Calling all true SW nerds

Calling all true SW nerds
Are the old canon books really worth reading?

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That trilogy is okay, don't touch anything with the Yuuzhan Vong war and after, it's so shit it makes the Disney canon look well thought-out and completely logical.

grade four reading comprehension
still better than TFA or Rouge1

>star wars
>anything but normalfag trash

None of the EU is worth any attention. It only works as a movie.

No, not really. Most of the writers are hacks and just make their own shitty fanfiction about luke and the gang.

Let me guess, you think you're special or unique because you're into Warhammer 40k

The Republic Commando series is pretty good. Im reading the legacy of the force atm. mainly for boba fett. I heard the Darth Bane series is good too.

No.

The only Star Wars book worth reading is the one where Lando Calrissian flies around on space whales while playing a magical harp.
I'm not kidding, this seriously happens.

Nah it's all fanficy trash.

That Zahn trilogy is by far the best but it's still got tons of garbage like crazy Jedi master clones, a blue Mary-Sue who defeats unbeatable armies by studying their pottery, the most contrived desu ex ending in history, and fury lizards that negate the Force.

Anything written by Zahn is definitely good. The X-Wing books by Michael Stackpole can be decent. Shadows of the Empire is ok. Anything else is very much meh tier.

Pretty much this.
Some of the spin off material can be good, so long as it doesn't focus on the main conflict/characters of the era, like the KOTOR comics.

The only EU piece of content I ever read was Crimson Empire. And it was fucking great.

Then I read Crimson Empire II and discovered wookiepedia in the same week. It was time to stop.

The Yuuzhan Vong books were pure kino.
>Ganner Rhysode's last stand
>Anakin Solo's sacrifice
>Luke shitting on everything with godlike abilities
I enjoyed the fuck out of them, desu.

Heir to the Empire /Thrwan trilogy is good.
Yuzhan Vong books are edgy.
The Han Solo are much more edgy than you'd expect, with mentions of Imperial slave brothels that cater exclusively to Stormtroopers.

>the Zahn books are the best
Not so fast, my friend.

I've read an embarrassingly large amount of Star Wars EU and most of it is garbage. But the Bane Trilogy is nearly perfect and anyone who's even considering picking up a Star Wars book should start with that one.

Stover is the best EU writer. Allston's X-wing books are decent. Didn't read the one he wrote way after the others before he died, though.

Only the first is good. Then, Traviss started masturbating to her characters.

Bane Trilogy
Thrawn Trilogy
Kotor 1&2 if you're into Vidya
Some decent ideas in the later stuff, like the eldritch evil thing that was imprisoned between 2 overlapping black holes for so long that the first thing it does when it escapes is try to get the Galaxy to love it.

I know that feel bro. I own nearly every main series Star Wars novel from Thrawn to end of Fate of the Jedi. Bane is easily my favorite in the series. I even enjoyed the Karen Travissty stuff for all the Mandalorian stuff. Didn't care for all the romance shit though.

I appreciated the development of Mandalorian culture from Travis's, even if they were just Space Spartans. You're 110% about the characters though.

I started reading Heir to the Empire and so far so good.

Back to r*ddit

hahaha wow! funny summarization! upvoted!

Rogue Squadron books were better. Corran wasn't a particular great character to begin with, but making him a Jedi jumped the shark.

Old EU that's worth checking out
>Bane trilogy (Novels)
>Thrawn trilogy (Novels)
>Shadows of the Empire (Novel, Comics, Vidya)
>Jedi Academy Trilogy (Novels) Fuck you, I liked it
>Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series (Vidya)
>Republic Commando (Vidya, Novels)
>Knights of the Old Republic (Vidya, Comics)
>Yuuzhan Vong saga if you're an edgy fuck like me
>Rogue Squadron (Vidya)

luuuke

There is something around 70+ SW books just in the audiobook form. Some of them are hit, some of them are miss.
Thrawn trilogies are good because of Thrawn, because he brought the perspective from the other side, Bane books are great - irrelevant mine working meathead gets in the troubles with law and ends up on the way to became Sith who came up with the Master - Pupil only dynamics in time where there was shitload of other Sith. Most of big books are good read, and EU brought many interesting angles - for example the fact that Jedi actually fucked up by defeating Palpatine, because Palpatine was aware of much bigger threat and was building the Empire to stand against it.
Or that the reason why clones didn't hesitate during Order66 was because they hated the pompous jedi dickheads.

