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Reboot the EU

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Who thinks it would be a good idea to reboot the entire EU? Just wipe the slate clean.

Let authors have fun with the material again without having to try and be bound by 10,000 previous projects. Let the world feel fresh and exciting again, not filled with tons of repeated refrences to the same concepts, terms, and hackneyed philosophies espoused in earlier books (Isn't "Fate of the Jedi" literally all about retracing the philisophical path Jacen Solo took over the two previous 19 novels? What happened to rescuing the princess and blowing up bad guys?)

Let them try and capture the spirit of the films, not the spirit of slightly better EU works from a decade before.

No more confusion about canon between the PT and the EU because it is obvious Lucas doesn't give a flying fig about EU canon. Let the new material have 12 hours of movies to be consistent with, and ignore everything else. No more decades long repercussion of soul sucking alien invaders, or 8 or 9 new Sith Organizations that seem to coexist. No weird plot twists to cover-up, retcon, or explain away inconsistencies or plotholes. Just new adventures set during and after the films.

I still read the EU, despite generally not liking it, since an average EU novel takes me an afternoon (I always skip most of the last third) and I love Star Wars. I just wish they didn't suck.

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It's a lot easier to unring the bell for the EU than it is to do the same for the PT.

The stories that always grabbed me from the EU were those that didn't incorporate these cliched, hacky elements:

1) Snapshot of the OT heroes enjoying life as a prelude for upcoming conflict

2) Distant villain plotting dastardly, galaxy-conquering scheme aimed squarely at our heroes - often at Han & Leia's kids

3) Previously mentioned scheme involves some sort of superweapon

4) A "Trilogy". (Sorry, rant in 3, 2, 1...go!)

THE GODDAMN TRILOGY STORIES - IF THOSE WEREN'T THE MOST OBVIOUS, DESPARATE LUNGES FOR SIMILARITY TO THE OT MOVIES, THEN I'VE NEVER FUCKING SEEN A DESPARATE LUNGE BEFORE! THE THRAWN TRILOGY, THE JEDI ACADEMY TRILOGY, THE BLACK FLEET TRILOGY, THE CORELLIAN TRILOGY, THE HAN SOLO TRILOGY, THE BOUNTY HUNTER WARS TRILOGY - JESUS H. MOYNIHAN, MUST EVERY STORY TAKE PLACE OVER THE SPAN OF THREE BOOKS??

Mind you, some of those trilogies had some good works in them - it's the principle I objected to.

5) The new force user that went unnoticed during the time of the Empire but is more powerful than Luke, Vader, Yoda, Obi-Wan and Palpatine combined.

The best of EU avoids that sort of thing.

Want to book yourself or a guest on THE VFP Show? PM me!

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It shouldn't be rebooted, but more stories should be written that are in the original spirit of the films. How about that bounty hunter on Ord Mantell?

VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader

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Well, in the old days (before Timothy Zahn's books) they didn't bother trying to keep the eu consistent. It wasn't meant to be one big consistent universe. It was just a whole lot of separate stories. Then they did the Thrawn trilogy and started taking the eu seriously, leading to our present situation. The eu doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

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The only thing that needs to be Booted is Lucas.  He no longer understands Star Wars if he ever did.

The EU was ruined because of the prequels.  If the authors of the EU could write their own better prequels or deny Lucas prequels existed as well as deny the special editions we would all be better off.

Besides the person who besides Troy Denning did the most damage to the EU Traviss no longer writes for star wars because dave filonis series crapped over her made up Mandalorian continuity in that crap clone wars cgi series.

It was her idea to kill Mara Jade.  Though her original idea was Luke, and she hates the Jedi based on some kind of real life hatred of religion or something or so i read, don't know if thats just fan bullshitting.  Her idea that Daala a war criminal becomes the chief of state. I am glad she was canned or voluntarily left, she can rape halo instead of star wars.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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Noooooo!  Leave my Halo alone!  It's all I have left.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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Don't worry she will never write for the real halo continuity only the novels.  And microsoft will never let her kill off Master Chief.  Maybe that annoying alien sidekick dude,lol.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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You must not be very current in Halo...

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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Never read the books.  Yeah i know Chief is supposed to dead at the end of III but he is not.  Supposedly if you get the good ending hes alive or something.  You need to collect all the skulls and beat the game on legendary.  Never did it myself so i don't care.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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captainsolo said:

It shouldn't be rebooted, but more stories should be written that are in the original spirit of the films. How about that bounty hunter on Ord Mantell?

 I think there are at least three versions of that story, including one radio drama and a comic.

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I agree that the EU needs a reboot. I mean, think about it-- in the 100 years following ROTJ, there are more catastrophic wars and bloodshed than the entire movie saga combined. Talk about an epic fail--- for 1000 years the Republic existed peacefully, and yet the New Republic / Galactic Alliance somehow managed to eff things up badly enough that we got the Yuzonn Vong War, the Second Galactic Civil War, the Palpatine clones, Darth Caedus and Kevin J Anderson (amongst many other writers of BS) all within 40 years ABY. The EU has turned into a soap opera of galactic proportions.

However, the silver lining to all this is that I have thought of a perfect escape clause from all this nonsense: Star Trek was able to successfully reboot by using time travel, so Star Wars could do the same thing, except in reverse. In Star Trek, the rebooted continuity is the result of Romulans traveling to the past and creating the new time line. In the Star Wars EU, the explanation could be that sith from the future have been using the force to travel through time and have been mucking things up in the post ROTJ period, causing war and destruction. A good Jedi Knight could travel back from the new Jedi Order from some time around 130 ABY during the second Sith war, and with the help of Luke Skywalker manages to create a new timeline and prevent all the dumb crap from the EU from ever happening.

