A Rant on the Post-RotJ EU

[owl]

living_force and padawanroo asked for this one.
snarkel and any other EU-lovers, I advise you not to read this :)


On the face of it, books about SW seem like a great idea. We loved the films, we want more Star wars, LFL are publishing more Star Wars, yay!
Unfortunately, it didn't work like that. I had been told that Zahn's trilogy was the best, so I started with that. Page one introduced Grand Admiral Thrawn, by having an Imperial officer muse on how much better the battle of Endor would have gone if Thrawn had been in charge. Oh, and he also has blue-black hair, blue skin and red eyes. Which would make him an alien, but in spite of the Emperor's ever-so-evil anti-alien bias, he made him a Grand admiral because he was SPESHUL. I wasn't as adept at spotting Mary Sues then as I am now, but even so I was bored and wished Zahn would hurry up and write about the characters I was really interested in.
Oh dear.
A lot of people don't write good Luke. They remove all his character and make him into Jedi automaton, or they make him a whiny wuss. It isn't just confined to the pro (or 'paid fanfic') writers. Zahn wasn't outstanding in that way.
There was Leia, who seemed to have no Vader issues any more, cheerfully running around with Noggi Hnogri Noghiri and exploiting her father's identity without even a hint of unease. There could be lots of good stuff in the concept of Leia's life being spared because of her hated heritage, but it was all thrown away.

Let's not forget Zahn's other Mary Sue, Talon Karrde, with his niftily named ship and his somehow non evil smuggling and his intelligence network--but he's nowhere near as pervasive as that other creation of Zahn's, Mara Jade. she's like the patron saint of the post-RotJ EU. She gets everywhere: the Skywalker family, the Jedi, the Imperials, the underworld, it's a wonder she's not in Rogue Squadron. She rarely makes an appearance without the adjective 'red-gold' being used somewhere. She didn't erupt into full-blown Mary Sue-ish till VotF, when she started ticking Luke off for all the mistakes he had made, while nobody mentioned her misdoings. Then she married Luke after the famous three-second courtship. Perhaps he was constrained by the small number of women in SW. Anyone less like his 'mother' Beru Lars is hard to imagine, and Leia is always nice to him, whatever she may be to Han.

He also invented the oh-so-convenient Force-kryptonite, the furry lizards with the unpronouncable name. Cop-out. It's much more interesting to give Luke problems that he can't handle with his Jedi powers, rather than simply depriving him of them and reducing him to a normal person again.

Moving on to the rest of the EU. There was the Han Solo Trilogy (Crispin's, not Daley's, which was actually good). Another red-gold Mary Sue. We wanted to read about Han, not an OC who takes up almost as much book space, and has even Winter thinking how wonderful she is.

Then there were the books featuring the Solo children. How many times were they kidnapped? You would think Han and Leia would have got some sort of security after the first time or two.

The Courtship of Princess Leia. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The only way to explain this book is to assume that all the characters had been replaced by pod people. Leia seriously considering dumping Han for a Fabio lookalike tied to his mother's apron-strings? Luke solemnly advising her to do so. Han shooting Leia and shutting her in a smuggling compartment where she might have suffocated? The ridiculously overdone Force powers? The two, no less, matridominant, mantis-like societies?

Then there was Crystal Star. The writing skills of a Mills and Boon (drugstore) novel combined with the most improbable plot (Waru the Borg Blog, anyone?) and the most precocious 5-year-olds EVAH.

The main problem with the EU is the continEUity imposed on it, which means that every new author is stuck with the mistakes and the pet OCs of all the authors before him. and then adds a few of his own. It's like having to accompodate all of fanon into your fic. There is no overall plan and direction to it, and it ends up being inconsistent both with itself and with te films, especially as regards characterisation.

Once they decided that they should publish a long series of books with an overall story arc, written by a committee of authors to avoid inconsistencies.

We got the New Jedi Order. With aliens who were somehow disconnected from the Force, mass destruction of the GFFA, death of characters canon and EU, disorganisation and more inconsistencies.
They killed off Chewie, comparing him to 'the family dog'. *weeps* None of the EU authors ever liked Chewie or wrote him well apart from Troy Denning. All it takes is to write him from the veiwpoint of Han, who understands what he says. He's an interesting study in alien psychology, totally wasted to turn him into Han's furry, ambulatory second gun. Cop-out, again.