>tfw Luuuke was an April fools joke but Luuke wasn't

For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force flow around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, yes, even between the land and the ship.
But not the Yuuzhan Vong. Good friends, they are not.

This is a pretty good list. The Han Solo trilogy by A.C. Crispin are really good too and the movie will apparently be taking some of their ideas as inspiration. As other anons mentioned the X-Wing series is largely pretty damn good too. The Thrawn and Bane trilogies are easily the best of all.

Caught me by surprise with that one user.

I'd say the thrawn trilogy are the only ones that are still enjoyable.

Honestly the new canon is much more cohesive and enjoyable to follow since it is all consistent.

I haven't read much of the new canon but Rogue One: Catalyst and the new Thrawn novel are both pretty good.

>mfw Bane is responsible for the Rule of Two
>mfw Bane is responsible for the creation of The Valley Of The Jedi
>mfw Bane trapped the souls of every Sith Lord and an entire army of Jedi within the Valley
>mfw they were trapped there until Kyle Katarn freed them thousands of years later in 5 ABY
>mfw only the Rule of Two is canon now

Rule of two was pretty dumb though, to be fair. One Asteroid or faulty ship that both were traveling on could have meant the Sith were wiped from the galaxy.

It would have made sense if the rule of two was there to prevent the Sith trying to organise like the jedi, with the inevitable backstabbing that would ensue, and instead forced each Sith to keep to a pair separate from the others.

>It would have made sense if the rule of two was there to prevent the Sith trying to organise like the jedi, with the inevitable backstabbing that would ensue
That is mainly why Bane created the RoT though. But also because in the old EU the nature of the Dark Side 'worked' better the fewer Sith Lords there were. Like it was a limited pool that they shared and the more Lords there were the less of the pool each Lord can use. Which of course led to the backstabbings and what have you. And rival Sith pairs aren't unheard of, that's what the whole Maul Vs Sheev arc was about in TCW. youtube.com/watch?v=-7hBZNsPnyg

>Maul Vs Sheev arc
That fight was so damn good.
The animators and Tim Curry perfectly encapsulated Sheev having the time of his life wrecking two people that could barely lay a hand on him

tales of the jedi comics are the goat

Who dark empire fan here?

reddit loves star wars§

star wars is literally balding male with glasses bait

This. Go to plebbit or at least /lit/, since you're talking about [very lowbrow fan fiction] books.

I, Jedi was great. My favorite by far
Heir to the Empire is a close second

This. The main problem with most of the EU books is that they read like trashy sci-fi novels, which is basically what they are. That's why the lauded Thrawn Trilogy has so much stupid shit. None of them really felt like Star Wars stories to me, except maybe Shadows of the Empire. OP's enjoyment of them will probably be directly tied to how much bad sci-fi he likes reading.

And I'm surprised no on had mentioned it yet, but none of the books were considered canon. Before Disney tried to make a single canon, the series was divided among different "levels" of canon, which was basically Lucasfilm's attempt at damage controlling some of the dumber stuff. None of the books existed in the same canon as the movies.

Very few of them are worth reading. The Old Republic ones and the Zahn trilogy are good. Darth Plagueis is good, too, Luceno rarely does wrong anyway so pretty much anything he wrote is worth the read.

>a blue Mary-Sue who defeats unbeatable armies by studying their pottery
Die of cancer.

No, the Star Wars EU is pretty terrible and that's because it was marketed towards kids. I liked them when I was a kid, but I tried to re-read the Zahn trilogy when I was in my teens and it was shit. I stopped reading after the first Yuuzhan Vong book where Chewie gets BTFO because of my growing disinterest in Star Wars due to TPM/Clones, but the books were just bad.

No, dude. Watch the movies. Fuck reading star wars books. If you are going to read a book you can probably find hundreds of better books to read.

The Bane trilogy is the only one that's worth reading.

>One Asteroid or faulty ship that both were traveling on could have meant the Sith were wiped from the galaxy.
This would never happen because sith are so ridiculously OP.

>watching corporate focus-group disney fanfics
nah.

Who here /SWCCG/?

No, the books are fan fictions LOL. If you go beyond the star wars movies you are a virgin.

>reading literal fanfics
>somehow better

>This would never happen because sith are so ridiculously OP.
If their ship explodes in hyperspace, they're fucked.

