The bending-over-backwards the licensing people did to explain away inconsistencies introduced by the prequels. Like Lucas had Obi-Wan call his droid an R4. Fine, it's a film, that's the established standard. I don't care that it makes a West End Games guidebook wrong because of the shape of a dome. But no, the EU came up with a cockamamie story about how Anakin had repaired an R4 by replacing its dome. Please.
You know the story about that? How they built the fighter with an R4 head because that's what the script said, and George saw it and asked why they'd put that head on and they said because that's an R4 head, that's how you set things out back in Star Wars and pointed to the breakdown of R's 1 through 5 that George had dictated back in the day (never mind that he'd contradicted himself in that very first film by having Luke call R5-D4 an "R2 unit"), and George said oh... well, he just wanted a regular R2-D2 style dome on it, so they did and the script never got changed?
That was one thing WEG
didn't screw up. There was a lot of stuff after Star Wars came out that used that production memo to point out the various astromech models in the film. Well before WEG started with the RPG in the late '80s. So yeah, EU authors felt the need to explain how a droid that George had decreed had a particular head type had a different head type.
They did the same thing when a bunch of unspeaking Jedi Council characters were recast. The fact that they used actors that looked like the previous ones makes it plain the intention was that they were the same characters. But no, the EU gave them new names and created backstories to explain why they looked similar. :facepalm
Hm-mm. Multiple actors portrayed Jedi like Saesee Tiin, Luminara Unduli, Kit Fisto, and Plo Koon. The new characters in ROTS had new names in the internal costume design stuff. They weren't made up after the fact. They were intended to be different people.
Countless comic and novel stories of good jedi trying out the dark side just to see what it's like. "Know your enemy, right? It's cool, I can come back". I say again, please.
Ulic Qel-Droma, who didn't realize he was going Dark until he killed his brother, repented, and spent the rest of his life in solitary, non-Force-using self-flagellation; Luke, who thought he was strong enough, wasn't, and it was his sister's love that brought him back; and Kyp Durron, who stole the Sun Crusher and destroyed the Imperial Academy at Carida to get revenge on the Empire for killing his brother... only to realize that his brother was alive and at the Academy, and he got to watch him die, and repented. Those three are the only ones I can readily think of. Well, there was also Revan, but that's messy to figure out, due to the multiple possibilities the video game gave players. And I'm not sure if Tahiri came back from the Dark Side. She's just
nuts. How many am I forgetting to make it "countless" times?
There's precedence in the films, though. If Anakin could unapologetically wallow in the Dark Side for a quarter of a century, kill hundreds of people by his own hand, and be complicit in the deaths of billions, and then come back, those far lesser transgressions don't bother me.
The NJO and the whole direction the series took after they dropped a planet on Chewbacca. I just checked out at that point. Killing Chewie was a stupid move for starters, but to follow it up with the freaking Vong, ugh. The Vong were one of the dumbest ideas introduced. They're basically the Borg just with biology instead of cybernetics. They'd have belonged more in, like, the WH40K canon as Slaanesh cultists than in Star Wars. It was just stupid.
I own only two books out of the NJO -- Dark Journey (because I actually liked who the Solo kids were growing up to be, and Jaina was the best of them and this was her skirting too close to the Dark Side, realizing it, and checking herself) and The Unifying Force (partly because it ended the whole thing, but mostly because it brought back Zonoma Sekot, the quasi-sentient planet from the Prequel-era's Rogue Planet). For the most part, I just skip it. "Bad guys attack, Anakin Solo dies, his girlfriend goes nuts from grief and goes Dark Side, Jacen SOlo has massive PTSD from torture at the bad guys' hands, Chewie's dead, Han moped for a long time about it, the Mandalorians were double-agents."
Similar thumbnail about the largely-unreadable Dark Nest trilogy: "Weird bug-telepathy stuff messes with Jedi -- including already-messed-up Jacen Solo." Then all of Troy Denning's offerings in the Legacy of the Force series. Sadly. His standalone Tatooine Ghost was wonderful, but when he has to work as part of a team... ugh. The other two-thirds more than make up for it, though, IMO. Some wonderfully perspicacious observations from an older Boba Fett to Jaina Solo. Then, after reading the six good books from that arc, I strongly recommend the standalone Millennium Falcon novel. The Fate of the Jedi was just... yeaaaahh. If it had just been Luke and his son wandering around the galaxy bonding after Mara's death, it probably would have been awesome. All the political stuff and Jedi-going-mad-due-to-some-mysterious-malady stuff just felt off, and ruined the great character Daala had become by the end of LotF.
--Jonah
