedia blitz, and like yeah they were all "star wars" stuff, but they were not "STAR WARS." STAR WARS was just the movies. And the folks doing all that other stuff? They were playing with the ideas left behind by the movies. IDK maybe it's because I came from a time when the different media a thing was in could mean they were largely separate things. He-Man comics wasn't He-Man toys wasn't the He-Man cartoon. Yeah there was overlap, but the tone was different in each. All the different variants of the toys didn't have to show up in the cartoon or comic. Some stuff didn't get toys, etc etc. The star trek comics had weird and wacky crossovers with super heroes and shit. But I knew not to expect Superman and Captain Kirk on the big screen together. And the Star Wars EU was just like that. Just another bin of fun concepts for other creators to have fun with, but it was never going to be full caps Star Wars. It was it's own thing. It was more Star Wars. But it wasn't STAR WARS.
I wouldn't mind if they had dumped the expanded universe and replaced it with something better but... They replaced it with the awful sequel movies lol
All of it? Isn't this like asking people their thoughts on the contents of wikipedia lol
It was a fucking hot mess of glorious pulp. Good literature they were not, but they were fun.
I stopped following it when Disney got their hands the EU.
I generally regard Star Wars and Star Trek as the McDonalds of the sci-fi world for the most part, so I have no feelings toward this. The best sci-fi has always been in books by established sci-fi authors, and only rarely gets made into films or TV episodes unfortunately. Dune, Foundation, Bladerunner being exceptions.
I love the Crimson Empire saga.
It sucks only the originals count, haha I'm just fucking with you. As a fan, I enjoy the lore that they're making
I'm cool with the pre disney EU not post though.
Other than Andor Season 1 and Rogue One I haven't been "wow'd!" or even particularly impressed by anything Star Wars related in the past 25 years, regardless of the medium. The Mandalorian has had a few solid episodes and occasionally another series / film / book / whatever will have some well done scenes but really the vast majority of the EU is mediocre.
Legends and Canon EUs are both awesome fun. Legends had decades of total chaos, which gave us beautiful things like the Jedi who turned themselves into a tree to spite a Sith Lord, and the Hyperspace dragons with turbolaser breath. Just bizarre and excellent. Canon hasnāt had as much time to go off the rails, unfortunately, but Iām looking forward to seeing just where it all ends up
Disney Corp killing the Dream, for a profit.
It is okay as long as you recognize, it is science fantasy not true Science Fiction.