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This is blatant misinformation. Only a single storyline, the comic series Dark Empire, featured a revived Emperor. There were lots of cool Star Wars books, running the gamut from standalone books like The Truce at Bakura, The Crystal Star, and I, Jedi to sprawling series (plural) like Rogue Squadron, New Jedi Order, and Legacy of the Force.
...I was going to make an objection here to including Legacy of the Force, but then I saw that you mentioned The Crystal Star as well, so I assume you are taking the piss.
There are indeed a lot of excellent Star Wars novels and sequels, though, and Rogue Squadron and New Jedi Order are definitely among them.
I haven't read any Star Wars books in maybe ten years, and The Crystal Star in particular in maybe fifteen years. But I do not remember The Crystal Star's being particularly bad (though I do recall thinking it was rather weird that the Solo twins were able to create light with the Force by vibrating air molecules in their prison cell). The point is that it is among a zillion books that are suitable for movie treatment.
Crystal Star is so out there that I'm convinced that, along with many other books, are actually edits of preexisting sci fi works hidden in the deep drawers if authors that were repurposed to Star Wars as long as there was a spaceship and magic involved. Black Fleet Trilogy, Crystal Star, even Courtship fall in this category. Once new concepts totally unrelated to established main canon are introduced as standalone concepts, then the whole fanfic aspect becomes obvious.
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While /u/BahRamYou's literal words are incorrect, I think the feeling behind them is directionally correct.
An awful lot of the pre-Disney Star Wars books basically had the plot, "Imperial remnant of the week shows up with a new superweapon." So even if the Emperor mostly stayed dead, it was hard to feel like the Empire was well and truly done for good.
There's a big difference between "the Empire remains a relevant force" and "it's just the Emperor again" though. A fledgling New Republic dealing with an Imperial remnant force with its own local goals that the Republic is spread too thin to deal with is very different than "if the Imperials ever catch our fleet, we're all dead".
And while the remnants often have something unique that make them a threat to the New Republic, it's rarely a "superweapon" in the sense that the Death Star was one.
Not to say there were no Death Stars: the Sun Crusher is the one I want to call out as being the most boring "well what if we made a Death Star but better". But notably, the Sun Crusher spends very little time in the hands of the Imperial remnant, first serving as an escape tool and then falling into the hands of a troubled young Jedi. So there we have the Death Star, but not the Empire.
My favorite riff on the Death Star was Darksaber, where the main plot was a Hutt finding Bevel Lemelisk, the original architect of the Death Star, and trying to get the minimum-viable-product version of the Death Star, where it's just the laser and nothing else. This is a threat the New Republic has to take seriously and deal with, though it turns out the whole project was a train wreck and it's destroyed the first time it tries to fire the laser to clear an asteroid in its path.
The lack of any of this adjustment is one of the problems with the movie sequels: the First Order is played as exactly the same threat and type of threat as the Empire, with Death Star 3 and similarly overwhelming fleet, and the New Republic is immediately relegated to a background entity so that the good guys can be exactly the same as the Rebels.
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So, looking up the AI summaries for these books, this one says that "The story is unique for being the only Star Wars novel told from the first-person perspective of a character not seen in the films." That's uh, damning with faint praise. The others seem to be about either Luke going off to fight "the Empire Reborn" or him going off to fight a new big threat to the galaxy. "Luke Skywalker is guided to Bakura by a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who warns him that the fate of the galaxy is at stake. "
I admit I haven't really read much of the star wars books or comics, but they don't exactly seem to be taking it in bold new directions.
That description is also untrue.
I feel like I'm only going to have to say this more and more in the future, but do not trust AI summaries about anything, especially not niche subjects. Come on, if you want to know what I, Jedi is about, the Wook has a detailed plot summary right there.
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These aren't always good (I really dislike both NJO and LOTF for pretty dumb canned heat), and the ones that are good aren't always original (The Thrawn Trilogy's a send-up of the very 'Empire Reborn' stuff that you're criticizing and has to invoke it to deconstruct it, Wraith Squadron has a few comedic bits that are basically Down Periscope In Space). Sometimes they're even just plain weird: I'm not recommending Darksaber when I say it's the best Kevin James Anderson work, but it actually does pretty a good breakdown of why the Empire's whole philosophy is so fucked up even if it's so deep in Bathos that there are Austin Powers jokes.
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That is a pretty terrible summary of I, Jedi so you should probably not listen to whatever other summaries that tool gave you. The pitch for that book was that it took a character, Corran Horn (the one not in the movies at all that your summary mentions) who was popular from previous books, and wove him into an existing (well liked) book's story in a way that felt reasonably natural. Think something like the Back To The Future 2 scenes where they are playing around the events of the first movie, that is kinda what that book does.
There are also lots of characters in the expanded universe books who aren't in the movies (kind of by necessity), as well as characters who are technically in the movies (e.g. Wedge Antilles) but who aren't real characters and get fleshed out almost entirely by the books. So it's definitely not noteworthy that this particular book centers around a character not from the movies.
