The Thrawn Trilogy: Dark Force Rising

[joysweeper]

"I have no qualms about accepting a useful idea merely because it wasn't my own."―ThrawnHere's the other half of Dark Force Rising.  First part was here.  You can probably tell that this time I have the book in hand.

Comments

[queen_marshed]

Reading this, you'd wonder why there aren't more villians as competent as Thrawn.

[aaron_bourque]

To write competent villains you first need competent writers . . .

[misterandersen]

This is true.

The single greatest competent ongoing villain I can think of is Beast Wars Megatron.

[devastron]

Because it takes a hell of a writer to come up with a way for the good guys to beat a villain as competent and smart as Thrawn without ruining any of the characters.

[joysweeper]

She... thought about it. But there were all these good excuses not to! And then he helped her, having hardly any reason to do so.

I love conflicted!Mara. *sigh*

[bloodly_shiva]

Hmp. From the amount of stuff that's left out-important stuff, this has failed at it's task of being an adaptation. You should not require both for the comic to make sense.

And the one question that has never been answered is 'how the hell did Thrawn get that good?' He's as 'bad' as Palpatine was at the founding of the Empire.

[valtyr]

See, I had two major problems with this book. One of them is actually resolved here - I never realised why Khabarakh being the Maitraikh's great-grandson meant it had been longer. Here, it says that her first four sons went out and fought for the Empire, so it indicates a long time passed in the Empire's service. I don't recall that from the novel. (I reread so many times trying to figure that out!)

And the other thing is the kholm-grass revelation. The Elders think the kholm-grass is harmless. Why would a droid having some liquid able to destroy kholm-grass convince them the grass is Evil? I mean, presumably the droids destroy the grass when they 'purify' the soil anyway?

If anyone can explain this to me, most grateful. :)

[joysweeper]

She says in the book that her four sons went out and fought for the Empire. Three died. One returned a cripple, and lived out his shortened lifespan in shame. That, I think, conveys pretty well that it's been a long time. Plus, she says it's been forty-three years, while Leia, based on Chewbacca's estimates, thought it had been eight years, and she hadn't confirmed this

[valtyr]

She says in the book that her four sons went out and fought for the Empire.

I think that must have been said a little earlier in the book, and I just never put it together until I saw them side by side here. :) Nice to have that cleared up!

She also demonstrates that the droids could be working much, much faster,

No, she just shows they could be destroying the grass quicker? But they don't believe the grass is the problem.

Also Chewie ran an analysis on the soil earlier on, and while they were going to Nystao he analyzed the grass and confirmed Leia's hunch.

That makes sense, but the Elders didn't see his analysis, so I'm still not quite sure why they switched so quickly to blaming the kholm-grass.

[aaron_bourque]

Cultural differences led to the initial confusion. Maitrakh refers to Khabarakh as (I think) thirdson, which Leia thinks means, literally, "third son." She thus thinks that the maitrakh is Khabarakh's mother, and that Khabarakh has (or had) two older brothers.

She's actually his great-grandmother, since, to a Noghri, thirdson means "son of a son of a firstson."

And, she was a child when the planetary devastation occurred.

So, unless Noghri life cycles are ridiculously short, the devastation occurred decades ago, not the near-decade the droid-renewal would indicate. And thus, Leia gets rightly pissed that the Empire has been stringing along the Noghri for DECADES

[misterandersen]

It always amazed me that no one just threw that Bothan idiot off a building. He's in large part responsible for a lot of the shit that happens in the NJO books and even nuking the senate building with a dead-man switch to take out a bunch of Vong in no way makes up for it.

It saddens me that the new Invasion series isn't an Infinities title showing what would have happened if Thrawn had been running things during the NJO period.

[joysweeper]

I think maybe the most sympathetic Fey'lya ever gets is in "Isard's Revenge", where at some point he tries to get someone to return to a battlefield and try to recover the body of a Bothan woman who'd disagreed with him so she can be listed among the Martyrs. When that someone says it's pretty damn unlikely, Fey'lya insinuates that he'd give them a Bothan criminal's body and they could pretend it was hers. That someone is violently horrified, and for about five seconds Fey'lya is all "WTF am I doing? WTF am I doing

[misterandersen]

The Vong were an interesting idea but I don't think they really fit the milieu of the GFFA.