I remember the short stories being funny

Sith would rarely travel together. But yes, they could get killed at the same time. It's not perfect, but it's better than any other dark side hierarchy.

The only Star Wars book I've ever read was the one in OPs pic. Got it for a nickel at a yard sale.

Was pretty fun. Later downloaded the deluxe audiobook. Was fantastic.

How is that not true? Thrawn's defining trait in that series is that he's able to beat armies by studying their art somehow knowing exactly how they think.

They are shit, but fun kind of shit.

Kinda like the whole franchise tbqh.

Most of it is trash.

>Bane
>Anything with Thrawn
>Plageuis

These are ok

How's the Clone Wars and Rebels show?

Clone wars is amazing after season 1
Rebels is trash season 1, but serviceable season 2 onward

I like how the Thrawn trilogy acknowledges that no reaction engine spaceship fast enough to be interesting is ever unarmed.

Clone Wars is shaky to start with, but consistently good around S2-3, albeit with hiccups.
Rebels suffers significantly from being a continuing plotline, meaning you
Rebels is too child oriented for the first 4 episodes, but gets better when Jason Isaacs' character is introduced, had a good finale for S1 and a decent second series, then a sketchy third series with a few bright spots.
Obi-Wan's Episode in particular is good, even if shoving in Ezra lessened it significantly.

Clone wars has the advantage of having a disconnected timeline, with episodes mostly all over the place aside from a few arcs. this allows you to dodge any crap episodes without issue.
Rebels suffers from a mostly continuous plot, meaning that you have to suffer the shit episodes (Mostly Sabine oriented).

>I remember the short stories being funny

Eh. The Tales From trilogy has some highlights, but 90% of the background characters turn out to be either secret Rebel Agents or secret Imperial Agents and it gets tiresome.

Bounty Hunters probably had the best stories in it, even if some of them were insanely stupid (IG-88 takes over the Death Star II CPU seconds before Lando and Wedge blow it up).

"A Barve Like That" is the only worthwhile story from the Jabba's Palace collection. And the Mos Eisly Cantina collection just all around blows.

Some of them, but most are shit.

Worth reading:
Shadow of the Empire
Truce at Bakura
X-Wing series
Wraith Squadron Series
Thrawn Trilogy

That's about it

>The Tales From trilogy

does that have the story where jabba shoves slave leia in boba fett's room so he can fuck her but instead he starts ranting about how sex outside of marriage is immoral?

>Who dark empire fan here?

Cam Kennedy's artwork is the only worthwhile thing about the Dark Empire trilogy, and even that doesn't cover the whole arc because he didn't draw Empire's End.

>does that have the story where jabba shoves slave leia in boba fett's room so he can fuck her but instead he starts ranting about how sex outside of marriage is immoral?

Yeah, that's the one from the Jabba's Palace collection.

The Boba Fett one from the Bounty Hunter's collection is way too try hard edgy with torture and gore and swearing. Tries to be poignant with a "what happens NEXT? Tee hee WE'LL NEVER TELL!" ending where Boba and Han have each other at gun point and the story ends there.

>only worthwhile thing about the Dark Empire trilogy
what's the problem with the rest?

Thrawn Trilogy of course

The Bane trilogy was my favorite by far.

I also thought Shatterpoint was pretty good. Maybe a little underrated since I never see it get mentioned.

>"How will I know the Dark Side and the Empire are bad if I don't JOIN THEM!?"

Yeah, what an organic direction for Luke's character arc to go in after Return of the Jedi.

Also

>The New Republic was defeated by the remains of the Empire completely off screen and now we're the Rebels again lol

That and it barely had enough story to fit one volume. Stretching it out to a trilogy (with a badly truncated third volume) was an idiotic move. All that and they actually managed to give Luke a duller love interest than Mara Jade, which I didn't think was possible.

As many in the thread have already said, a lot of EU novels are silly space fantasy stuff. I've read a shit ton of them because I love reading and SW so much, and thoroughly enjoyed them, but can admit that for the most part, the EU material is not great writing overall. There are some great series, some absolute trash, and a lot that falls in the middle.
I'd recommend: both X-wing series [except Mercy Kill, skip that], both Thrawn series, Darth Bane series, I, Jedi, Shatterpoint, the ROTS novelization is lit, Jedi Academy trilogy, Republic Commando series, Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, The New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, and Fate of the Jedi series, Riptide (skip Crosscurrent though).

