How does the Disney EU hold up

[Darth Yan]

http://thegoodthebadtheinsulting.blogsp ... ra-of.html

Honestly I think SOME of the points had merits. For all it's flaws the old EU explored other eras (the distant past for instance, many years later). The OT did feel a lot like it tread old ground a little too much. And some of the things the old eu got criticized for WERE in fact in the new EU (the Bendu's godlike powers for instance, the B-Wings being absurdly powerful, an overly large focus on Jedi). On the other hand I disagree about Kylo. His whole point is that he wants to be like Vader but really can't.

[Adam Reynolds]

I have said much of this before as well. Clone Wars alone had committed nearly every sin of the old EU and the prequels on its own, and it was generally better than Rebels is now. One thing I think is missed about the novel sales is that with the current films coming out one a year, only hardcore fans need anything more than this. Star Wars books have been little more than a stopgap for most people anyway.

Fans of the old EU also tend to forget just how bad many of its stories were. The Yuzhan Vong are an abomination to the name Star Wars. Even when occasionally well executed the core concept was so horrible it could not be redeemed.

Having said that, I am also feeling much the same thing lately. I am not likely to bother with anything from the new continuity other than the films, and if The Last Jedi doesn't address some of the problems with TFA I might be done with those too. The direction of the sequel trilogy in the context of the OT is less than ideal. While I am generally liking the trailers at this point more than the movies, The Last Jedi trailer did very little for me. The trailer for Battlefront 2 had more of an impact, but I doubt the final game will be all that good.

Though maybe it is just me. I have become rather disillusioned as to the direction of most current franchises that I would consider myself a fan of. Mass Effect and Star Wars are probably my two favorites overall and I am only enjoying them to the extent that I am playing with setting rewrites for the purpose of tabletop RPGs set in each.

[Thanas]

The only good thing out of the new EU was the Thrawn novel and even that pales to Heir to the Empire.

Rebels is just minimalism en masse and somehow manages to be even more minimalistic than clone wars.

[The Romulan Republic]

I don't really count The Clone Wars or Rebels as "EU"- More of a grey area between film level and the rest of the EU. But then, its my understanding that its pretty much all equally considered canon under the new management.

I don't really care too much about "minimalism" either. Telling a good story is more important than how many men/ships/guns/planets are involved. There's a point where it feels too constrained, or just becomes ridiculous, but that's a pretty high bar for me.

I haven't read much of the new EU (or the old EU, come to that- a lot of my knowledge of it was second-hand), but my perception is pretty much "Meet the new EU, same as the old EU". Some good, some bad, far too much for a more casual fan such as myself to really keep track of, and I can't be arsed to try.

If it makes it in the films (or to a lesser extent the animated series), I give a shit about it. Otherwise, I largely don't, unless a particular work happens to catch my eye.

[Darth Yan]

One thing Kotor and even the rather cheesy tales of the jedi did. They at least tried to explore an untapped era. That was what the EU SHOULD have been doing. Taking an unexplored era of the universe and fleshing it out

I actually rather liked the Vong arc. Traitor, Destiny's Way and Unifying Force are sublime and easily among the best EU work put out. Unifying Force was also a good passing the torch moment (which later writers fucked up).

[The Romulan Republic]

KotOR is definitely one of the highlights of the old EU, and one of the few specific things I'm rather sorry to lose from the old canon.

[RogueIce]

I'll say what I always say when people try to compare the two: the old EU had a 23 year run. If you want to compare Disney's efforts, come talk to me in 2037.

[Batman]

The old EU had it's highlights, but it also had lots and lots of trash. Did we seriously need a background story for every single character that was onscreen in the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence?

[Adam Reynolds]

I'll say what I always say when people try to compare the two: the old EU had a 23 year run. If you want to compare Disney's efforts, come talk to me in 2037.

That works both ways though. The old EU also had more time to screw things up, as it so often did. The fact that the new EU has made so many of the same mistakes in a much shorter time period is hardly something to be said in its favor.

The old EU had it's highlights, but it also had lots and lots of trash. Did we seriously need a background story for every single character that was onscreen in the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence?

I had forgotten that. I especially love the stormtrooper who recognized the weakness of the AT-AT to snowspeeders and was reassigned to the stormtroopers on Tatooine as punishment, eventually shooting his commanding officer in the back to save Han. At least that one wasn't as bad as IG-88's Death Star II.

There is also the trading card game that gives the ice cream machine guy escaping from Cloud City a backstory that he was a Rebel agent named Willrow Hood. Having just looked this up on Wookiepedia, I was surprised to see that this backstory is actually back in the new canon, which ironically serves to further underscore my point that the new EU is just as bad as the old in a much shorter timeframe.

