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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
Funny. I’m a regular /r/MawInstallation participant, and I’ve mostly heard good things about the High Republic. Sure, a niche fan group isn’t going to generate the sales Disney expects. But wouldn’t the anti-war message annoy them first? The sub is literally themed around Imperial military research!
Reading the article, it starts to make a little more sense. The first section is all about how woke the buildup was, based largely on a screencap of a whiteboard. Plus some tea-leaf interpretation on character designs. By his standards Maya here is far too androgynous to be, uh, a good character. If the tits aren’t out, she can’t be a good Jedi, hmm?But I digress.
The follow-up to this condemnation of the rollout is…an argument that the first book was actually successful. Which segues smoothly into all the reasons High Republic sucks. There’s no self-awareness in sight. This author started from the premise that Star Wars was woke badthink, and by the Force, he’s going to see it through.
Here we get to another shocking claim: Zahn did it right. Truly the hottest take in this article. I suppose it demonstrates better taste than the Rabid Puppies whom this author so openly apes.
Never mind the graveyard of non-Zahn Star Wars projects. Media tie-ins are a crapshoot. If we weren’t lucky enough to get Zahn, we’d have been stuck with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I’m sure the author was aware of melodramatic runs like Dark Empire or Legacy of the Force. Not to mention multimedia projects like Shadows of the Empire. More successful than High Republic, surely. But it’s easier to say “member Zahn? I ‘member.”
Could there be another reason than a woke mind virus? Maybe writing a decent novel is tough, and even tougher if you’re stupid. Er, third-rate talent operating on a budget. Maybe it gets worse when there is stifling corporate oversight. (Hey, I hear Marvel has multimedia projects. And is owned by Disney. And has a plan with similar Phases…) Maybe 2021 wasn’t the best time to release half a dozen books. How’s the hardback market looking, in this era of streaming services and Fortnite tie-ins?
I shouldn’t be surprised that the pseudo-review ends with a Joker quote. Censored, too. How fitting for an article which regurgitates so much else.
While I agree that the author is overlooking a lot of Legends stinkers (why do people keep hiring Kevin J Anderson?!), I think the old EU had a lot more than just Zahn and Splinter. I love Zahn's work, warts and all, including a lot of the lesser-known stuff (eg, Quadrail, Dragonback, Icarus Hunt), but Allston, Stackpole, Stove, Denning all had some good works with significant success. Even a lot of the marginal stuff wasn't as bad as Splinter; Truce at Bakura or the Junior Jedi Knight septology didn't age well and were a little formulaic, but they were pretty reasonable works of fiction with decent sales numbers.
It's actually hilarious to think that that series introduced Tahiri as a character before NJO kicked off. And also reminded me of the absolutely off the rails Galaxy of Fear goosebumps knock-off series.
God I loved Galaxy of Fear as a kid. I always thought Uncle Hoole was one of the more interesting characters introduced in Legends canon. I'd love to see another book take a crack at him in a less "for kids" narrative, or really any of the Shi'ido.
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No objections here.
I will report my personal satisfaction with Robert Allen Macbride’s Corellian Trilogy (for operatic adventure) and L. Neil Young’s Lando Calrissian Adventures (for weird, if rather off-genre, world building). It was a wild universe of fiction, both fantastical and militarist.
Splinter was meant as an example rather than a rule. Actually, I was going to use Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge, but settled on one from before any Zahn influence. The graveyard is clearly smaller than the list of successes!
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Yeah, Redditors don’t really reflect the true fan base for, well, anything anymore. surprised someone still thinks that, especially in this space.
Successful? It merely is the best selling of the bunch, which is….not high praise given the pathetic numbers on display:
Yeah, why would the middle of a pandemic when everyone is stuck at home be a bad time to sell books?
According to the fans, yes, Zahn “did it right”. Money talks. Shit walks.
Judging by the fact no one knows who this character is, yes. Correct.
Lol, Disney is operating “on a budget”. Yeah, a billion dollar marketing budget.
This article has made you really angry. Why? Did you enjoy the new Star Wars and it’s abject commercial and cultural failure feel invalidating to you?
Less sarcasm and psychoanalyzing the person you are responding to, please.
