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MrNexx
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 Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2021 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | Thrawn was always supposed to be Imperial Sherlock Holmes, with Captain Pellaeon as his Watson. I think it's a mistake to assume that everything extraordinary that happens in the SWU is the result of latent Force sensitivity; normal (ish) people are capable of greatness, too.
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I don't particularly have a problem with him being vastly intelligent and a tactical genius. He's got a vast array of intelligence sources, and him being a step ahead of everyone is good fare (especially as he makes a few crucial mistakes in Dark Force Rising that outs him as not infallible).
My main problem is the whole "I can study art and figure out a culture". I've enough experience with anthropology and history to see that going from "This is an incredible level of genius" to "this is magical fantasy."
| TauntaunScout wrote: | | More than that, though, the whole time I was reading Heir to the Empire, I felt like I was trapped at a party listening to some guy tell me how awesome his DnD characters are. It was just an author fiat and plot contrivance parfait. |
There's that, too. His relationship with Pellaeon didn't feel like Holmes and Watson... it felt like Pellaeon was there to be just dim enough to show that Thrawn was super-smart.
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Whill
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| Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 1:45 am Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | TauntaunScout wrote: | | The existence of a Force suppressing creature is almost the definition of a plot contrivance. It was the 90's, life was crazy. |
"It surrounds all living things... except this one." |
| garhkal wrote: | | I know some have had issues with the Vonskry and the ysalmarri.. BUT i never had issues with them. |
I didn't either. My interpretation is not that the Force doesn't flow through Ysalamir. It does. The "bubble" just prevents the Force from being used on anything inside the bubble.
I've extended the concept to characters. In my SWU, if Dark Side individuals procreate, their offspring have this Force-rejecting bubble, and their offspring are normal but cannot be Force sensitive. The next generation after that can be.
| TauntaunScout wrote: | | The artist's intent is irrelevant to a viewer's interpretation. |
That is often true, but it shouldn't be. It is important to try to understand the author's intent, even with our own interpretations.
| TauntaunScout wrote: | | I found Thrawn to be an unsettling endorsement of cultural bigotry at times. |
Nail, meet head. However it would be remiss to not note that WEG is likely partly to blame for this. Zahn was given the WEG books and told to use their fluff in his trilogy. WEG described many alien characters as sterotypes of their species.
| TauntaunScout wrote: | | More than that, though, the whole time I was reading Heir to the Empire, I felt like I was trapped at a party listening to some guy tell me how awesome his DnD characters are. It was just an author fiat and plot contrivance parfait. I can't really say what the underlying themes or broader message of the book was. The author didn't seem to have anything to say besides "give me money". |
Thank you! The Mara Jade character sheet says red hair and green eyes to boot.
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Darklighter79
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| Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 8:52 am Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: |
I didn't either. My interpretation is not that the Force doesn't flow through Ysalamir. It does. The "bubble" just prevents the Force from being used on anything inside the bubble. |
But Vonskr could still detect Luke and Mara while being on Myrkr, so technically still within a "bubble". I guess their Sense Force is operational there. I guess it would be simpler if Ysalamir would add his "bubble" skill to power activation difficulty.
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Whill
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| Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Darklighter79 wrote: | | But Vonskr could still detect Luke and Mara while being on Myrkr, so technically still within a "bubble". I guess their Sense Force is operational there. |
I could be misremembering plot details, but the bubble I was referring to was not the whole planet. Just the bubble around a single Ysalamir, which Thrawn used to prevent the evil Jedi Master clone from using the Force on him. It is a 'personal Force powers immunity' bubble around each Ysalamir. I was referring to the comment that indicated that the Force doesn't flow through Ysalamir. It does and I don't think Zahn was saying it doesn't.
| Darklighter79 wrote: | | I guess it would be simpler if Ysalamir would add his "bubble" skill to power activation difficulty. |
Maybe.
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garhkal
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| Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 2:59 pm Post subject: |
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I'd have to re-read the novels, and sourcebooks, to see how they handled it..
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 11:39 am Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | I could be misremembering plot details, but the bubble I was referring to was not the whole planet. Just the bubble around a single Ysalamir, which Thrawn used to prevent the evil Jedi Master clone from using the Force on him. It is a 'personal Force powers immunity' bubble around each Ysalamir. I was referring to the comment that indicated that the Force doesn't flow through Ysalamir. It does and I don't think Zahn was saying it doesn't. |
The reason for the anti-Force bubble around the planet was explained as individual ysalamiri being reinforced by the presence of other ysalamiri. An entire forest full of them was enough to create a large enough anti-Force bubble to encompass the entire planet.
It was never hugely clear in the novels exactly what the ysalamiri did, or how they did it. Per Thrawn on HttE, they "push back the Force", but that could easily just be speculation on his part. He wasn't a Force user, so he had no way to experiment, and it seems from the lead-up that knowledge of ysalamiri and their ability was pretty firmly suppressed, both in the Republic Era and during the Empire, so it's doubtful that there were many scientific papers written about them. "Push back the Force" may have just been Thrawn's tl;dr for the result it achieved, rather than how it actually worked.