[Abacus]

My biggest riff with the new canon is the fact that they created the bio-chips inside the clones' heads. I feel like they did that because they wanted to kid-dumb-down the execution of Order 66. Originally, it was simply the fact that the clones did what they were *made* to do: follow orders. The fact that some Jedi escaped the order was because enough clones had developed beyond their initial "programming" and questioned the order.

I thought this was well developed and shown in the now legends book "Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader".

The bio-chips though? Cheap, kiddy cop-out.

[RogueIce]

My biggest riff with the new canon is the fact that they created the bio-chips inside the clones' heads. I feel like they did that because they wanted to kid-dumb-down the execution of Order 66. Originally, it was simply the fact that the clones did what they were *made* to do: follow orders. The fact that some Jedi escaped the order was because enough clones had developed beyond their initial "programming" and questioned the order.

I thought this was well developed and shown in the now legends book "Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader".

The bio-chips though? Cheap, kiddy cop-out.

FYI that was done under George Lucas, not Disney.

[Darth Yan]

Lucas doesn't always do the right thing (greedo shooting first anyone?)

[Gandalf]

FYI that was done under George Lucas, not Disney.

It was? I thought their first appearance was in 2014 or so?

[Abacus]

My biggest riff with the new canon is the fact that they created the bio-chips inside the clones' heads. I feel like they did that because they wanted to kid-dumb-down the execution of Order 66. Originally, it was simply the fact that the clones did what they were *made* to do: follow orders. The fact that some Jedi escaped the order was because enough clones had developed beyond their initial "programming" and questioned the order.

I thought this was well developed and shown in the now legends book "Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader".

The bio-chips though? Cheap, kiddy cop-out.

FYI that was done under George Lucas, not Disney.

Nope. It was Disney.

Disney acquired the rights in October of 2012.

The first mention of the bio-chip, or inhibitor chip, was in the episode "Conspiracy" which was released on March 7, 2014 in the show's 6th season.


Anyone who thinks that these chips were originally part of Lucas' idea are lying or deluded. I'm not saying that he wouldn't have been silly enough to think of the idea himself, but simply that IRL and historically it was not in fact his decision -- but Disney's.


Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasfilm ... present.29
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Inhibitor_chip
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Conspiracy

[Abacus]

Also, imho, it lessens the moral complexity in Captain Rex's character; him and all the other clones that didn't follow Order 66.

[Gandalf]

Also, imho, it lessens the moral complexity in Captain Rex's character; him and all the other clones that didn't follow Order 66.

For me, it ruins the thing that made the clones so interesting. When they first appeared in AOTC, as the viewer you know that as cool looking as they are at the end of the film, it's only a matter of time before they're wiping out the Jedi, and killing Owen and Beru Lars. I can only assume that someone as Disney realised that they had made a likeable bunch of SS soldiers, and needed to give them and their comrades a moral out for their atrocities committed in the name of the führer. This way, the merchandising empire can go on and on!

[Q99]

The new EU really hasn't had much chance to spread it's wings yet.

That said, as ever, the comics tend to be one of the better parts. The Vader comic gives an interesting story of the character and how he normally acts, and the character of Dr. Aphra is a new-EU protagonist to run around with.

The most interesting parts of an EU, new or old, tends to be the new characters.

The old EU had it's highlights, but it also had lots and lots of trash. Did we seriously need a background story for every single character that was onscreen in the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence?

Nah, what we really needed was one that didn't leave out two whole people!

[RogueIce]

Nope. It was Disney.

Disney acquired the rights in October of 2012.

The first mention of the bio-chip, or inhibitor chip, was in the episode "Conspiracy" which was released on March 7, 2014 in the show's 6th season.


Anyone who thinks that these chips were originally part of Lucas' idea are lying or deluded. I'm not saying that he wouldn't have been silly enough to think of the idea himself, but simply that IRL and historically it was not in fact his decision -- but Disney's.


Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasfilm ... present.29
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Inhibitor_chip
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Conspiracy

Season Six was written in 2011 and Filoni was quoted as saying production had began in an Insider article published a week before the announcement (which means any interview certainly happened before that date) and looking a little deeper it appears that would have been based off an interview that happened at Celebration VI which was two months prior to the buyout announcement. And the deal wasn't even finalized until December 2012 - October was just the announcement it was in the works.

So yeah, Lucas was still involved. Or at the very least Disney didn't actually have creative control until well into the production cycle of those season six episodes. Which wrapped about three months after Disney had fully acquired Lucasfilm anyway.

So your proof it was The Mouse that demanded the inhibitor chips and not, say, Filoni himself deciding that was the way to go? Filoni, the guy who was practically a protégé of Lucas during the entire run of TCW and to this day credits him strongly and references back to Lucas' thoughts about various elements in his production of Rebels?

Face it, this is just more bullshit "wah wah Disney is kiddyfing Star Wars" hysteria that got old the very day the announcement was made and people were crying over it happening.