The big question though, is what multi-media project would warrent such a large-scale house cleaning in the Star Wars EU? It can't be to just create new novels, or else it's only a matter of time before we end up in the same rut we were in in the first place. Personally, I would say a reboot would be ideal for a Star Wars TV series (or even a new trilogy of movies) that takes place after Return of the Jedi. Even if in this new work they just ignore the old post ROTJ continuity's crappiness, but they could make an expanded universe story that chronicles the time travel muckery that caused the original post-Trilogy fiction to be rebooted.

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I think timetravel is the last thing the Star Wars EU needs.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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It's either going to be a Star Trek XI/ Crisis of Infinite Earths-scale event that reverses the storyline, or it's going to be a straight retcon with no in-universe explanation or what cause the prior timeline to be undone. Multiple universes and time travel might be tired, but as a means of overhauling continuity there aren't really a lot of other options.

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I think if you look at the EU overcomplicated mess, the solution shouldn't be "how can we make this a whole lot more complicated? I know, let's add alternate timelines and time travel! That'll make it less obtuse to read!"

I say wipe it clean and salt the Earth.

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Lucas is pretty good at decanonizing stuff.

"This is not the canon you are looking for!"

That would probably be the best way of doing it.

Not that I'm convinced that it would make the EU any better.  I think it's as good as it's going to get.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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It could be a lot better, actually. I've already touched on some of my biggest grievances with it in its current state. If they don't want the EU to end up in the same rut it's already in though, they're going to have to tie the reboot in with a big multi-media project. The biggest option would be new movies, but that seems pretty unlikely at this point due to most of the actors probably not being interested. Easiest option would be a big video game, but I think that the happy medium in between would be a cartoon series. Basically they need something firm, tangible, and most importantly, mainstream that they can root the new EU in, instead of just saying "all those old books don't count anymore, and these new ones do." They're going to make new books anyway, so they might as well reboot with something bigger to make sure their efforts aren't in vain.

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Though I enjoyed the new Star Trek movie (I liked the Original Series and that was, well, the only Star Trek series I watched fully) the biggest mistake it had, IMO, was the Time Travel plotline. If it would be more of a straight reboot, without any alternate timeline shit, I would like it a lot more. Because a reboot doesn't mean "this is right, this is not", it means "this is old, this is new, and who knows maybe sometime there will be a second new, enjoy whatever you want".

Anyway, I think a SW reboot of any kind will come only in, like, years 40-50, no less than that. First, because the Prequel trilogy IS practically a reboot of the franchise itself, wherether you like it or not (and by the time of it's appearance, EU was a lot lesser mess than it is now), so the only time one could start over Star Wars is when Star Wars will start getting forgotten/too old.

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But I'm saying I like the EU a lot more than the prequels or the Clone Wars cartoon.  So, if they wipe out the current "meh quality" EU and replace it with "atrocious quality" EU... then that would be for the worse.

From what I've seen, 90% of the new stuff coming out of LucasFilm/Arts is worse than the bad stuff from the mid to late 90s.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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The EU passed into "atrocious quality" a long time ago. Over the last 10 years or it seems like it's been one bad storyline after another, and with all the popular characters they've killed off there's really not much left to do. Slowly but surely the EU is imploding from too much baggage and not enough support pillars, and so at this point an EU reboot seems like a pretty sure thing to me.

And I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I don't really understand how anyone could say that they find the Darth Caedus storyline preferable to the prequels. Or the Second Galactic Civil War. Or any of the stupid, half-assed rehashes of the movies that we've been subjected to for the last 10 years (and the 90's had their share of stinker books, too).

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The eu past about 1986 isn't worth paying much attention to anyway. Some of that later stuff is good, but it gets farther and farther away from the spirit of Star Wars. The Zahn books were a revisionist take and Dark Empire was bull and the rest of it followed on from there.

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Vaderisnothayden said:

The eu past about 1986 isn't worth paying much attention to anyway. Some of that later stuff is good, but it gets farther and farther away from the spirit of Star Wars. The Zahn books were a revisionist take and Dark Empire was bull and the rest of it followed on from there.

 I've always thought the Zahn books suffered from a couple major flaws. Not that they were revisionist, but that they neglected the Star Wars heroes.

Look at Thrawn. Cold, brilliant, a real threat. But Zahn clearly liked him more than he liked the heroes.  So on top of that, Thrawn is fairminded, egalitarian, and only brought down due to treachery over an atrocious crime he didn't commit.  If Thrawn had been a brilliant, cold, sadistic psycopath, then he would have been a great villain. Adding three or four more books of Thrawn worship later didn't help.

Han and Luke and company seem to be there so they can observe how fascinating, moral, and brilliant Thrawn, Jade, and Carde are.

Who takes out the villains? Mara Jade kills the clone of Luke, Jade kills Cboath, some Nogrhi kills Thrawn from behind while Thrawn is winning. I found that irksome.

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Tales/Infinities have been the highest-quality stories in recent years, I think. When there's no "canon" to weigh the stories down, the writers seem to have more fun.

Normally the heroes/villains authors come up with just aren't strong enough to stand up on their own for a full-length story (actually a reason why I like the cartoons usually - they can make cool-looking characters while focusing on a short, self-contained story).

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Krakatoa said:

Normally the heroes/villains authors come up with just aren't strong enough to stand up on their own for a full-length story (actually a reason why I like the cartoons usually - they can make cool-looking characters while focusing on a short, self-contained story).

 I think short, self-contained stories, would be the best way the EU could proceed. Not 19 novel epics that redefine the fictional universe. just adventures, that may connect, but each work should be mainly independent, with a climax all its own (you know... like the movies had!)