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 
I think the Yuuzhan Vong in general were a foolish idea, nevertheless I still think the overall premise of something to shake up the Expanded Universe because frankly characters like Borsk what’s his face could finally use a killing and in a semi decent fashion and if nothing else I approved of the vastly different dynamic of the galaxy under assault from an unknown threat because the “resurgent empire” or “splinter faction of the resurgent empire” or the “isolated group from the former empire” or the best of all the “isolated alien species since the empire” were getting more than a little old. That said I think they could have managed better than the organic based technology of a bunch of extra-galactic Jihadists.
From a pure story perspective I also didn’t really have a problem with them killing Chewbacca although I think a blaze of glory or a bittersweet quick yet painless end would have been preferable to what amounted to a big rock falling on his head. I liked the Chewie character, however for me personally he wasn’t much of a character unless it was in a story that involved more than Han Solo and Lando and the other smuggler elements or at least the classical era storylines.
I say this because in the post RotJ storylines he was basically used for virtually nothing but a babysitter or passively referred to as who happened to be flying the ship at the moment. The reason I imagine for this being that it would be somewhat more difficult to make a good character based storyline on someone that you would always have to refer to in the third person because I for one wouldn’t want to have to think of a template onto which to base Chewbacca’s mindset for an inner monologue; and nobody wants to read a book where half of the dialogue is “Hrrrrrnnn rawr wuuuuuuuuuh rawrah harrrhn!”
To which I again say to address one of the principle complaints about the NJO series I don’t mind the killing of Chewbacca because to be honest I preferred the character die with dignity (and preferably meaning) than the character from the movies I watched constantly as a child (I was born the year after RotJ so no I’m not ancient) being relegated to a background character with less meaning than other background characters like Winter or Wedge Antilles prior to the X-wing series.
Note, I meant “I still like the overall premise.”
Fair enough, I get what you’re saying Michael. I was also born the year after ROTJ, so understandably we’re from the same breed of SW fans. So is my future brother-in-law, and one day we were talking about how young people nowadays will watch the Clone Wars cartoon and grow up believing that is their version of Star Wars. Us, on the other hand, we’re old school, the way it should be.
(For the record, I actually don’t mind the Clone Wars cartoon that much. Not as good as the original trilogy, though.)
Still, I wonder if anyone can fix up the mess that has been made. I don’t have much of a problem with Chewie passing on, but a lot of other things since then have really annoyed me. LOTF just made it worse.
“Cade Skywalker isn’t a jedi. He isn’t a Sith either——- he does have the heart of Jedi – and the power of the Sith within him.”
Something about this summation of the comic book character seems eerily reminiscient of Jacen Solo, but that would be impossible because in the EU you have to be one or the other as I understand it.
I have to admit, after they killed off Mara Jade, I really lost interest in the SW books. I got every one of them, and couldn’t wait for the next one, but after she died, I totally lost interest, and struggled through the last of the series until the end. I have little of no interest in the books anymore. Mara was my favorite and when she died so did my willingness to shell out anymore money. RIP to Mara and the SW Book series.
Ricky
I know. I just went to a video games store (and purchased Red Faction: Guerrilla, if anyone is interested in knowing, though that’s not relevant right now), and I started a conversation with the guy behind the counter. He knew a little about the EU, but not much, so I filled him in. He agrees that it totally sucks now, especially with what happened to Mara, and needs to be rebooted.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes when new writers, directors or whatever take over an established franchise, they have plans to take it in an “exciting new direction”, and yet when they do so, the end result just plain sucks?
Everything from the start of NJO onwards needs to be erased. Let’s face it, killing Mara was a huge mistake, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just the tip of the iceberg that sank the EU ship.
See, that whole changing the formula was the experiment of New Coke. And we all know how well THAT went. That’s what these new authors are trying to sell. New Star Wars. And the punchline is that no true SW fan is buying it. Whatever passes as Star Wars in the EU novels today is nowhere NEAR the Star Wars I grew up with.
The problem with the new authors is that you get whackjobs like Traviss who have not the slightest interest in the preceeding novels. That said I don’t expect a new author to read all 100 whatever novels but one would expect that a summation provided by the editors wouldn’t be unreasonable. I can’t read them anymore since Invincible but what I find downright offensive is that they are going to retcon the Mandalorians in future novels to “fix” what Traviss did to them yet personally I would say if you were going to do that then you could accomplish much the same by simply redoing LotF in totallity with the added bonus of fixing all the illwill they’ve generated.
No argument from me here. Like has been said, they need a new group of authors to bring things back to the “old ways”. Basically, a new timeline needs to be done from Vector Prime onwards.
Personally, I have no beef with Chewie dying (hope that doesn’t piss too many people off), but there is so much that should not have happened, such as Mara’s death, and that needs to be fixed up.
Yeah, but like I said before I personally would ask for Legacy of the Force to be redone or negated entirely simply because 9 novels would be easier to “fix” than 30 something. That said I have no idea what heap of new crap has been added with this new series. I don’t even know how many of them are out nor what their titles are or even what the general story arc is, that’s what LotF did for me which is a shame because I boxed up 100 something Star Wars novels (many of which are nearing 20 years old and the pages are yellowing…) and put them in the basement because I can’t even imagine wanting to read even those again.
Seriously though, they are going to make a concerted effort to redo or at the least undo what Traviss “did to the Mandalorians”…this is what they’ve decided needs fixing.
I actually didn’t mind the three clone trooper novels, I say three because Four weddings and a funeral (think that’s a joke? go count them..) that came out around the LotF conclusion was nearly as rushed and halfassed as Dennings’ Invincible was. I didn’t mind them in general because like something that has characters not associated with the jedi to any major degree (if you don’t think the X-wing series was the best lengthy series of the old novels you need your head examined) that said I couldn’t stand Bardan Jusik or “the one true Jedi!” or whatever she was trying to make him into and in particular I loathe the character because such a vapid two dimensional nothing was the method by which they wrote of Jacen Solo’s “necessary” death and that not well.
Towards this end I’m not even sure what their problem was, there’s what a couple of fleshed out examples of Mandalorians in her own series and frankly aside from their personalities as I recall they were all unstoppable killing machines as we had all been taken to believe Mandalorians to be.
So I can only assume that barring them wanting to retcon the EU novels to again take Boba Fett to be the only remaining Mandalorian (like it or not Mandos are cash in the bank so I don’t see this potential revenue stream being shut down) that their main beef with the novels is the over the top ultra mega super supreme badassedness that enables random nonames to toy with “Sith masters” and/or Traviss’ take on taking Mandalorians back to the original meaning of “Mercenaries” (she’s a brit so we’ll assume she’ll throw some latin with a dash of history into her backstory..despite her personally being a dumbass) that was present in the shoehorned into the LotF novels.
Which brings me full circle at 4:45am (damn you caffineless late shift) to the fact that I find it insulting that they’ll pick out the Mandalorians from that LotF mess to fix. Though in retrospect their minor willingness to admit needing to repair the EU from a damaging author (as though they didn’t have useless editors of course) is interesting.