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garhkal
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| Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: |
It was never hugely clear in the novels exactly what the ysalamiri did, or how they did it. Per Thrawn on HttE, they "push back the Force", but that could easily just be speculation on his part. He wasn't a Force user, so he had no way to experiment, and it seems from the lead-up that knowledge of ysalamiri and their ability was pretty firmly suppressed, both in the Republic Era and during the Empire, so it's doubtful that there were many scientific papers written about them. "Push back the Force" may have just been Thrawn's tl;dr for the result it achieved, rather than how it actually worked. |
Exactly. For all thrawn knew, they could have just created a 'static' in their bubble, that made it hard or impossible for force powers to work in there, as they couldn't overcome the noise of the static...
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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I was not under the impression that the bubble covered all of the planet, just most of that forest. Remember, Sturm and Drang didn't have a negative reaction to Mara while at the base, because they were usually in a force bubble. Once out of that bubble, they started getting aggressive. And the wild vornskyrs were also aggressive.
At a bet, the vornskyrs could sense other force-users, but not the yslamari... like gar said, maybe it was static, and the force-users were clear as a bell through it.
Or maybe their ability wasn't force-based. Maybe they just smelled midi-chlorians. 
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garhkal
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 1:06 am Post subject: |
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Of to the gulags with you.. How dare yo bring back up midichlorians! 
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 10:21 am Post subject: |
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Got a bit further in The Last Command and, tbh, I'm not a fan of "Clones go nuts because of a force link to the original during development."
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garhkal
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 3:12 pm Post subject: |
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I actually liked that concept, as it made sense for WHY the emperor was unable to clone force users.... There was a natural "Resonance" that caused one or the other, to go insane... Non force users on the other hand could be cloned as often as possible...
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| garhkal wrote: | | I actually liked that concept, as it made sense for WHY the emperor was unable to clone force users.... There was a natural "Resonance" that caused one or the other, to go insane... Non force users on the other hand could be cloned as often as possible... |
Nope. That's not how it worked in TLC.
While C'Baoth had subverted Thrawn's cloning facility to make clones of himself, and Thrawn was also planning on making clones of C'Baoth, Leia specifically figured out that they were able to quick-grow clones (in a month instead of a year for stable clones) because the yslamari prevented the Force resonance between the original and the clone from driving the clones mad.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | Got a bit further in The Last Command and, tbh, I'm not a fan of "Clones go nuts because of a force link to the original during development." |
I don't see the problem. We know so little about the science behind the Force, so what's to say it's wrong? Sure, it's a plot contrivance to facilitate the end of The Last Command, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it. Especially when you compare it to some of the other continuity atrocities the EU has foisted on us.
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Whill
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:15 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | MrNexx wrote: | | Got a bit further in The Last Command and, tbh, I'm not a fan of "Clones go nuts because of a force link to the original during development." |
I don't see the problem. We know so little about the science behind the Force, so what's to say it's wrong? Sure, it's a plot contrivance to facilitate the end of The Last Command, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it. Especially when you compare it to some of the other continuity atrocities the EU has foisted on us. |
I also don't really have a problem with that as a feature of the specific method of Spaarti cloning in general.
My problem is more with the relative ease of cloning Force-sensitive characters through any method. In Lucas' personal SWU, all stormtroopers are clones of the Kaminoan kind (with multiple genetic hosts to explain the different heights and voices). Since Lucas didn't do Force-sensitive clones, it just doesn't feel like a thing in SW to me. So in my SWU, cloning F-Ss is extremely difficult and thus rare, as if the m-words sabotage it.
For the plot of the TTT, there is really no reason the C'Baoth character even had to be a clone. He could have been the original Jedi Master who turned to the Dark Side and went insane. In Zahn's original proposal, the character was an insane evil clone of Obi-Wan and Lucas forbade that for some reason. In Zahn's next draft, there was no reason to keep him a clone since the original genetic host was now an original character.
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:26 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | MrNexx wrote: | | Got a bit further in The Last Command and, tbh, I'm not a fan of "Clones go nuts because of a force link to the original during development." |
I don't see the problem. We know so little about the science behind the Force, so what's to say it's wrong? Sure, it's a plot contrivance to facilitate the end of The Last Command, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it. Especially when you compare it to some of the other continuity atrocities the EU has foisted on us. |
Bear in mind, this is also my first real exposure to post-TFA EU. A few comics, yes, but otherwise, it's all been stuff written after TFA, or as a prelude to its release... definitely post-Disney, at the very least.
I know there have been some weird things in the EU canon (I also read a lot of Dragonlance, whose series bible was no doubt highly moth-eaten)... but this is something held up as being the thing they should have done instead of the ST... which also involved lots of clones.
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