The charcters in the NJO were all reset to their original (and I mean, ANH) types. so Han's a responsibility-dodging scoundrel, Leia's a workaholic icewoman and Mara's a hard-hearted...ahem. No notice was taken of any character development in subsequent books or films. Then, within the series, you get characterisation flip-flops as differnet authors take over. One book Luke's naive farmboy type, the next he's omniscient Jedi Master without flaws, Mara goes from mushy mummy to macho warrior woman. The young Solos develop entirely new personalities to the earlier EU.

Come on, does everything in the GFFA have to happen to Luke, Han, Leia and friends? How many adventures have they had now, 162? Give the poor things some peace. That's one reason why the X-wing books are among the few bits of EU I'll read.

What I would do to 'fix' the EU: Throw it all out and start again. With the new light of the PT, we can have more accurate books and new areas to explore. Don't have one huge story, rather a more fanon-like linking of stories, with alternative happenings and no preeminent canon. And talking of that, don't try to make out that the books have the same or better canon authority as the films.



*uses appropraiate snarky!Luke icon*

Comments

[leeflower.livejournal.com]

I actually don't hate ALL of EU.

NJO, yes. NJO can die a slow, painful death by sarlaac digestion. NJO makes the Forgotten Realms novels look like The Lord of the Rings.

My primary issue, actually, is the forced continuity. These books are essentially comic books without pictures, and when a new author comes into a comic book melieu and decided zie doesn't like what hir predecessors have done, zie puts a different word in the title and ignores older 'cannon' at hir leisure. This is what Star Wars EU ought to be. It would be much the better for it.

...oh, and the shmeerps (made-up words for things that already have english words). The wrist chronometers and 'refreshment units' can go keep NJO company in the Sarlaac pit, because any good scifi author will tell you not to throw around buzzwords unless you're indicating something for which there is no english word, and besides that, they sound dumb.

[foodsthatcan.livejournal.com]

any good scifi author will tell you not to throw around buzzwords unless you're indicating something for which there is no english word, and besides that, they sound dumb.

I have a major knee-jerk hate reaction to any sci-fi that throws around shmeerps (I've never heard that term before, but I love it!). It's distracting and pretentious, and did I mention I hate them? ;)

[leeflower.livejournal.com]

it is exactly that: distracting and pretentious.

James Blish coined the term Shmeerp.

Lightsaber, Jedi, Muja Fruit, et al aren't Shmeerps because they are actually different from swords, samurai, pasionfruit, etc. But if it looks like a watch and ticks like a watch, in the name of all things holy, don't call it a wrist chronometer.

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

Shmeerp has been hereby added to my vocabulary ;).

I'll put some commonly-used terms in the SW lit in my fan fic ("chronometer") but it used to drive me NUTS to see people use "shmeerps" for every damn thing in their stories. There was one fan fic author who couldn't call dinner "dinner." It had to be "evenmeal." Couples never went on honeymoons, they went on "festas." Luke never put salt on his food, he put "tsal" or something like that. This was in all of her fan fics and once when she tried to edit one of my stories, she tried to get me to use a shmeerp instead of an "Earth" term. I refused.

[owl]

Actually, in a fic I once used 'vanity compact' and 'lipstick' instead of shmeerps, and lots of my readers complained that I had broken the 4th wall and they felt like they were in a pharmacy.

[leeflower.livejournal.com]

well it's a fine line. They clearly have lipstick and makeup in the GFFA (unless we're to believe that Leia and Mon Mothma are naturally colored that way, which would be creepy), and since things are being translated into English anyway, I wouldn't have a problem with words like vanity compact or make-up. Lipstick is a little trickier because it's sort of like saying kleenex-- it's not the actual name of the product, but a slang term associated with it. Lip color, on the other hand, would have flown right under my radar.

Basically what it comes down to is that if you're relying on foreign-sounding words to make your setting seem alien, it's going to backfire.