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Star Wars - Ahsoka


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23 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

So I guess I need to watch Rebels?

Like typical Filoni stuff, it starts off slow, and you'll be like "this is a crap kids show" after the first episode. And the animation style isn't that great, at first.

But stick with it. By the middle of the first season, you'll be all-in. The season 2 finale is one of the best things to grace the entire Star Wars universe.

Personally remains my favorite Star Wars series, even ahead of the Clone Wars and Andor.

It's the first series that really gives you that feeling of how oppressive the Empire is, during the Imperial era. It also has some really dynamic character development. And CH10P is my favorite droid ever.

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8 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Well I am going to be walking for 5 straight months, so audio books is a definite option.

Zahn’s original Heir trilogy laid the groundwork for the Expanded Universe.  There was a lot of shit that followed from dozens of other authors, but Zahn really nailed some solid things about what a post ROTJ Star Wars could look like.

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16 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

And read the Heir to the Empire trilogy (aka the Thrawn trilogy).  Which gave Rebels some of its content and gave us Thrawn and Mara Jade.  And Joruus C'baoth Baylan.

Might as well add the 6 thrawn books that are canon now too. 3 Thrawn books and 3 Thrawn Ascendency books.

 

Audio book is definitely the way to go. The Thrawn voice is top notch and all the John Williams music and star wars sound effects really add to the emersion.  

Edited by Viper
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Thrawn’s back story is pretty damned interesting. I hope we get an episode on it. 
 

I hope they cast the voice actor as live action Thrawn because the voice is perfect. It’ll be very difficult to replicate if they go another way. 
 

Rosario Dawson ain’t real busy, so I hope we get 3 seasons. 

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2 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I’m not gonna lie - as cool as it was to see Thrawn and the Rebels folks, seeing Ray Stevenson was awesome.

Yeah a physically imposing non cyborg Sith/Jedi is well, a change. Any theories on his character? 
 

Stevenson is a scene stealer. Rome gets a much longer run in HBO if he was the lead. 
 

 

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30 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Zahn’s original Heir trilogy laid the groundwork for the Expanded Universe.  There was a lot of shit that followed from dozens of other authors, but Zahn really nailed some solid things about what a post ROTJ Star Wars could look like.

And, really, one can't overstate that most of what followed really was shit.

What I remember most from reading Zahn's books back in the day was that the new characters he created were better and more interesting than the familiar old characters... and by the end of the series, the main cast was a lot more interesting, too.

Thrawn and Ahsoka remain my favorite characters in the whole of Star Wars.

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7 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

And, really, one can't overstate that most of what followed really was shit.

And I can't think about that, without then thinking about this:

 

Quote

Foolscap

 
 

By Tycho

Before the convention itself got underway, Foolscap guest of honor Harlan Ellison was savaged by a parrot.

The story morphed somewhat throughout the event. The most marked departure from the canonical version was that Harlan Ellison had actually been raped by the parrot.

I don't hold to that account.

He didn't appear any worse for wear, although I am told that the bird's vocabulary is now studded with profanities, dark oaths, and shrieks of mortal pain.

(CW)TB

Quote

Mr. Ellison

 
 

By Gabe

I think that Harlan guy is really pissed at us.

-Gabe out

Quote

He's Not Pissed At US

 
 

By Tycho

He's pissed at YOU. If he's pissed at me, it's simply because I know you. It was clear to me from the start that he wouldn't appreciate having to "share" guest of honor status, so to my mind an altercation was inevitable.

He's a ridiculous man, a little goblin who pokes his head out of dark holes and scowls at all the Earth. There is no room in my life for that kind of person.

(CW)TB

Quote

Just Tell The Story

 
 

By Tycho

I know you're dying to.

(CW)TB

Quote

The story

 
 

By Gabe

So Tycho and I are up in front of the audience with Harlen, and Hank (the con organizer) presents us with some jester hats (“Fool’s caps”). Tycho and I put ours on because we are polite, but Harlen - who is apparently too cool for school - refuses to wear his. I turn to him and say, “Don’t you want your hat?” and he tells me to fuck off. This caught me off guard, I mean I have no clue who this fucking coot is. Then he points to a pad of paper he has and asks if I’m aware that his paper is also called foolscap. Now, I’ve never heard that term before, I pretty much just call it paper so I shake my head “no.” This really isn’t a fair question. I mean, it would be like me asking him about Photoshop or if he can remember what he had for lunch. The guy was essentially setting me up to look stupid in front of all these people. So then he asks me if I even attended college and I say “No, I did not.” Then, he says “did you at least finish high school?”

I said that I had, but you couldn’t really hear me because the audience is laughing at me along with Harlen. So once they stop, I turn to him and I say, “While I’ve got you here I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Star Wars stuff you wrote.”