[Patroklos]

The new EU lost me the second they came up with this whole "trained as children to be robots" storm trooper BS. Backed up to an absurd degree in Rebels.

Its the exact same mistake with the Clone Troopers. For whatever reason people seem to have an aversion to having the bad guys have any depth. Which is even more maddening when you know the vast setting the writers have to pull from (which they intentionally reject via minimalism attempts). Evil enemies are not actually evil if they have no agency. They are also not interesting, so I don't care if you defeat them. Its also an excuse to write enemies as incompetents, which means I never feel tension in most of what are supposed to be dangerous situations so I am never impressed by what the characters do.

This all stems from the identity crisis SW has always had regarding whether it is schlocky kiddie fair or a more serious drama with adult themes (kicked off by the tone difference between ANH/ROTJ and ESB). And there is an other schism between people who are in love with the world of SW and those who are in love with the characters and themes. The simple fact is that the latter go see movies and watch cartoons, but the first buy source books. There is overlap there but the shiftiness of the stories and characters of the prequels and so many EU books forced people like me to almost exclusively exist as a setting lover. I endure the crappy story arcs to get a look at the world, and people like me is why the accusation of minimalism is such a big deal in the SW fandom. Per capita we probably spend far more than your casual story fan, especially since we have to consume the pure story products too, but our money comes in as a slow drip across many product streams rather than a blockbuster weekend haul of hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Abacus]

Nope. It was Disney.

Disney acquired the rights in October of 2012.

The first mention of the bio-chip, or inhibitor chip, was in the episode "Conspiracy" which was released on March 7, 2014 in the show's 6th season.


Anyone who thinks that these chips were originally part of Lucas' idea are lying or deluded. I'm not saying that he wouldn't have been silly enough to think of the idea himself, but simply that IRL and historically it was not in fact his decision -- but Disney's.


Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasfilm ... present.29
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Inhibitor_chip
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Conspiracy

Season Six was written in 2011 and Filoni was quoted as saying production had began in an Insider article published a week before the announcement (which means any interview certainly happened before that date) and looking a little deeper it appears that would have been based off an interview that happened at Celebration VI which was two months prior to the buyout announcement. And the deal wasn't even finalized until December 2012 - October was just the announcement it was in the works.

So yeah, Lucas was still involved. Or at the very least Disney didn't actually have creative control until well into the production cycle of those season six episodes. Which wrapped about three months after Disney had fully acquired Lucasfilm anyway.

So your proof it was The Mouse that demanded the inhibitor chips and not, say, Filoni himself deciding that was the way to go? Filoni, the guy who was practically a protégé of Lucas during the entire run of TCW and to this day credits him strongly and references back to Lucas' thoughts about various elements in his production of Rebels?

Face it, this is just more bullshit "wah wah Disney is kiddyfing Star Wars" hysteria that got old the very day the announcement was made and people were crying over it happening.

Oh, I guess I need to blame Filoni then, that rat-bastard.

[Bellarius]

Fans of the old EU also tend to forget just how bad many of its stories were.

Apologies to interrupt this thread, but I took issue someone listing me under this unfortunate stereotype. A rather untrue one to be sure, and about as accurate as Disney fans who seem to think that the EU consisted of little more than endless superweapon plots and Palpatine clones. Please allow me to refute this with a quote to another article linked to the above one:

"For all of that joy though, I never looked through those novels with rose tinted glasses. The Expanded Universe was mighty, dynamic and massive, but certainly flawed. The likes of Darksaber or Karven Traviss' works were something I still hold up as major creative failures among successes of their eras. Many times I would see mistakes made by new creators or old cliches overplayed, perhaps even terrible concepts which never should have been invented in the first place. Yet for all of this, it was here I actually learned to enjoy a franchise as a fan truly should. I learned that you didn't need to aggressively defend everything, adamantly love every story, and that fans should learn to enjoy franchises despite their flaws. More importantly however, it allowed me to remain optimistic in spite of storytelling failures.

For every terrible story, for every terrible decision or botched concept, quite often we'd see something better emerge from its ideas. While Palpatine's return might have been a flawed chapter, it led to many fantastic spin-offs such as the Crimson Empire series. While Kevin J Anderson might have overplayed the super-weapon cliche, it led to the Hand of Thrawn duology, Star Wars: Leviathan and a more dynamic era. Even as the Sun Crusher dominated Jedi Academy Trilogy might have led to a parade of mind-numbing stupid moments, it planted the seeds for new stories. We saw the Jedi being rebuilt, Kyp Durron would slowly transform into a better character, we saw a moment which explicitly depicted the Light Side having advantage over the Dark Side of the Force, and it led to I, Jedi. No matter how dark or dumb things seemed, you could always be sure some good would slowly emerge from them."

