Bring Back Mara Jade Skywalker! Sign the Petition!! July 3, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in darth caedus, Mara Jade, Mara Jade Skywalker, Petition, Sci Fi, science fiction, sciencefiction, scifi, Star Wars, star wars legacy of the force.trackback
Mara Jade Skywalker didn’t have to die at the hands of Darth Caedus.
It was a wasted empty death…
Lucas Licensing apparently allowed this disaster to happen and now we should call on them to reverse it. The Sith have the power to bring back the dead and so too then does the Force.
Whether it is Ben or Luke Skywalker or even someone else I don’t care. I just want Mara Jade back.
To that end we here at ShowMeSciFi have started a petition to Bring Back Mara Jade.
Please sign in and together we can be THE FORCE that will bring Mara back.
Show Me SciFi 
Well I find it hard to believe as Madman put it that they are selling as many books now as they were before but they would never admit to it and even if they did they won’t do anything because like it or not as the EU progressed further and further from the movies the novels have been pushed into a niche of the (comparatively) few who read enough of them to know what the hell was going on. Ultimately as I said they just don’t care because they’ll take the money they can get from people who don’t care about quality and only buy them out of “brand loyalty.”
As for being the only ones who care, I find that even more doubtful because lets keep in mind that the series was over more than a year ago.
In regards to whether most fans care any more than George Lucas does all I can say is WHO CARES the fact that George Lucas’ only consideration was that it be contiguous means that it was largely up to Delrey (and we could say Lucaslicensing to an extent) to maintain quality writing for the customers who do (or did in my case) buy these novels; whether or not the same 38 year old who pretended to have kids to buy Happy Meals in order to collect Clone Wars toys shouldn’t have mattered one bit to the publisher.
As I said, were it up to me I would correspond with the publisher on a regular basis had they any means to do so that I could find.
Though I should also point out that in the grand scheme of things that if they were going to bring back any characters by one means or another I would much prefer Jacen Solo. Not because I didn’t care for the Mara Jade character but for the simple fact that we’ll put her at the same age as Luke (who I’ve never cared for because lets be honest Supermanesqe characters get old and boring if not well written), Han, Leia, Lando (aside: I actually prefer Lando and Han Solo simply because in the earliest novels they weren’t Jedi. Go figure).
That being said if the future novels are going to consist largely of the exploits of Ben Skywalker (Luke Jr…), Jaina Solo (ye Gods NOOO!), Tenal Ka (eh, maybe something interesting there), Jagged Fel/Zekk (lol), Tahiri (Booooooorrrrrrrring), Lowbacca (“hrrrn wwaaah Grrrr” will not a novel make), or Valin Horn or someone like that (so left field it wouldn’t even make sense even for Delrey) the only character of that age group who was interesting (by far) was Jacen Solo in my opinion especially with the setup they were making at first with him not being as high and mighty as his uncle the supreme power in the universe.
i dont even want to read the books anymore because mara jade is dead. π¦ it may sound stupid but its true!!
It’s not stupid, Maras_Emo_Life. That’s your choice. Same as mine. I not only will no longer buy anymore SW books, I will never read any of them. And Mara’s death is just ONE reason. Bad story and characterization is another big part of it. Like Bored-Michael said, I also am not interested in any of the remaining characters they have to write about. They’ve killed off all the best ones. Some say there’s a new dynamic with Luke and his son now. For me, and many others, that dynamic has been shattered because of the loss of Mara. Luke and Ben will never be themselves without Mara.
But wait, I hear the detractors yell, that’s normal with grief. Yes. In reality. I’ll say it again:
WE DON’T READ STAR WARS FOR REALITY !!!!
And THAT is what Del Rey has never understood. It’s a different time than when Star Wars first began. A younger generation is accepting the drivel that’s being pumped out because that all they’ve grown up with. We live in a reality-based society now. Younger generstions watch the original ANH and they laugh because “it’s not realistic”. There is no such thing as escapism in the movies anymore because what is there to escape from? Want to ignore the world for a while? Go on the Internet for hours. Hook into your ipod. We didn’t have that when I was young. Sorry if I sound like a near forty-year-old grandpa, but they don’t make Star Wars like they used to. I’ll remember Star Wars my own way. And it doesn’t include anything made by Del Rey.
Well in regards to the movies in general I’d say it has more to do with the fact that a “good” movie is very hard to find anymore so “younger” people don’t know one when they see it. If people would stop going to see crap like Scary Movie, Aliens vs. Predator (Don’t even begin to argue that one, the first one when I was 18 was billed as being a “Three way battle royale between the Aliens, Predators and Space Marines” instead they had a limited re-release of Alien and Alien vs Predator ended up under Antarctica in a Mayan temple….) maybe they would make an effort. Hell, even big name science fiction type movies are half assed; what exactly was the point of Transformers II this summer being two hours and twenty minutes long when forty minutes of it was Megan Fox jiggling towards the camera in slow motion?
The real problem from all this is that viewers are lazy anymore, they don’t appreciate work. People can argue whether Episodes 1, 2 and 3 were good or not all they want and I’ve no interest in doing so in regards to the acting, characters etc but I can appreciate little things like it being much more work (and much more rewarding) to get dozens of extras in stormtrooper outfits standing amongst a bunch of mirrors to move in formation for the Emperor coming aboard the death star in Episode 6 than it is to digitize twenty thousand identitcal clone troopers.