I didn’t know him very well but I felt like mistaking him for someone who writes Star Wars books was the sort of insult that would cut right to his brittle old bones. The audience seemed to agree because I could hear a lot of ooooooooh’s and oh no’s over the laughing. Some people in the front even suggested a fist fight was now in order. I look over at Harlen and he’s staring at me like he wants to choke me. He then says “so that’s how it’s going to be.” Now keep in mind that he’s the one that started hostilities when he told me to fuck off. I’m just the one that finished it. The guy tells some pretty funny stories about how witty he is and how he’s always saying clever things at exactly the right moment. When confronted with someone who was unwilling to take any crap from him he had no clever retort. The great writer just glared at me and then walked off stage. I don’t doubt that given enough time he could craft a perfectly worded and extremely vicious response but up there on stage in front of all his fans the man didn’t have shit.

I don’t blame Harlen for not knowing who I am. I honestly don’t expect him to. I don’t expect anyone that old to know who I am. I did expect him to be polite and at least respect the fact that I was a fellow guest of honor. That was apparently too much to ask for from the great Harlen Elison.

-Gabe Out

Quote

HAHA

 
 

By Gabe

Someone just sent me a hilarious Ellison story. I’ll just post it here for you all to enjoy. Just so we’re all on the same page, Mr. Ellison is about 4 feet tall. I suppose he’s always been short but he might have been tall at some point and now he’s shrinking. The same thing is happening to my Grandma.

Of course I wasn't there, but the first thing I think of when I think of insulting Harlan Ellison is to call him a little fuck. There's an old story out there (stop me if you've already heard it) about him propositioning a tall blonde woman at a party with the line, "What would you say to a little fuck?" Her answer, of course, was, "Hello little fuck."

Still gets him riled I hear.

 

Thanks Tom, that’s good stuff.

-Gabe out

Quote

Let's Be Clear, Here

 
 

By Tycho

We're talking about a person that a couple total assholes find rude.

(CW)TB

 

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1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

I can't imagine a better casting for Ashoka, tbh. Who knows if the show will be good.

They could’ve done what they did for Bo Katan and casted the voice actress, who campaigned for the role but was never given an audition due to insufficient screen acting experience. She’d have the voice sound and inflection correct and would possibly look more like animated Ahsoka with a younger looking and less grizzled face. 

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1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

I said that I had, but you couldn’t really hear me because the audience is laughing at me along with Harlen. So once they stop, I turn to him and I say, “While I’ve got you here I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Star Wars stuff you wrote.”

1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

I didn’t know him very well but I felt like mistaking him for someone who writes Star Wars books was the sort of insult that would cut right to his brittle old bones. The audience seemed to agree because I could hear a lot of ooooooooh’s and oh no’s over the laughing. Some people in the front even suggested a fist fight was now in order. I look over at Harlen and he’s staring at me like he wants to choke me. He then says “so that’s how it’s going to be.” Now keep in mind that he’s the one that started hostilities when he told me to fuck off. I’m just the one that finished it. The guy tells some pretty funny stories about how witty he is and how he’s always saying clever things at exactly the right moment. When confronted with someone who was unwilling to take any crap from him he had no clever retort. The great writer just glared at me and then walked off stage. I don’t doubt that given enough time he could craft a perfectly worded and extremely vicious response but up there on stage in front of all his fans the man didn’t have shit.

1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

I don’t blame Harlen for not knowing who I am. I honestly don’t expect him to. I don’t expect anyone that old to know who I am. I did expect him to be polite and at least respect the fact that I was a fellow guest of honor. That was apparently too much to ask for from the great Harlen Elison.

beautiful happy endings GIF

I've heard a lot of Harlan Ellison stories, but holy shit, to insult him like that...just glorious.

This is one of my favorite Ellison stories:

Quote

Ellison was among those who in 1968 signed an anti-Vietnam War advertisement in Galaxy Science Fiction.[73] In 1969, Ellison was Guest of Honor at Texas A&M University's first science fiction convention, Aggiecon, where he reportedly[74] referred to the university's Corps of Cadets as "America's next generation of Nazis", inspired in part by the continuing Vietnam War. Although the university was no longer solely a military school (from 1965), the student body was predominantly made up of cadet members.

Quote

Between Ellison's anti-military remarks and a food fight that broke out in the ballroom of the hotel where the gathering was held (although, according to Ellison in 2000, the food fight actually started in a Denny's because the staff disappeared and they could not get their check), the school's administration almost refused to approve the science fiction convention the next year and no guest of honor was invited for the next two Aggiecons. However, Ellison was subsequently invited back as Guest of Honor for Aggiecon V (1974).

