JasperKazai > Recent Status Updates

Like I said when I started, I did not remember many details at all. The fact that Xizor convinced the Emperor to leak the second Death Star plans to the Rebels is... ehhh. It's not the worst idea ever, but it's very unnecessary. The ever-present prequel problem: you are adding unintended context to a story that was already complete. Black Sun giving Leia the Boussh disguise she uses in RotJ is also unnecessary.

Luke finishes constructing his lightsaber, and then the next scene that we see him, a swoop gang comes out of nowhere with the sole intent of killing him. Nothing but a flimsy excuse for an action scene with the lightsaber, lol. It feels like a TTRPG session where you throw meaningless filler baddies at the players so they have something to beat up. Is this really the best use of the limited space that a novel has??

I did not remember that Dash Rendar is supposed to have red hair and green eyes. The actor they got to portray him in promotional images definitely did not, lol. And by going to check on Wookieepedia just now, I learned that Dash Rendar is technically a part of the Disney canon, albeit just a small mention. Interesting.

Having a good time so far. But Prince Xizor really does come across a bit like a super special oc donut steel. He's a crime sydnicate boss, is not human, but he's the Emperor's second favorite person? The racist/xenophobic Emperor?? It doesn't make much sense. Also how Jabba just agreed to Xizor's summons, and also obeyed his commands without hesitation, is silly. I'm nitpicking, but I'd be a hypocrite if I wasn't.

I've been looking forward to this. I have read this before, and I remember enjoying it, but I honestly don't remember many details. (I mean, it's probably been close to if not more than 20 years since I read it! My god what is time) Shadows of the Empire was a pretty cool multimedia project in its day. The N64 game is iconic. This is absolutely emblematic of Star Wars for me.

I don't think this Fett story was all that good. This characterization of Fett as some hypermoral prude is weird and bad. He kept referring to gray armor, even though it's clearly green. Also that cliffhanger ending is a lazy copout.
As per usual, the rest of this ebook is filled with excerpts. Done with this. Next is Shadows of Empire. I have read it before, and I remember liking it, but don't recall many details.

This part w/ Han, Leia, and Luke in 19 ABY feels like fanfiction. Not how they normally act. I was thinking maybe it's because this was written before that period of the timeline was explored, but nope, this is right in the heyday of that. The Jedi Academy Trilogy, Corellian trilogy, and Black Fleet Crisis trilogy were all written before this. No excuse. Also why is this from Han's PoV in a Fett short story?!

One thing this story does that both the movie itself and the other stories didn't bother to do is explain how the bounty hunters got to the Executor so quickly after the Battle of Hoth. In the movie, they just show up out of nowhere. This story says Imps gave them general coords to go to for potential capture bounties. It doesn't make perfect sense, but it's better than nothing.

Of course they saved the Boba Fett story for last. This one is a bit odd, because it technically takes place in 19 ABY (much later in the timeline) with flashbacks. I'm not going to bother waiting to read it in sequence, so here it goes. Also weird because this is the old pre-Episode II backstory for Fett where he's actually Jaster Mereel. This got completely retconned by EpII due to Fett being a clone.

The Zuckuss and 4-LOM story by M. Shayne Bell was pretty decent. He wrote one of the better stories in the Cantina compilation, so I'm not too surprised. One aspect that was weird was that he claimed the Rebel rendezvous point was outside of the galaxy. Yeah, at the end of TESB Luke and Leia are gazing at some cosmic galaxy-looking thing, but I don't think it was meant to be taken literally. It just was to look cool.

That wasn't a Bossk story. That was a story about a human female/male Wookiee bounty hunter duo defeating Bossk. I don't know if these authors were assigned the character to write about, or it was a first-come-first-serve choice basis. Either way, this story was a damn copout. That ain't a Bossk story! I saw that unnecessary reference to Bakura, Tyers. You can't sneak one past us. Anyways, it wasn't good.

That was bad. The beginning was ok, but it's like he had no idea what to do in the middle and it grew very dumb. Both Jabba and Boba Fett were written terribly. The little agreement between Jabba and Dengar made no sense. The 'romance' with Manaroo is silly. I think Dengar finding Fett at the sarlacc is retconned by later stories, which is good because that's dumb as well.
Next is Bossk by Kathy Tyers. Ugh

This Dengar story is by Dave Wolverton. I hated Courtship of Princess Leia, but his short story in the Cantina compilation was ok. So far, this is leaning more towards Courtship. It's not great. What are the odds that Manaroo would also just so happened to have went to Bespin? Nil. That wouldn't happen. It's dumb. Wolverton seems to have had some... uh... interesting ideas about women. He sucked at writing them.

Finished the first story, about IG-88 by KJA. Too silly. It's a short story so you have to take some license to move things along, but the idea that an infected droid just so happened to already be aboard the Executor when IG-88 needed it was dumb. The idea that IG-88 was secretly in control of the second Death Star was also really dumb. Hard to take seriously when it feels like the author isn't taking it seriously.