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I think the author of this piece is a hack, and that you’ll accept anything for evidence so long as it flatters your worldview.
Sales figures are pretty good evidence of quality of product, but go off I guess
Are you sure about that?
Was Fifty Shades of Grey a well written product?
Was Jersey Shore a well produced TV show?
I'd never suggest the quality of the product and the sales figures are anything but loosely correlated.
Perhaps quality assures sales but sales are affected by much more than quality, so looking at good sales as indicative of quality is a sketchy metric but poor sales is a much better metric of poor quality?
Though I can think of examples here that buck the trend as well. Bach wasn't well known during his lifetime, after all.
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The EU has also been wiped once - which makes it hard to justify investment - and the "lead in" from the new mainline SW stuff is...not as good as in the past.
But the writing is also probably bad.
Agreed. There are plenty of reasons to pick at HR. I was tempted to go through more of them. The one paragraph spent on how banal the villains are is legitimate criticism.
Ironically, delving into an expanded, effective Jedi Order is one of the oldest fantasies of the fanbase. Hence all the New Jedi Order material, the Old Republic, and so on. What does the galaxy look like when the space monks are everywhere? Authors keep trying to make this work with varying degrees of success. It’s possible “you think you know what you want, but you don’t.” Is any work featuring a monk police force doomed to silliness?
But delving into that would be the work of a fan, and this author was more interested in scoring political points.
The High Republic was Disney’s latest attempt to monetize that concept. Possibly to Marvelize it, too, and launch an ongoing setting for tie-ins and merch. I absolutely believe that it’s been a nonstarter. Perhaps that’s down to bowdlerization! Personally, I suspect Zahn was tapping into an underserved market which, today, is already satisfied.
Zahn was able to deliver a competent sequel trilogy to Star Wars fans who were hungry for just that and provide a framework for much of the rest of the post-ROTJ EU. That was never going to work with Disney because their plan for a sequel trilogy was the Sequel Trilogy. And while that wasn't the abject failure its detractors sometimes think, it underperformed and (perhaps more critically) failed to generate much enthusiasm or provide room for growth. Even people I know who like the sequels aren't particularly excited about them. Say what you will about the Prequels, they managed to hang a lot of stuff on that framework and the camp element makes the PT very memeable even if it isn't necessarily good.
On the other hand, Zahn is pretty close to the peak of the old EU. There were a lot of baaaaad Star Wars books that are mostly (justifiably) forgotten. I've noticed when people talk about the NJO, they tend to talk about a couple of high-point books like Traitor and not the chaff that fills out the series.
I think that this actually does mark it down as an abject failure. Look at the original star wars movies and both the massive cultural impact and the galaxy of commercially successful properties that came out of it - games, books, toys, etc. When you compare each member of the trilogy of trilogies on a broader scale it becomes immediately obvious that the sequel trilogy has been a huge failure. The individual films underperforming might not be an abject failure when compared to a new property, but when compared to their immediate predecessors the difference is starkly obvious. I can remember countless lines and moments from the original trilogy, but what new ideas and characters have the sequel trilogy produced which had anywhere near that impact?
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Fuck Zahn, with all due respect. Stackpole is what's missing. Warlord era world building was the real skeleton of the EU before NJO. And it's what missing in the Sequels where the backdrop is either nonexistent or makes no sense. Who the fuck decided Mon would just disband the Navy after a full on civil war? Who the fuck thought of operation cinder? Nothing that makes any sense could come out of this nonsensical universe.
Only Andor got this and way late, which is why it's the only decent part of Disneywars and has actual characters who actually do human things for human reasons instead of political statements and author pets.
Dunno, that mousy looking commie in the parka was extremely blatant and offputting.
Who? Space Ted Kaczynski? The whole show is about ways people end up as dissidents, and his sort of nerdy naive idealism is a very real thing, and it's challenged by the plot.
I got real Les Justes vives from him. There's an interesting thing going with his character which is sort of reversed in Saul Gerera's Anarchist cynicism.
If you're talking about Mon's lesbian cousin, I reserve judgement until S2 where she surely will get some more characterization before getting murdered by Cassian or something.
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I'd take Allston's ensemble approach in the XWing run over Stackpole's few special characters deeply tied to the meta plot approach. It works better in his other books though.
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