 

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1 hour ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Yeah a physically imposing non cyborg Sith/Jedi is well, a change. Any theories on his character?

Sure as hell looks and acts like Joruus C'baoth (Jedi/Sith cloning didn't work as well as people thought it would), and given that they are already using plenty of elements/characters created by Zahn, I don't see why not - they can change the name (and for all we know it's a code name so that people didn't realize they were going full on Heir to the Empire, or at least partially Heir to the Empire) but the presence feels a lot like C'baoth.

1 hour ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Stevenson is a scene stealer. Rome gets a much longer run in HBO if he was the lead.

It was fine with the cast, it was just about 10 years ahead of its time.  But it paved the way for Game of Thrones and John Milius got to do some stuff he had been wanting to for years.

Beside being ahead of its time, its other problem is that they decided to compress a lot of stuff down, rather than spread it out over 4-5 seasons.  The cast was just fucking amazing.

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12 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

beautiful happy endings GIF

I've heard a lot of Harlan Ellison stories, but holy shit, to insult him like that...just glorious.

This is one of my favorite Ellison stories:

 

Tycho has said, on other occasions, is that "Gabriel's "super power" (if you will) is to suss out the exact thing that will drive a person out of their fucking minds."

image.thumb.png.e7618e2acac8fda21c20076271885077.png

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1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

And, really, one can't overstate that most of what followed really was shit.

1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

But, to be clear, the Zahn books are top-notch, whatever the rest of the "expanded universe" turned out to be.

They started to veer into bad Star Trek territory where they focused on the same fucking lead characters instead of mining the universe for new characters and plotlines, they fell into the Wesley Crusher trap where the kids of the main characters are constantly putting everybody into danger and/or needing to be rescued, and they were seen as a cash cow when the toys weren't in stories and movies weren't on the screen.

And while I bash some of the Star Trek novels, say what you want about the Star Trek novels, and there was some shit ones, but Star Trek also had some fantastic ones written by people who were established sci-fi writers first, and Star Trek fans second, including people who wrote for the Star Trek TV shows.

LucasFilm was allowing a lot of pitches to be made of just stupid shit that made no sense from people who were not the most established in their sci-fi writing careers, and they didn't police their timelines as much - somebody made a chart years ago showing a potential timeline of all of the EU novels, and basically Han/Luke/Leia were saving the galaxy or going to war about every 2-3 months for several years after ROTJ. 

Now you can argue that there was no cannon with the EU, it was just people throwing "What Ifs" out there left and right, but the problem with that is that people get bored with reading that stuff. They would have been better served with only allowing the Holy Trinity to be used just a little bit here and there as background characters, and instead do things like the X-Wing squadron books (although they got old after a while) or some of the anthologies (Tales from Jabba's Palace, etc.) where you got short stories that built up the background characters we saw in the movies.

1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

What I remember most from reading Zahn's books back in the day was that the new characters he created were better and more interesting than the familiar old characters... and by the end of the series, the main cast was a lot more interesting, too.

That's the thing - Zahn went way out there with worldbuilding and character arcs and backstories for his new characters and for the originals he brought in.  Then again, he was writing trilogies and not one-offs, so he took that chance to let the characters/stories breathe a bit.  He also worked to improve on bits of the movies that weren't the best, and to give those background characters interesting backstories.  If you told me Filoni was a huge fan of his, I'd believe it, because the Clone Wars tapped into that idea of "let's take this movie universe and really dig in and expand it and show the worlds that were just mentioned in passing, or show who these background characters were.

Zahn didn't give us stupid shit like "Leia is all of the sudden going to marry some dork that's not Han, and what is Han going to do and oh no she's in danger!, but we only have 300 pages to wrap everything up so that everything was exactly where it was at the start of the novel, unlike Zahn who was more than happy to deconstruct characters and events where the ending was in a wildly different place than the beginning.

1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

Thrawn and Ahsoka remain my favorite characters in the whole of Star Wars.

Thrawn is my favorite out of the EU, without a doubt.

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by the way, that comic above is not the comic that inspired that quote; it's the comic before that one that brought it up, but that one also illustrates that ability and is funnier.

That saga with Jack Thompson is worth looking into, anyway: Jack Thompson | Penny Arcade | Fandom

including such gems as...

Quote
From Jack
Monday, October 17 2005 - 4:39 PM
by: Gabe
---
I thought you might like to see the mail I got from Jack this afternoon:
This story is completely false and defamatory. Take it down or else.
And my reply to him:
****This is an automated response****
Thank you for contacting Penny Arcade. I’m sorry but I am simply not able to respond to all my fan mail. I want you to know that I’m glad you enjoy the comic strip and I appreciate you taking the time to mail me.
-Gabe out

 

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16 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Zahn’s original Heir trilogy laid the groundwork for the Expanded Universe.  There was a lot of shit that followed from dozens of other authors, but Zahn really nailed some solid things about what a post ROTJ Star Wars could look like.