I noticed this in the Mos Eisley Cantina compilation, and it's here too. There's something about short stories that seems to make author(s) more willing to include pointlessly cruel things. Like, here, a human is introduced and then literally pulled apart and killed by 5 droids like 3 paragraphs later. Is that really necessary? Does it add anything of value to the story? I say no.

I had been ready to read Shadows of the Empire next. But then I re-checked the list, and it turns out most of the stories in this compilation take place vaguely before Shadows. I had kind of forgotten about the rest of the Tales books... The Jabba's Palace one will be coming up soon as well.
This one has only 5 stories, so they're longer than the ones from Cantina. Not sure how I'll feel about that.

Decent. Definitely better and more interesting than Razor's Edge was. Scarlet Hark was rather annoying - I think the James SA Corey duo has a tendency to write annoying women characters. But she took a hard backseat once Leia entered the story proper, so it could've been worse.
For whatever reason, this ebook copy didn't have the ~30% of excerpts from other novels, so the story actually went to the end of the ebook.

A group of like ~8 snubfighters blew up a Star Destroyer. That's not really possible, especially how fast it happened. That's written by people who don't really know Star Wars. Luke blew up the Death Star because it had a specific, glaring flaw. Most ships don't have that. A group of snubfighters could disable a Star Destroyer, not outright destroy. But it would take more time than it did here, and with casualties.

Seeing as Baasen is supposed to be someone that Han has history with, they should've actually pulled an existing character. The shitty Solo trilogy by Crispin surely has at least one mentioned character that isn't used elsewhere. This book was the last one ever published, so they literally had the entirety of the EU to pull from. Making up some random new character is cheap.

When I said earlier that this felt vaguely similar to The Expanse, I meant in tone. But now the plot is about an ancient alien race that developed technology to control/prevent interstellar travel. That's literally the plot of The Expanse! One part of it, anyways.

The heist went much quicker than I expected, and they met back up with Chewie. But they went to another planet and left Chewie with the Falcon again. Come on! This planet is filled with aliens, there's literally no excuse now.
The Leia-centric novel had a decent amount of Han, but barely any Luke. Now the Han-centric novel is shaping up to have a decent amount of Leia, but still barely any Luke. Wonder why that is

I don't like how they've sidelined Chewie. The previous book did a similar thing, by having Luke and Chewie be with the Falcon and only show up near the end. This one has him sitting in the Falcon waiting for the getaway. I know he presents a problem when on Imperial worlds, since he sticks out. But it feels lazy to just write him into a corner like this.

This is alright. It's vaguely (very vaguely) reminiscent of the first Expanse novel, which is the best one of those.
Marginally more interesting than the previous one. Of course, that comparison isn't worth much. This is not really a 'series' in any meaningful way. The stories are not actually related to one another in any way. It's only a series for marketing purposes.
Scarlet Hark is a dumb name.

The last novel in the timeline before TESB. Also notable because this is the final EU novel published before Disney de-canonized all of it. James S.A. Corey is the author duo that wrote The Expanse. I have read 7 of those, and I'll finish it someday. I want to like that series more than I do - it's very uneven. Some books are great, some are really bad. Anyways, I'm interested to see what they do with Star Wars.

The end. A little bit shorter that usual. Most SW ebooks get to around the 70% mark before the excerpts.
I didn't have many updates for this because I didn't have anything to say. This was a big ol' glass of room temperature water. Nothing egregiously wrong with it, but bland as hell. As I've been saying for the past few books, it's hard to do much of interest in this filler territory between movies.

This has been alright, but nothing amazing. Han and Leia feel close enough to authentic. (Luke and Chewie haven't been in it enough yet to make a judgment.) I guess the most notable thing is that she's really ramping up the sexual tension between Han and Leia. It's getting pretty close to TESB in the timeline, so I suppose it makes sense. But no other book has done it to this degree.

I can't believe she brought back the Lorrdian body language reading shit that Aaron Allston made up for Face in the X-Wing series. Of all the things to callback to, you pick that dumb nonsense??

Of course Leia just so happens to be intimately familiar with the family of the Alderaanian pirate captain. Of course! Such a small galaxy. It makes no sense that the captain answered all of Leia's questions without protest BEFORE Leia identified herself. Switch the order of that around and it makes way more sense. Everyone is so agreeable in the Star Wars universe, lol.

Back to Star Wars. This series has an interesting development story - it was supposed to be a trilogy, but the Disney buyout happened in the middle of it. Only 2 books were published before they made the EU non-canon. The 3rd book was actually retooled and published as part of the Disney canon.
Martha Wells became known due to Murderbot, but I haven't read that yet. This is the first work of hers I'll have read.

Only 2 days after my beach trip; not bad.
I liked this, but it has flaws. In the preface, he talked about disliking when authors overexplained things and didn't let their readers figure things out. I think he want TOO far in the other direction. A lot of shit in here just kind of happens with basically no explanation and it feels almost random.
Can't wait too long for the next one... Might start forgetting things.