The Legends Of A Fallen Order

As you’ve heard in Ep 108 (and will hear again, and in more depth, in Ep 109), I’ve been playing Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order and something about it has felt strangely…familiar…to me.
Until recently, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
Then I started reading a new, at least to me, Star Wars novel and it all fell into place.

June 24th, 2008, a month and a half before Star Wars came onto my radar in a big bad way with The Clone Wars movie.
That day kicked off what would eventually become one of my top 3 favorite lines of Star Wars books, the Coruscant Nights series by the incredible writer Michael Reaves.

Kicking off just about 3 months after Order 66, the series focuses on Jedi Knight Jax Pavan as he makes his way through life on Coruscant (now dubbed Imperial Center) after the fall of the Republic, taking jobs to get by, working for an upstart Rebel cell called Whiplash, surviving.

As the series progresses, Jax assembles a team, gets a ship, and makes his way through the galaxy trying to help the Rebellion in anyway he can to take down the Galaxy’s new oppressors, all the while dodging Inquisitors.
He even has a run in or 2 with Darth Vader himself…is any of this starting to sound familiar yet?
Because it sure did to me!

I’m currently reading the 4th novel in the series, The Last Jedi, released February 2013.
Now, I’m not finished with the book (I’ll post a review in the coming weeks when I finsih), but the similarities get even stronger.
As the story moves along, past the halfway point, you’ll never guess where Jax ends up going.
Dathomir!

So, Jax heads to Dathomir, where he ends up meeting the Mother of a clan of Night Sisters who has a conversation with him trying to understand his motivation and dedication to the light side of the force.
Once he passes that test, he heads to an ancient site that has an intense force aura, he is even joined by a Night Sister that knows the site and takes an intense interest in him.

Gang, you can’t make this shit up!
And it points to a much larger issue I have with the new canon overall.
Back before the Disney buy, LucasBooks, through Del Rey, were publishing roughly a novel a month, and in a wide variety of different eras.
That led to a host of different stories, with different characters, and entirely different feels.
That’s not to say these stories were 100% better, but at least they were far more original.

But now?
Now we’re getting stories that are oddly close to stories that have recently been told in other mediums (need I remind you of The Phantom Limb comic being so similar to the Rebels S2 Ep The Forgotten Droid), and in the case of Fallen Order they kitbashed 2 stories together, The Last Jedi movie and Coruscant Nights, to extrude a story that, while still enjoyable, is a lesser result than the sum of its parts.
Overall, the quantity AND quality of the stories have dropped.
They’re swinging less which in turn leads to them succeeding less.

My hope for the Fallen Order sequel would be for them to take a step back, look at the long trail of Star Wars stories that have been told, at least in the last 10 years, and try something fresh, don’t just slam a few stories together and slap a new name on it.
Either that or expand the timeline again so that we can allow the different vibes of the different eras, because this collapsed timeline is leading to far too much retread.

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Special thanks to @ACFerrell1976 for her continued editorial assistance.

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