I mean, it's heroic fantasy. What do you want them to do? The genre is kind of defined by people going off to fight larger than life threats. You seem to have this idea that to be good, a new entry needs to go in a bold new direction, but that would in my opinion make it a terrible new entry. I don't want bold new directions from sequels; if I wanted something totally new I'd just watch(/read/play) something new. When I reach for a sequel I want something substantially the same as the first one, but with some new elements sprinkled in to make it interesting.
I'll have to yield to you on the books. Like I said I really haven't read much, and it was a long time ago that I read any.
I'm not saying that anything needs to be different in order to be good. Like I read a lot of manga that tends to stick to the same structure over and over again... I'm fine with that. Sometimes there's value in just finding something good and sticking with it.
I think Star Wars is weird because the Jedi are just inherently a bit silly. The originals somehow managed to make them look cool by only using their powers sparingly and not going into too much detail about their religion. But every time we see more of them, it starts to fall apart a bit. Their swords don't work very well for fighting in space, they talk a lot about pacifism but mostly they're going around fighting, and they never seem to achieve any sort of real lasting peace so they're just failing at their jobs.
The way I see it, it's sort of like a magic trick. It looks awesome the first time you see it. But when you go back to look at the same trick again and again, in great detail... you start to see the hidden wires and the magic falls off.
You haven't played Knights of the Old Republic 2, have you?
i have not. I played Star Wars: Jedi Knight but I don't remember any story from it.
The reason I bring that game up is because Knights of the Old Republic 1 and Knights of the Old Republic 2 both set out to subvert and deconstruct Star Wars respectively in a way that was not destructive, and years before the Disney Triology ever came to fruition.
While people universally hold KOTOR1 is one of the best Star Wars games ever made(as well they should), KOTOR2 is much more devisive. For one, there's a severe tonal shift - while KOTOR1 is a galaxy-spanning pulp science fantasy in the theme of the original trilogy, KOTOR2 is much more darker and philosophical, to the point where the opening level is taken straight out of a horror game.
KOTOR2 also brings to the fore the potential consequences of the Jedi and Sith conflict, in the wake of such a cataclysmic, planet-destroying war, openly questioning on wether such organizations and individuals are good things overall, and the nature of the Force as a whole.
And it does all of this while managing to somehow not take a steaming shit over the setting itself or insult the fandom, while never giving you a clear or concise answer as to what the game thinks is correct. I'd argue it's a masterpeice of writing, for all the balancing act it plays.
Doesn't hurt that it has one of the best video game characters ever created in the form of Kreia, but the KOTOR series is littered with incredible characters.
Personally, I like KOTOR2 far more than KOTOR1, myself. There's just something about it...
OK, i'll try to take a look at the KTOR games, thanks!
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Jedi Knight had some at-the-time impressive FMV bits, but the story was not exactly the core of the series. Knights of the Old Republic is much more heavily on the RPG side with correspondingly deeper story, and a lot of KOTOR 2 and especially its end boss in particular is focused on questions about the Force and its Dark Side and what that means to individual people force-sensitive or not (along with a bit of theodicy and anti-theism).
Pretty good game, too, if you're into the genre.
KOTOR 2 is my go-to shield when somebody accuses me of just wanting more of the same, or not appreciating the brilliance of subversion.
You could argue even that game is pushing against the limits of what the SW universe can really tolerate. But you never get the sense the writer is scoffing at the pillars he's working with.
Yes, you can have 'dark, questioning' Star Wars. But you need to be competent and respectful.
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Kevin J Anderson (author of the Jedi Academy series and the I, Jedi fixfic written solely to close narrative loopholes) is one of the worst writers of the Bantam era of Star Wars Expanded Universe, and there are an incredible number of contenders for that title. Timothy Zahns Thrawn trilogy and the Michael A Stackpole series of X Wing novels were adrenaline shots for the franchise legacy, since much of the rest were middling quality and canon inconsistent.
The easy way to see which aspects of the canon worked are to see which survived the disney transition: Thrawn.... yea thats it. No Kaarde, Calisto, Xizor, Han Solo Twin Brother... most concepts are too dirt tier to be worth maintaining. There is deep lore here that is not worth brain cells to expound; suffice to say Star Wars was a limping property that needed the prequel trilogy to give narrative space for the key ingredient (jedi, superweapons, cool armor soldiers) to thrive in the clone wars narrative era. The dearth of sequel era works is precisely proof of the narrative graveyard that Disney ran the franchise into.
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I remember deeply enjoying the Thrawn trilogy when I read it a decade ago. It's basically my headcanon Star Wars 7, 8 and 9. Perfectly captures the essence of the original trilogy, gives them a fantastic new villain who challenges them in devilish new ways.
And that's about as far as I got on my "Expanded Universe" exploration. I think I got through another book or two that failed to leave any impression what so ever.
Same, which is made easier by only having seen pieces of TFA and not seeing TLJ and whatever followed it. After enduring the prequels, I decided I was done with SW overall.
Also same, although I've read plot summaries of others, and there are some batshit insane books out there. I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. Whoever was in charge of licensing wasn't afraid to let some authors go wild.
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