fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2589 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2589 ⌋

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I was a *huge* Star Wars EU fan for quite a while (pretty much until NJO came along and just kept getting darker. Grrrr.), but I managed to not read much of the X-wing series, or any of the pre-Original Trilogy fiction.

However! I would highly recommend anything by Zahn. The Thrawn Trilogy, Hand of Thrawn Duology, and Survivor's Quest are fairly Skywalker-focused, but they're only at most a couple of plotlines out of 4 or 5. And he writes them really, really well. Seriously, I don't much care for Luke even in the movies, but Zahn's Luke is a really fun, interesting character. And his OCs are awesome.

But if you want non-Skywalker stuff, he also wrote Allegance, which mostly focuses on Mara Jade and her adventures during Empire Strikes Back, although there's some subplot stuff with Luke and Han, and Outbound Flight, which takes place around the prequels, and mostly follows Thrawn as an Imperial officer dealing with a Jedi expedition. I haven't read Outbound flight, but it mostly deals with non-Jedi OCs outside of the standard Star Wars settings, so that might be more to your taste.

Thank you, anon! What's NJO? I don't know much about the expanded universe.

New Jedi Order: start of a new 'phase' of the series, with a nasty alien species trying to takeover the galaxy and pretty much succeeding. In practice it became less space opera and more 'grim and gritty'. There are bits I love but overall it is just too dark for me personally and I don't like the changes to the characters. Also it builds a lot on the other EU stuff so you probably would be confused to start there. :) I think NJO is a matter of taste.

SA

So... is it kinda similar to what happened with comics in the 90s? That kind of "grim n gritty"?

That's a decent comparison. Everything just got kinda brutal and hopeless.

Nayrt but NJO = "New Jedi Order" which is a series set much later than the movies; it focuses a lot on (spoilers probably)

Han and Leia's teenage children. It's pretty grimdark and a lot of people, myself included, have issues with parts of it, though there were some very good and well-written books in it (many different authors wrote different books within the series) and a lot of the things they came up with were pretty interesting and innovative.

AYRT

Sorry, forgot to un-acronym. Which is particularly dumb when introducing a new subject. Apologies!

It stands for New Jedi Order, a kind of sea change event in how the EU books were written. Prior to that point, pretty much all of the books were stand-alones or trilogies by a single author, solved in the set of books. New Jedi Order was a massive (like, 20-something books? wookiepedia would know) event series, taking place over years of in-universe time, with a bunch of different authors involved. Each author wrote one or two books in sequence. It also took a much more "dark and gritty" tone than the rest of the Star Wars universe up to that point, which was where it lost me. Too much darkness, not enough heroes prevailing for me. Plus, the different authors were occasionally *really obvious* as to which characters they liked or disliked, so a lot of the characters were really inconsistent in motivation and characterization. Plus, ship wars are even worse when the authors are actually making canon (Looking at you, everyone writing the Jaina Solo storylines.)

It's not all bad, I actually really like the concept of the villains, and some of the new characters and short-term plots were really fun and interesting. But the overall "event" was kind of a mess, and not at all what I want out of a Star Wars story.

Sorry if that's a bit more than you're looking for, I still have Thoughts and Feelings about Star Wars, obviously.

SA

The massive continuity is a turn-off for me, I prefer stand-alone novels.

Darkness is fine, but there's a limit, because Star Wars is inherently a hopeful series. Authors favoring particular character is also tacky, so I think I'll give that series a miss!

(sorry that should be AYRT I can't acronym)

[ SECRET POST #2589 ]

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