I forget what series it was, but remember when Lando convinced Luke to be his wingman while he tried to find a hot, young, rich wife? Classic Lando.

"No. I am Ganner. This threshold is mine. I claim it for my own. Bring on your thousands, one at a time or all in a rush. I don't give a damn. None shall pass."
Fucking chills everytime I read that.

I too enjoyed the culture development, but Traviss turned the series into a war romance trope. I think she raised some good questions about the clone's role in the war and the personality issues, but went off the deep end with Etain/Darman shipping. I'm also pissed Disney retconned the Order 66 explanation.

My dude, they were fun little throwaways that eventually suffered from the self-referential syndrome that plagued many EU novels. Comfy reads though.

it cheapens the original trilogy by having the emperor reborn and recycles the superweapon plo not once but twice. The third book has a weak climax and is riddled with bad art. Though all books have some amazing designs ( Eclipse SD, World devastators) some interesting but shallow characters. The constant gothic edgyness is silly but kinda fun in a way akin to over the top fanfiction.

>Pic related was at my school library
>They didn't have parts 2 or 3
>Decided that if I couldn't read the whole trilogy, I wouldn't read any of them

Did I dodge a bullet or miss out on an epic piece of Star Wars literature?

Zahn's had a decent balance and at least went somewhere. None of them were of the level of the TOS books between TOS and when the flood gates opened for anyone to write (lookin at you, Shatner!)

Commander Pelleon was the worst fucking character, holy shit.

>Ask Thrawn "Is doing X really such a good idea?"
>Thrawn replies with, "Ah, but you see, by doing X I will force them to do Y and then Z. All part of my meikaku!"
>Pelleon gasps in astonishment and then asks the same stupid question again and again and again for three fucking books

Also Mara Jade was pretty bad.

>"Stupid Skywalker! It's not like I like you or anything!"

>it cheapens the original trilogy by having the emperor reborn
What's the big deal with him being reborn? What other power could the dark side offer than eternal life?
The dark side is a path for unnatural things, Palpatine says this.
The dark side is not only lighting, that makes a lot of sense
Also using clones
>and recycles the superweapon plo not once but twice
Unlike what we saw with ROTJ and TFA, those superweapons made sense and were different

It's a p good series, get to see Boba Fett get back up after being knocked down. It skips between past and present a bit, but is a worthy read overall.

I liked them a lot too I dont know why everyone shits on them so much
At least they finally moved on from the sith and empire shit and actually gave the galaxy an existential threat

I would argue that oddly enough Shadows of the Empire is the most "star warsy" EU out of all of them, even it is written pretty badly. The characters and dialogue feel very true to the first trilogy, except that Leia is a bit weird in this. Dash Rendar is a Han Solo expy, but it kinda works for the story. The new villian Xizor is amusing in his absolut decadence.

The reason to read this is that it has the best Vader outside of Empire Strikes back.

>How will I know the Dark Side and the Empire are bad if I don't JOIN THEM!?"
>Yeah, what an organic direction for Luke's character arc to go in after Return of the Jedi.
>Also
that's not what happened
luke wanted to know why his father fell for the dark side, he wanted to know what powers make him fall that as a jedi he didn't know
also he was a double agent and it worked
he destroyed the plans of the world devastators

>The New Republic was defeated by the remains of the Empire completely off screen and now we're the Rebels again lol
that's not at all what happens, you are talking out of your ass

>managed to give Luke a duller love interest than Mara Jade, which I didn't think was possible.
why? that girl was hot and she was a force user
she was the only force user he knew why wouldn't he like her?

That depends. Do you like betrayals?

I am not hating on the books after all i kinda like them. It is just that i feels that Vaders sacrifice is rendered meaningless if the Emperor comes back. Ultimately i guess the Problem is always new writers trying to introduce their new characters and plotpoints by shitting on the old aleady established lore. Its cool as fanfiction, as an official continuation.. meh.

Luuke was okay though.

very. thrawn saga is great

>be literally one-in-a-billion super genius
>use your off-the-charts abstract intelligence to understand the psyche of different racial groups via their art
>use that understanding to predict the types of strategies they would most likely employ (defensive, aggressive, etc)
>dominate said inferior cultures
Sounds pretty great, actually. Cool character design.
>some subhuman weebshit omega calls you a blue mary sue 25 years later
heh.

>it's not fanfic when billion dollar international (((corporations))) do it.
Nice argument guys.

It's like the diary of a madman.