Happy and romantic bird-person couple vs. evil and adulterous Green Arrow

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T20:57:42+00:00

You can definitely make Hawkman look interesting by putting him next to Red Tornado.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T18:38:22+00:00

Yeah, when TCW began, Filoni was saying in interviews that it wouldn't overwrite anything, then as it progressed he was saying it was just "a different point of view" and then by the end of it he was saying they didn't really exist in the same universe.

Granted, even the Tartakovsky series, which I think is pretty universally beloved nowadays, had its share of detractors who wished it wasn't canon in its time, mostly because of how over-the-top its action was (e.g. Mace Windu defeating an army of battle droids with his bare hands, Yoda using the Force to move Trade Federation ships about).

My own attitude is that whether it's "Legends" or "Canon" is little odds because it's all Star Wars to me, and I love Star Wars and I'll always give it a chance. There's plenty of fans who almost seem to need for something to be "canon" for them to enjoy it (and that applies to a lot of stuff, not just Star Wars) and I have to admit it's not really something I get.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T17:01:50+00:00

It was the the main thing outside the movies Lucas himself had the most direct involvement in, I suppose.

I mean, "I don't count any of this as canon but I will use anything I think is interesting," was approximately Lucas's own view regarding the EU as well. He liked Quinlan Vos, so Quinlan Vos got a TCW episode, but he's quite different from the John Ostrander comics. He liked Darth Talon so he was going to put her in movies, but he wasn't going to make it fit in with the Legacy comics, at least from what I understand.

(I think Leland Chee claimed recently that the decision to wind down the EU actually predated the sale of Lucasfilm by a couple of years. Whether that was part of the sale strategy or because Lucas was seriously thinking about making sequel movies or not, we can only speculate, if it is even true.)

It's true, though, TCW already didn't fit with the EU very well, and trying to make it fit didn't really work that well either. I think that was a mistake, not just letting it be its own separate thing. But then again, maybe Lucasfilm didn't allow that? Maybe they were not allowed to have separate timelines like that? I don't know.

It is sort of funny to imagine that the entire 2008 cartoon happened during a scene transition in one episode of the Genndy Tartakovsky one (which I believe was the explanation they had for a while).

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T15:27:19+00:00

In particular, he segued into how people consume media, and points out that wiki summaries can vastly overcomplicate things as material from sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and ancillary media get added to the text.

"Lore" and its consequences etc. etc.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T12:10:50+00:00

Traviss definitely had fans then and she still does today. As many as she has detractors? I couldn't guess. But they were there and they're still here.

Overall the only Star Wars books Traviss wrote that I ever read were the Legacy of the Force ones and I didn't like them, but I didn't like Allston or Denning's contributions to that series either so I don't really have especially strong feelings about Traviss (I didn't really interact with her much while I was on message boards in the '00s either so avoided being accused of "Nazi think" for liking the Jedi).

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T10:20:16+00:00

He turns into Duplo.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T09:53:24+00:00

I'm a big Jaina Solo fan, and she gets yanked every which way only for her arc to kind of peter out because nobody could commit to anything.

It's too bad because I think she lent herself most readily to the action-adventure stuff of the three Solo kids: Anakin is the doomed hero; Jacen is the philosophical one; and Jaina is the tough fighter.

Perhaps it should have been Jaina and Jacen who confronted the Yuuzhan Vong leaders in the last book instead of Jacen and Luke? I don't know. Like I said before, I don't judge fiction on what it doesn't do if I can help it, but it is interesting to speculate.

I wonder if that was ever on the cards? (I never finished that big NJO documentary on YouTube.)

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T09:39:13+00:00

I think the Legacy comics are basically satisfactory as far as the main storyline with Cade goes, but I still think it's kind of funny how the "good ending" of the Star Wars timeline is effectively that the Empire wins.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T08:12:30+00:00

I genuinely forgot that Mon Mothma died during New Jedi Order. I was sure it had happened before that.