The same is fundamentally and sadly true of these novels, which is sad because one would hope if someone was going to sit down to read a four hundred page book that they would be a little more discriminatory towards its quality yet they aren’t.
On a side note I checked again and I’ve still not found a viable contact method for Delrey or anyone associated with the quagmire they’ve driven the EU into. Anyone else had any better luck?
No, but then, I haven’t even tried.
Anyway, you do present some good points about how Jacen was royally screwed as well. Of all the people in the next generation, he was probably the one with the biggest potential, apart from Anakin, of course. Jaina just doesn’t have what it takes to cut it, unless they made her drop all the boyfriend baggage. But after looking at what has happened in the Fate of the Jedi series, I’d probably have better luck of scoring with a hot Twi’lek babe (which, while very appealing, is impossible seeing as they unfortunately do not exist).
Basically, Del Rey simply jumped the shark, as the expression goes.
Well looking at the progeny I just always had a preference for Jacen for the future. As I recall one fo them was sort of a super empath and the other was Miss Fix it (lol, what?). Then when the novel authors brought Anakin into the mix which I really didnt’ care about one way or the other as for years he was essentially a non-character because he was either an infant, or away being trained etc. When they finally did start including him in some real point they made him into Mr. Fix it; given that when he reappeared some years later they’d decided to essentially drop that (well it was dumb for her and it was just as dumb for him…) and unfortuneately the best they could come up with was just making him into a mini-Luke.
I have never really cared that much for the Luke Skywalker character. If a character is all about truth, justice and blah blah blah then I can at least wrap my head around that because it stands to reason that in a galaxy of multiple trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, sextillions or whatever worth of intelligent life that there would be more than a handful of idealists to have stories about (Wedge Antilles etc.) When you give that same character super powers however it lessens the overall quality of said character to me (lets face it we all know the real underlying reason as to why Batman is better than Superman…) and unfortuneately in the NJO which they went to great strides to write as dark and gritty I found it hard to believe that Anakin Solo could manage to be this paragon of righteousness.
Jacen Solo and even his whiny sister had been essentially abandoned to a nanny, bodyguards, other relatives and if you think about it the Jedi Academy may as well have been a boarding school. Jacen Solo is written as a toddler slashing a lightsaber around beheading dark side imbued creatures, he and his sister are written as being abducted at least once that I recall and attempts made more than once, as teenagers they are written into stories seeing them tortured, witnessing violence, carnage and meting out death by their own hands.
With a childhood like that it made it believable to me that both of them and their associates could take the crap that would fall on them from a galaxy wide war, Anakin Solo just sort of happens into the scene and is greater than both of them (by virtue of?) just never really clicked with me to which I would attribute to him just never really being used.
In any event that’s just my two cents on the “future” or at least the “future” that would have made sense. In regards to the “present” characters like Mara Jade (call me a sexist but everytime I read Leia Organa-Solo or Mara Jade-Skywalker I just ignored the hyphenated stuff because I never really appreciated their politically correct crap out of my escapism, and yes I’m well aware that in India or Japan or wherever they might not have the same familial name conventions but semi Bhuddist notions and everything else aside in Star Wars it was written to appeal to European/North American sensibilities so I never had a problem presuming them to have taken their husbands names; sorry for the diatribe but you never know where you’re going to find a science fiction feminist on boards like these) were necessary to maintain a check against all the Lukes in the galaxy.
Mara Jade was willing to shoot first (as Han Solo did in the real episode IV….) Lando Calrissian was a con man, Jacen Solo knew that it was unrealistic to be perfect in an imperfect galaxy, Talon Karrde was at his core an underworld sleaze; all of these “imperfect” characters were made likeable by the simple act of being imperfect and now they’ve been killed, or are in the process of being written out which makes no sense because Delrey seems hell bent on making everything “darker.” In the end aside from favored characters of mine being written out in disrespectful and stupid manners for stupid reasons even were I willing to continue to shell out my hard earned money to read their trash it wouldn’t last for long because the simple fact of the matter is that invincible, infallible characters just don’t fit into the written universe that Del Rey has created.
If only those idiots at Del Rey saw things the way that you did, Michael, then the EU would be a MUCH better place.
Since I’ve not been able to find much in the way to contact editors at Delrey as they seem to believe that noone would ever want to talk to them in regards to their publications but instead would only like to get in contact with a specific author which I don’t understand why on earth anyone would do that what with Allston Traviss and especially Denning oh that poor poor man…having the crap that was LotF forced on them…
Nevertheless, I’m going to start corresponding regularly with every address I can find starting with these both making known my dissatisfaction with what they’ve done, their horrible missuse of characters that belonged to none of these authors and requesting a way to directly contact Sue Rostoni and Shelly Shapiro other than the submission of a general question to whoever decides to answer it..
Customerservice@randomhouse.com
Publicity mailing address:
“Author Name”
c/o “Publisher” (e.g. Broadway, Bantam, etc.) Publicity
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
delrey@randomhouse.com
With a lack of anything better to do I’m just hoping that someone sooner or later will get tired of it and let slip something useful; especially with email addresses (really how hard is it to save a few different drafts saying the same thing and mailing one of them daily.)
I’d hope that anyone else who finds what they’re doing as loathsome as I do to make more noise as well.
Well I got a response from one of the addresses, basically all that they would say to anything I said was “Story concepts are primarily in the hands of the authors.” (Really!?)
Did you tell them about that swamp land that you wanted to sell?
That’s such a pathetic answer.
Bonus points for trying!