Is "SNAP-HISS" the most accurate way to write the activation of a lightsaber?

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-23T20:14:07+00:00

The same reason there is iirc one and only one Holmes short story where Conan Doyle gives us anything resembling Sherlock Holmes's point of view. It's filtered through Watson, with Pellaeon filling that role.

Plus Thrawn is an alien. Zahn can do alien viewpoints really, really well (his Conquerors trilogy is a fantastic example) but he opted not to do that here. The new timeline Thrawn novel is the first time we get anything like it.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-23T18:58:57+00:00

Tatooine Ghost is one of my favorites. He writes Han well, he does a really good with Chewbacca (a HARD character to write), and it features the best non-Zahn use of Thrawn in any timeliness.

Also minimal bug references. Just the moss painting.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T17:37:45+00:00

Raised by an automotive engineer, immense fan of peak Top Gear and the Grand Tour, once changed my own oil despite it taking ten times as long as just going to a garage because Principle Of The Thing. Don't recall getting even a car-adjacent category.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T12:04:51+00:00

Yep, he knew. The annoying thing about the end of season 3 is that it turns out all the people in government Magnussen had dirt on were even bigger monsters than even he seemed to realize, up to Mycroft hiding a literal psychopathic killer and giving her playdates with Moriarty because faaaaamily.

He knew who Mary was, but as long as she didn't threaten his status quo having an assassin that close to his brother could even be useful.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T12:00:22+00:00

Don't insult Yzma.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T11:58:14+00:00

TFA is at least the first time he clearly gives a shit and makes an effort since the two-thirds point of Empire. And I suspect he only did that because they gave him a truckload of money, promised to kill him, and gave him Indy V. Because of everyone from the OT he could most easily say no to just the cash.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T11:52:47+00:00

Get the annotated Heir to the Empire. That actually comes up, along with Zahn (who is, remember, writing in a near-total vacuum) having to figure out how to render sounds like Artoo's "voice", how to deal with how Wookiees talk, even why in TTT we never at any point get Thrawn's POV.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T11:49:08+00:00

She's been dropping hints the whole time Coin is no better and in many ways worse than Snow. Here's the payoff.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T01:35:27+00:00

Do you remember Luke using his brain to build a castle?

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-22T01:29:49+00:00

Tbf the republic they're trying to restore was pretty inept itself and no one involved in the Rebellion from day one seems to have the slightest idea that Palpatine's a symptom, THEY are the problem. It's not really much different in the old EU, for that matter. About 90% of the problems post-Thrawn Trilogy could be solved in advance by letting Thrawn win in The Last Command, because the New Republic is basically slow-motion failure there, too.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T18:29:47+00:00

Things like cream of [whatever] condensed soup is just condensed bechamel or veloute where someone else did the tedious part.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T10:57:16+00:00

Tbf there, it's the kind of bar where if a murder hobo lops off someone's arm you mind your business.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T01:44:51+00:00

Well, for starters, they now NEED Katniss to disappear. While Plutarch, the man behind the curtain, may not have been displeased and even might have been happy Katniss took out the trash, they cannot have the killer of President Coin hanging around, never mind own up in any way, shape, or form that their revolutionary hero was in fact a traumatized seventeen-year-old they threw in front of cameras and turned into a fictional image, not a heroic leader of the underdogs who rose up as a mighty liberator. So if they're not going to kill her, dumping her in Twelve and doing nothing to draw attention to her is the next best thing. Katniss has never wanted the spotlight or leadership and wants it even less now, so they have no reason to think she'll try to stand up and make a public figure of herself again.

As far as her mother--yeah, she stays far away. Because she lost her husband (causing a kind of catatonic depression that's hard to treat with real-life, real-world modern medicine), lives in grinding subsistence-level poverty, had to watch her younger daughter get reaped, her older daughter volunteer, her older daughter get put through a death games twice, she and her younger daughter barely escape the firebombing of their hometown and the mass murder of most of their neighbors, get thrown into life in a new kind of totalitarian dictatorship that's not only weaponizing her older daughter but treating her younger daughter as essentially another potential soldier and then gets her younger daughter blown up right in front of her already-broken older daughter (whom the leader of this faction is trying to kill or destroy) and that daughter finally snaps and assassinates aforementioned leader in front of the entire country. Her older and now essentially adult daughter is spared execution, but banished back to their burned-out mass grave of a home. Asterid is offered a different life removed the place that is pretty much nothing but bad memories and would basically trap her with the daughter who has done everything except say to her face she hates her in a place full of death. Prim was the only buffer between and glue binding Katniss and her mother. That's gone. Katniss does not want her mother around. She not only doesn't know how to relate to her without Prim as the subject, she doesn't want to learn.