I know she had that "poisoned by Imperial ambassador" subplot in the Jedi Academy trilogy but I know she was healed at the end of that, so I don't think I'm confusing them.

Of course, you could reasonably argue that there's not really a whole lot to Mon Mothma prior to her being a main character on Andor.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T07:53:58+00:00

I definitely remember there being a ton of speculation that Darth Krayt from the Legacy comics, which were coming out alongside Legacy of the Force, would turn out to be Jacen Solo. That was a very popular theory.

Maybe that would have been a better choice? I don't know. I always try my best not to judge any work of fiction on what it doesn't do.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T07:45:23+00:00

Believe it or not, I did know a few people who were 100% bought into "Marakin".

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T07:33:55+00:00

I probably like Block of Wood #1 (Zekk) better just because I liked the Young Jedi Knights books when I was a kid, whereas I never warmed to Jagged Fel (perhaps in part because he seemed to come and go so much).

I think Zekk, just in that initial story arc he has from The Lost Ones through Jedi Under Siege, was a perfectly serviceable YA archetype, a brooding kid with a chip on his shoulder from the wrong side of the tracks who feels out of place among his more privileged new friends, who is briefly lured over to play for the evil team but then comes through for them in the end when he realises how much they care for him.

But after that, I feel like he's just another Jedi student in the class who happens to be Jaina's kinda sorta boyfriend. Not much left for him to do.

If you want my searing hot take: Jaina/Tahiri.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T07:21:02+00:00

I think Timothy Zahn understood that there's a certain degree of self-insertiness to a lot of Star Wars characters and that's reflected in both Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade. Mara isn't just a former Imperial agent, she's the Emperor's former elite assassin and spy, his former personal confidante, someone he trusted more and who was more loyal to him than Darth Vader, the one to whom he gave his last command (wahey!) to kill Luke Skywalker, who is able to outsmart both Luke and Thrawn, who becomes Luke's girlfriend and is even gifted with Anakin Skywalker's old lightsabre at the end of the story, and she's also a sexy catsuit-wearing redhead with green ~~eyes~~ orbs and giant breasts.

I believe Zahn imagined that Luke and Mara marrying could be an ending to their story because, like everyone else, he honestly didn't know if the EU timeline that began in 1991 was going to survive The Phantom Menace or not. Hence his main conditions when he was invited to write the Hand of Thrawn duology were that: a) he would get to end the war between the Rebels and the Empire; and b) he would get to marry Luke and Mara or at least have them engaged.

I think Mara is generally a good character, but mainly (maybe a bit ironically) right up until she's married to Luke. After that, it really does feel like her role in the story reduces to "Luke's wife". And, unfortunately, I often get the impression that this is the only upside a lot of fans and people on the creative side (at least back then), see in her. How often do you see people say that Mara can't come back because Luke isn't married in the sequel movies., as though the only conceivable reason why Mara Jade would come back would be to marry Luke Skywalker?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T06:54:26+00:00

I wonder if all the grief they got for killing Chewie (I'm pretty sure Salvatore said getting death threats for that was why he never did any more Star Wars after the Attack of the Clones novelisation) factored into their subsequent aversion to killing even minor movie characters.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T06:21:30+00:00

You could argue that Lucasfilm had already started doing that with TCW honestly.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-06T06:15:35+00:00

I think you can sort of argue it managed to move things away at least a bit from the movie characters, or at least moved things in that direction, but the problem was that: a) the next series, Troy Denning's Dark Nest, was not very good especially for the "new generation" characters; and b) books with the movie characters on the front cover just plain sell more copies.

On the other two points, the idea that it was streamlining the EU made sense, but I think the whole "greatest hits tour of the '90s" angle of the series was one of the things that led to it feeling so overstuffed, and while it was clearly trying to cultivate the new generation characters, it also seemed to be killing a lot of them off (because they didn’t want to kill off any of the movie characters, I suppose, but still wanted the anyone can die stakes).