Today I learned that Zahn’s trilogy were in fact the first books published after LucasFilm licensing made the decision that books were the way to go for keeping older fans/teens engaged in the wake of no new content coming out from the movies, and were the first books set after ROTJ.  George didn’t want them writing anything set prior to the original trilogy, because if he came back to Star Wars, that was where he was going.  Heir to the Empire also kept John Grisham’s The Firm from hitting #1 on The NY Times bestseller list.  

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5 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Today I learned that Zahn’s trilogy were in fact the first books published after LucasFilm licensing made the decision that books were the way to go for keeping older fans/teens engaged in the wake of no new content coming out from the movies, and were the first books set after ROTJ.  George didn’t want them writing anything set prior to the original trilogy, because if he came back to Star Wars, that was where he was going.  Heir to the Empire also kept John Grisham’s The Firm from hitting #1 on The NY Times bestseller list.  

The books were originally gonna be canon but Zahn put in stuff about the Clone Wars so Lucas went back on his arrangement with him/them. Lucas also had the primary hero character in the EU killed off because his name was Anakin Skywalker and didn't want to confuse moviegoers. The EU mostly suffered from the 90s sci-fi/fantasy idea of villains and introduced a really stupid anti-jedi race of aliens an almost as dumb idea as the rule of 2 sith crap

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41 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

The books were originally gonna be canon but Zahn put in stuff about the Clone Wars so Lucas went back on his arrangement with him/them.

Which sucked because the idea of clone Jedi/Sith being batshit crazy with Force powers was interesting.

41 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

and introduced a really stupid anti-jedi race of aliens an almost as dumb idea as the rule of 2 sith crap

If you are talking about Thrawn's bodyguards, the noghri or whatever, Zahn mentioned in the 20th anniversary edition (or maybe 25th, whatever big anniversary edition they put out) that they were going to be Sith like it was rumored with the Emperor's bodyguards in the 80s, but Lucas didn't want anybody touching on anything with the Sith (Zahn wasn't even allowed to use the name in his books) so he had to scrap a major subplot and throw something in at the last minute.  It was one of the very few things that Lucas made him take out.

If you are talking about the Yuzhan Vong? from that 20-book series (along with comic books), those were also supposed to be Sith, but again, Lucas directly intervened and said they couldn't be Sith because Sith wouldn't group together.  That whole series was kind of interesting, but I gave up a few books in.  Too much of a repeat of the 90s stuff, although I give them credit - something like a dozen authors were involved, the publisher/LucasFilm/Dark Horse Comics dreamed up the storylines, and they pumped out a unified set of 20 books and a comic book line or two in fairly short order.  But they were just too powerful (killing 300 trillion people/beings and countless planets), and it came out just as the prequels were, so I bailed on it.

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45 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Which sucked because the idea of clone Jedi/Sith being batshit crazy with Force powers was interesting.

If you are talking about Thrawn's bodyguards, the noghri or whatever, Zahn mentioned in the 20th anniversary edition (or maybe 25th, whatever big anniversary edition they put out) that they were going to be Sith like it was rumored with the Emperor's bodyguards in the 80s, but Lucas didn't want anybody touching on anything with the Sith (Zahn wasn't even allowed to use the name in his books) so he had to scrap a major subplot and throw something in at the last minute.  It was one of the very few things that Lucas made him take out.

If you are talking about the Yuzhan Vong? from that 20-book series (along with comic books), those were also supposed to be Sith, but again, Lucas directly intervened and said they couldn't be Sith because Sith wouldn't group together.  That whole series was kind of interesting, but I gave up a few books in.  Too much of a repeat of the 90s stuff, although I give them credit - something like a dozen authors were involved, the publisher/LucasFilm/Dark Horse Comics dreamed up the storylines, and they pumped out a unified set of 20 books and a comic book line or two in fairly short order.  But they were just too powerful (killing 300 trillion people/beings and countless planets), and it came out just as the prequels were, so I bailed on it.

Yeah the Yuuzhan Vong, some of the series was written by RA Salvatore so he just copy/pasted Drow into Star Wars

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2 hours ago, Michael Knight said:

The books were originally gonna be canon but Zahn put in stuff about the Clone Wars so Lucas went back on his arrangement with him/them. Lucas also had the primary hero character in the EU killed off because his name was Anakin Skywalker and didn't want to confuse moviegoers. The EU mostly suffered from the 90s sci-fi/fantasy idea of villains and introduced a really stupid anti-jedi race of aliens an almost as dumb idea as the rule of 2 sith crap

They were canon. Until Disney. 

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