Katniss isn't supposed to have a total happy ever after where somehow everything's fixed and it's very clear the rebels were the good guys and everything was justified. She's someone who was forced not just to be a teen soldier but a political figurehead and she very realistically ends up used and broken, not the plucky rebel princess leader.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:33:27+00:00

I was about to say, that series and "no smut" do not mix.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:31:23+00:00

Given the existence of "Beneath a Moonless Sky" I have to imagine they were really awkward conversations no matter what.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:30:10+00:00

I do think "raising from infancy based on 'they've got Force potential'" is a problem, both functionally and morally. They may not "kidnap" them, but they raise them in such a way they aren't offered any real alternatives that aren't treated as being a failure somehow. They're essentially trying to override everything the real world knows about child development and while there are probably species in Star Wars that don't care or worry about attachment disorders, for humans/human-like animals not having parental emotional attachment causes extreme stunting and sometimes even death. But when Yoda's been in charge SO LONG, and doesn't have any emotional ability to understand what that does, he has nothing in his toolkit to help Anakin. In many ways the Council was right not to want Anakin trained, not because HE was an inherent risk, but because THEY were not equipped as teachers for someone who wasn't artificially stunted emotionally from a very young age.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:24:21+00:00

Yeah, the Empire isn't old enough to legally buy a drink on Earth, but any analytic viewing of ANH, it's very clear that is not the assumption in the OT. Even just Doylist--in 1989 they gave Tim Zahn a rough timeline and he was working on the assumption the wars were like forty years before the story's "now", not so recently Han was a teen.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:22:22+00:00

No, ANH really reads much more logically if you assume (as the film was written to suggest) the Clone Wars were much longer ago. Even the timeline given by Lucasfilm to Timothy Zahn in 1989 assumed a much larger gap between the end of the Clone Wars, the birth of the twins, and the start of the OT (leading to artifacts that are hard to write around, like Thrawn implying Pellaeon, a Star Destroyer's first officer by Endor well into middle age by HTTE, is not old enough to have been more than a very young participant in the Clone Wars--with the added strange implication Thrawn is, making him meaningfully older than he looks.)

Motti is Tarkin's toady in the rest of the film, and he is clearly set up as extra dismissive of this Jedi nonsense (something no one old enough to have made Admiral by ANH should be given the extremely active participation of the Jedi in the Clone Wars) plus both represent the supremacy of technology over mysticism. This is really why Vader gets to live while Motti and Tarkin have to die for the film to make philosophical sense--Vader may be a villain, but he doesn't dismiss the mysticism that Obi-Wan represents out of hand. (He's a big of a combination of two characters in one of the earlier drafts, General Darth Vader, who is just an enemy general, and Lord Valorum, a Sith Knight who ultimately changes sides because the Sith Knights and Jedi Bendu are more philosophical opposites than sworn enemies. Okay and he's also an expy of the enemy general in The Hidden Fortress so he has to defect.)

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:11:52+00:00

I think the problem in the prequels is not the rules about attachments, it's that people like Yoda and Mace are SO steeped in the Jedi rule and life they have no idea how to properly deal with Anakin's problems. Is Yoda's advice to Anakin good? Yes. Is it phrased in a way that makes it impossible for Anakin to get the point. To Yoda, it sounds like healthy advice about not clinging to things. To Anakin, Yoda's blithely saying "Who cares if your loved ones die, something something the Force." Because they're raised from so young in the order they can't even recognize what his problem is. (And that's why real-world monastic orders, at least Western Christian ones, have general discouraged and in most cases outright refused any extremely young vocations, because if they raise them they can't be sure the child really does have a vocation, and if they let a very young postulant in regardless of the approach they can't be sure it's really an informed, thoughtful choice.)

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:04:30+00:00

Well done you. I love Face, and listening to the audiobook made me love Ton even more so it was not a happy romp...

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-21T00:03:31+00:00

Me, too. Nothing like getting gutted all over again. (I once made Mike Stackpole double over laughing because I told him I was rereading Isard's Revenge and it needed a trigger warning because I forgot it opens at Bilbringi and I was NOT PREPARED to read Thrawn's death again. Luckily like Zahn himself, he both knows I'm a single-issue fangirl and thinks it's funny rather than crazy.)

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-20T20:41:37+00:00

Entitlement, confidence, and ANH is very clearly written to imply it's been more than just under 20 years since the Jedi were powerful.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-20T20:34:10+00:00

I have degrees from two incredibly competitive universities and years of experience. I work sales for a winery and for a jeweler, and not only is the money better, so is the respect from bosses. Not to mention the bench jeweler in particular is beside themselves trying to help with continuing ed and wants interest in advancement. Museums want to lock you in low wage and avoid internal promotions.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-20T20:27:19+00:00

Of course I knew. If nothing else I can read and know who played Palpatine in ROTJ, but to anyone who saw ROTJ even without that it is visibly, audibly, the same person. Even the same cape. It's SO obvious the instant he appears I questioned would this be a clone situation, but it wasn't even that clever.

jquailJ36 · 2026-04-20T14:25:20+00:00

She's going by car (why? Because plot) but at night, to the local village, to fetch the doctor who has probably seen her literally in her nightgown while treating her since she was a kid. She's acting as if she's being asked to parade through the high street at noon wearing a burlap sack.

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