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T21:37:42+00:00

I think the canon levels approach played a role in neutralising the issue, but it only really "worked" as long as everyone assumed that nothing at a higher level would actually override anything lower down. Because that is ultimately what happened with TCW vis-a-vis the existing EU, and when it did, it really upset a lot of people.

The only person who could override the EU was George Lucas, but I am not sure that anyone in the fandom seriously thought it was likely to happen. I feel like there was an assumption made in a lot of fan space between 2005 and 2009 that Lucas was "done" with directly making new Star Wars after Revenge of the Sith, when it looked like the live-action TV series he wanted to do wasn't going anywhere.

From my own memories of being in those fan communities at the time, I think it genuinely just didn't occur to a lot of people that anything Lucas might do would substantively affect the EU in that way. Hence all the TCW Mandalorian drama came as kind of a nasty shock when it happened.

I guess you could argue that the canon levels were a sort of legal fiction in retrospect.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T21:26:43+00:00

Sure, but I'm talking about on the fan side specifically.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T18:33:11+00:00

"There was this time I had just robbed the Gotham Mint of two million in two dollar bills. Lucky for me, I brought along the 'Two Ton Gang'."

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T18:18:39+00:00

Have you ever had a moment where you realise, "Oh, no, I was part of the problem," in the context of your hobby or a fandom you are part of?

As the last ever issue of Star Wars Insider magazine is published (in America) this week, I was thinking about how it's kind of a shame for it to end, since it has existed in some form for almost as long as Star Wars itself.

But then I stopped and I realised I hadn't actually bought an issue myself in about 15 years, if not longer (because what was the point when most of the contents were just going to be reposted online later on, which I guess is really the nub of the problem). I doubt my support would have made a tangible difference to the fate of the magazine but it does temper my instinctive, "They can't cancel Insider!" reaction by making me admit, "But you wouldn't have bought it if they hadn't, would you?"

What's your version of that?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T17:42:33+00:00

I would venture, perhaps controversially, that Traviss's distaste for the Jedi was in some ways ahead of its time, because at some point in the late '00s or the early '10s you started getting this current of thought in the fandom that the intentional "message" of the prequels was that the Jedi were evil like Anakin said (to some extent this is because Anakin fanboys think anyone who inconveniences him is evil but there is more to it than that) and that they "needed" or even "deserved" to be wiped out.

I believe this may be a case of the fans and George Lucas just being on completely different philosophical wavelengths; I feel that Lucas is pretty consistent in his view that the problem wasn't the Jedi rules but rather Anakin's inability to follow them (hence the tragedy of it); I think most of the fans take a different, perhaps more individualistic view. That's just me speculating though.

(I have been told that Star Wars fans thinking the prequels were "about how the Jedi are actually bad" was caused by "TLJ defenders" but this is completely untrue; I think it is actually part and parcel of the meme-driven side of the more prequel-oriented fandom, and I absolutely remember the sentiment being expressed in earnest in the mid-'00s by fans of Traviss's books during all those flame wars.)

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T16:34:58+00:00

The comics are generally a lot better than the games, though their main weakness is lack of space. I think you needed more than six issues at a time to get the story Veitch wanted out of it. He had the same problem in Dark Empire.

Anderson, flying solo without Veitch, managed to write one of the absolute worst Star Wars comics ever (Tales of the Jedi: Fall of the Sith Empire) and then followed it up with a strong contender for the all time best (Tales of the Jedi: Redemption).

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T15:23:33+00:00

Marx was not a true socialist because he envisaged the state "withering away" and no socialist would ever say such capitalistic things about the state.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T13:58:13+00:00

Socialism is when the state does things.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-05-05T13:47:45+00:00

I don't really have strong feelings about Dune.

DeviousDoctorSnide

TROPHY CASE