JasperKazai’s Reviews > Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina: Star Wars Legends > Status Update

Empire Blues was a weird story. Not bad, just weird. I'll take not having negative feelings towards a story any time. Did not know the famous cantina song was titled 'Mad About Me' in-universe, and that fact is apparently still canon even though this story was the first time it was identified as such (and the story, like the rest of the EU, is not canon anymore).

What the fuck, Barbara Hambly? No, really, what the fuck? Didn't expect to read about a misogynist Gotal wanting to date rape a woman. That was... beyond fucked. What an awful story. And yeah, it has the praying mantis style twist ending, but that doesn't excuse it.
Also, a Gotal would not be an Imperial official of any level on any planet. The Empire is racist towards nonhumans. They'd do grunt work, but that's it.

Alright, the Wuher story is now my lowest ranked (thus far), because it kind of pissed me off. When he went to collect the droid, they started speaking in ridiculous flowery language, to the point where I thought it was a joke. Like it would turn out to be Wuher recounting and embellishing this story to someone. But nope, it was played straight. Also, him making alcohol from Greedo's literal corpse is fucked up.

Yet another story that contradicts Greedo's earlier story. In this bartender story, he is a seasoned bounty hunter that has traveled enough to call Wuher a bad bartender, and invokes Jabba's name. But in his own story, Greedo was a fresh-faced 19 year old who was a new arrival on Tatooine who barely met Jabba. Those two things clash. Having these contradictions in the same volume makes this look really amateurish

Eh, this one was a bit more shaky. I liked how it overlapped with the previous story. (I hope more of these do that.) But some aspects were... questionable. Ithorians are unable to kill, but Nadon has 4 skeletons of dead humans in his house?? Uh... what? The trees said using the plants to kill was just as bad as doing it himself. Those contradict. Also, planning to clone the dead Imp officer is really fucked up.

I actually didn't completely hate that. I would rate it above both the Greedo story and the first one. Perhaps Crispin works better in short form, or maybe it's because these are less-established characters than Han Solo. Or maybe a combination of those two factors. Regardless, it was passable.
Wolverton next, huh? That's another author I've recently reread and disliked. Really hitting the all-stars here...

Zahn's story was decent. Not amazing, but that's about the best I hoped from this. I hope more of them are on the same level, but I'm not holding my breath.
And of course, it gets followed up by the story I was dreading the most - the one by A.C. Crispin. After the abysmal Solo trilogy, I was hoping to never have to read anything from her again, but alas. I now see she also has one story in Tales from Jabba's Palace.

It's kind of funny how this story incidentally makes the previous one more ridiculous. They said it'd cost 30k to hire a band of mercs for guard duty, and the Imperial doctor balked at that. Which makes it all the more ludicrous that the previous story claimed Imps paid 60k for mere information. Also, their identity scanner thing shouldn't have been able to ID Greedo, because he was a nobody new arrival at this point

The Greedo story was also bad. The idea that hunting Han was literally his FIRST job ever is stupid, and also him seeing a vision of his dead mother hinting that he's about to die moments before he confronts Han in the cantina is also very stupid. I didn't hate it, but it's not good. It deserved to get retconned by Episode I.
Hey, next is a Zahn story. That'll be good, right?? Right? ...

The money in this makes no sense. In EpIV, when Han sets his price to take them to Alderaan at 10k, Luke remarks that they could almost buy their own ship with with that amount. In this, Greedo wants to use 20k to buy a ship, so that roughly lines up. But what doesn't make sense is the fact that Imps would pay 60,000 (20k was one third of the take) for merely informing on Rebels. That's ludicrously high!