I will also add that of the entire Disney EU thus far - while people claim it has yet to start - a major problem has stemmed from the fact it continues to fail to meet the same standards I held the past setting to, save for one or two exceptions.

Oh, and I personally quite liked the Vong Saga for the reasons Darth Yan cited.

Thank you, I will leave you in peace now.

[Q99]

Vong Saga? I'll give it a pass for having an original dark villain who's not sith. Darth Caedus? Less so! And they both went on waaay too long. Fate of the Jedi was reasonably solid though.

Part of the problem with the Del Rey era books was pacing. The Vong I think were maybe a 10-book threat, and they got 20-plus.

The Bantam era didn't have as many long arcs and thus had less consistency, but IMO had the best character work between the X-wing and Young Jedi Knight ones.

Dark Horse started off very shaky but ended up the most consistently good source of good EU.

The Video Games were often good but also a perpetual source of superweapons and uber force users.




I will stress the point on some good ideas rising from bad ideas- the new EU simply hasn't had time to do that yet, we are on wave 1 of Disney EU fiction and old EU had multiple novel companies each get a chance to put out double-to-triple digits of books. The Vong saga alone took more than 3 years, Darth Caedus 2 years, and the current EU has had a year and a half. It is still an apples-to-oranges comparison when the current EU has had less time than individual story arcs of the old one!

[RogueIce]

That works both ways though. The old EU also had more time to screw things up, as it so often did. The fact that the new EU has made so many of the same mistakes in a much shorter time period is hardly something to be said in its favor.

I won't disagree, mainly because TBH of the new EU all I've read is Battlefront: Twilight Company and of course the new Thrawn novel. Both of which were quite excellent. The rest...well they've had middling-to-bad reviews from what I can recall, so I frankly didn't bother. For the record, I barely made it into the NJO before I gave up on the old EU, never read any of the Prequel-era stories and was very selective on what I read after that point: basically Mercy Kill because of Allston, everything Timothy Zahn wrote (because it's Zahn) and then a few books that I heard good things about, like Dark Lord. And FWIW that's pretty much how I'm treating the new EU.

Which is my main point. It's not that I'm defending the Disney era per se it's that I'm arguing that it's not somehow worse than what came before. Really, it's not. If anything, it's only just as bad as what came before it, and has barely had a chance to stand on its own yet. As I've said from nearly the beginning: "Meet the New EU, same as the Old EU." I've been pretty consistent on that point, I feel. Give it a couple decades and I'm sure we can look back at the highs and lows, as well as all the new worldbuilding they've done, and then a proper comparison can be made.

Oh, I guess I need to blame Filoni then, that rat-bastard.

Why, are you so eager to absolve Lucas of any potential responsibility for the chips? Because he was heavily involved in the story aspects of The Clone Wars, and it's hard to see how he wouldn't have been involved with this decision, made well before he gave control to another company and retired. I can't prove his involvement, not offhand anyway - Filoni may have made some comment somewhere but I haven't seen anything - but it's hardly outside the realm of possibility, either.

I will stress the point on some good ideas rising from bad ideas- the new EU simply hasn't had time to do that yet, we are on wave 1 of Disney EU fiction and old EU had multiple novel companies each get a chance to put out double-to-triple digits of books. The Vong saga alone took more than 3 years, Darth Caedus 2 years, and the current EU has had a year and a half. It is still an apples-to-oranges comparison when the current EU has had less time than individual story arcs of the old one!

I think this cuts to the point better than most, and reinforces my own views quite eloquently. Give it time, see if the new EU can build like the old did. Then we can fairly judge it. Perhaps there will be another I, Jedi to come out of a currently disliked book, or somewhere down the line someone will do a Hand of Thrawn where it calls out the new EU on some of its bullshit. Only time will tell.

[Abacus]

RogueIce, you're really sending me mixed signals. First you say you're tired of hearing people blaming Lucas/Disney for kid-ifying things; and then, when I change to bash Filoni after you tell me that he is the likely culprit, you complain that I'm absolving Lucas. Dafuq?

I'm blaming *all* of them, I guess.

That said, I wish Disney (now that they control the IP) would realize that the majority of their sales-potential lies in an audience above the age of 18. Sure, kids are important to the growth of the franchise (not that it actually *needs* to increase, jeezus), but to realize that they need to retain fans as well. "Rogue One" was a nice change of pace. The fact that it received such positive reviews was because it was more adult oriented, it's action far more real. I'm hopeful that future movies and EU projects will bear in mind such things.

[Gandalf]

RogueIce, you're really sending me mixed signals. First you say you're tired of hearing people blaming Lucas/Disney for kid-ifying things; and then, when I change to bash Filoni after you tell me that he is the likely culprit, you complain that I'm absolving Lucas. Dafuq?

I'm blaming *all* of them, I guess.

Personally, I'm keeping the blame with Disney. While they didn't originate it, they published it and made it canon.