Anyone feels like the darker post ROTJ Big Three adventures should have stopped?

[Red Robe Jaldari]

I say after the Vong Invasion it should have stopped, we should have seen some more optimistic stories about them from that point forward. I really feel the EU betrayed the tone and premise of the whole big 3 era kicked off by the movies by pushing all the family drama and turmoil for these characters after the Vong Invasion. Anyone who feels this way but has a different cutoff point in the chronology for the grimdarkness?

Or has a disagreement about something else...

[Starter Set]

Always found the vong to be a terrible idea for being honest.

[sunofdarkchild]

I agree. I really enjoyed the NJO, but what came afterwards what terrible. Legacy of the Force was backwards in thinking, mishandled in execution, culled the next generation thereby killing story potential, and of all things sought to retell the prequels. The EU was never going to recover from such a terrible story.

I think there could have been potential in a civil war where no one is the villain and Han and Luke choose different sides, but the potential lies in the moral ambiguity of the story and is utterly ruined by turning one of the main characters into a Sith. Seriously, whoever came up with the idea to turn Jacen Solo into a Sith lord should never be allowed to write again.

[Hiromi]

It honestly started during the Vong invasion, killing off Anakin when previous writers had spent several novels building him up was head scratchingly bizarre from what was supposed to be a tighter and more focused(aka with editors being more involved) EU. Never mind turning Jacen into an insufferable prick. And it just got worst. I wasn't all that sad to see the stuff get cut by Disney to be honest, it had gotten pretty irredeemable by that point

[ChrisIII]

Technically, it has stopped-the sequel trilogy totally ignores the Vong stuff entirely. Although the characters don't exactly get 100% happy endings that way either....

I thought at first it was an interesting concept, a break from the bazillion Imperial remnant/Sith vs New Republic/Jedi stories (Which the EU sort of backslid into after NJO wrapped up), but I felt it sort of became sloppy after a while, and some of the Vong technology just didn't really seem "Star Wars" to me....

[Red Robe Jaldari]

I agree. I really enjoyed the NJO, but what came afterwards what terrible. Legacy of the Force was backwards in thinking, mishandled in execution, culled the next generation thereby killing story potential, and of all things sought to retell the prequels. The EU was never going to recover from such a terrible story.

It was on the road to recovery right before it was ended.

[LordMikel]

Legacy of the Force was terrible. At least two books ended in the exact same place. Jacen did something horrible, good guys said, "I can't believe he did that" and the bad guys got away.

After that was good and it still makes me mad they didn't finish the storyline. I was promised a Sith versus Sith war.

I think they milked the Vong story too long. Many hardcovers plus the straight to paperback. I think perhaps 4 or 5 of those could have been dropped.

[Sacred Knight]

For all intents and purposes my interest in the EU ended after the Hand of Thrawn Duology. I only got a couple books into NJO and hated it, and I never went back. It only got worse from there so I'm glad I stopped when I did.

Its why I didn't care when the sequel trilogy moved it all out of canon. By the time that happened the entire original EU structure had collapsed on itself anyway.

[WebLurker]

It was on the road to recovery right before it was ended.

Not sure about that. I found Fate of the Jedi to be the worst thing in the franchise to date. I agree with a lot of other users here; NJO is where things started going south and it only got worse, to the point that I was okay with a new movie series erasing the post ROTJ-timeline clean for something new.

In regards to the OP, yes, I think the series should've passed the baton from the original character to the new generation, exactly what TFA did, ironically enough.

[Hiromi]

Even if it did start improving the damage was done, one of the biggest complaints about the EU is that it was always the OT club, Luke, Han, Chewie and Leia. Sometimes Lando. The four biggest original EU characters were Mara Jade(who was also by far the most popular), the Solo twins, and Anakin Solo, and they killed off three out of four of them, meanwhile the only OT character who got axed was the most replaceable in Chewie

[Red Robe Jaldari]

By the time that happened the entire original EU structure had collapsed on itself anyway.

What do you mean exactly?

[Sacred Knight]

I just felt the killing off of some of the best characters the very medium created, like Mara Jade, Jacen, even as far back as Anakin Solo, which had become a big part of the mythos, weakened the foundation. Mara's death being what really broke the camel's back. That was the pov I was coming from with the comment. All that was really left were the core three, and they had just gone through too much, imo.

I know that is ironic in part because Luke and Leia have gone through a lot too and now Han is gone in the main continuity now. But jumping into things after a big time lapse kinda helps in that regard. I didn't follow a bunch of stuff in between to see it all destroyed, in other words.

[Enterprise E]

I just felt the killing off of some of the best characters the very medium created, like Mara Jade, Jacen, even as far back as Anakin Solo, which had become a big part of the mythos, weakened the foundation. Mara's death being what really broke the camel's back. That was the pov I was coming from with the comment. All that was really left were the core three, and they had just gone through too much, imo.

That's my view of what happened to the EU as well. It was great until the Dark Nest Trilogy. Sure there were a few clunkers in the pre Dark Nest Trilogy stuff, but overall, things looked to be going fine; and even before then, the NJO was not bad and improved as it went on, with there being a good deal of hope at the end, despite the deaths in it. When Chewbacca was killed, I was not thrilled, but it was still something that could help develop other characters. Even the killing of Anakin Solo was not a death knell because it helped develop Jacen Solo and the end of the NJO, there was a sense of hope and that there was a new way of looking at the Force. That foundation was beginning to break come the Dark Nest Trilogy, and collapsed entirely with the events of Legacy of the Force. As stated before, the killing of Mara was the straw the broke the camel's back and made the EU irredeemable with the fall of Jacen merely making things worse. I never read Fate of the Jedi because I was so angry about the events of Legacy of the Force. As a result, I'm not sad to see Disney throw out the EU entirely, merely picking and choosing which aspects to keep. I do hope we see Mara Jade, or a Mara Jade-like character, but if we don't, I won't be bothered.

[Red Robe Jaldari]

I just felt the killing off of some of the best characters the very medium created, like Mara Jade, Jacen, even as far back as Anakin Solo, which had become a big part of the mythos, weakened the foundation. Mara's death being what really broke the camel's back. That was the pov I was coming from with the comment. All that was really left were the core three, and they had just gone through too much, imo.

I am fine with killing characters as long as new ones get created which are intriguing but i did not like LOTF and FOTJ. I got bored with the Skywalker mythos fairly quickly.

[sunofdarkchild]

Killing Anakin made thematic sense. He was one of the most powerful Jedi, but his aggressive approach of overpowering the enemy would not work. His death was the turning point in the war because it marked the point where the search for knowledge and understanding became more important in the war against the Vong than military might. It was powerful. Chewbaca's death also served a purpose, to show that the NJO was not like the previous EU stories. With LOTF there just seemed to be less thought put into everything.

It's really shocking to see how much they got Jacen wrong in the Dark Nest trilogy and LOTF. Jacen was still a pacifist at heart after he came back with Vergere. He avoided fighting and was horrified at the attempt to wipe out the Vong. Heck, in his final confrontation with the real mastermind he didn't attack at all. He just took the blows and let his enemy destroy himself. There is no way the Jacen from the end of the Unifying Force would have advocated genocide against the bug-people. And there is no way that Jacen would do any of the things he does in LOTF. All this talk about how he changed during the Vong war is bs and does a disservice to the arc Jacen actually had.