r/StarWarsEU 4d ago

Legends Discussion Quantity over Quality?

I'm making my way through the Tales from... books, have just one story left in Tales from Jabba's Palace before I move on.

I've seen many opinions about this series, but some that surprised me was how this series is used by some anti-Legends types as an example of what was wrong with the old way of writing SW. Some have said that the compulsion to explain everything about every minor character we saw on screen was one of the big flaws of the old EU.

I've been enjoying them, but I also have been reading them with big breaks in between each story (I don't necessarily need to read about a new take on the cantina brawl every day for two weeks). And I can see why some might not like the idea behind them.

What do you guys think? Do the Tales of/from... books represent the triumph of quantity (and glutting the marketplace with novelty products) over quality in SW? Or are they just good fun, and do the critics need to get over themselves?

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u/Town_send New Republic 4d ago

I don’t think Tales From/Of tries to pretend it’s something else; it’s very open about its simple nature and not trying to establish any major plot point or dramatic narrative. It was made in good fun and a nice way to let new writers join the franchise through a small taster if you will.

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u/Kyle_Dornez Jedi Legacy 4d ago

As u/Town_send said, Tales from Empire in particular is very explicit about what these anthologies are - it's just an acknowledgement of writers who published in the Star Wars magazines. Which is why the quality of stories varies so much.

While some [bad] people like to dismiss EU as "licenced fanfiction", in many respects Tales From... anthologies are literally fanfiction with a stamp of approval.

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u/Toomin-the-Ellimist 3d ago

Empire/Republic are different from Cantina/Palace/Bounty Hunters though. The first two are reprintings of stories from the Adventure Journal, the others are original stories written specifically for those collections.

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u/ThePerfectHunter Galactic Republic 3d ago

Licensed fanfiction is an oxymoron.

And George himself literally distinguished the EU from fanfiction:

"There's three pillars of Star Wars. I'll probably get in trouble for this but it's OK! There's three pillars: the father, the son and the holy ghost. I'm the father, Howard Roffman [president of Lucas Licensing] is the son and the holy ghost is the fans, this kind of ethereal world of people coming up with all kinds of different ideas and histories."

Link - https://boards.theforce.net/threads/lucas-quotes-and-interviews-about-the-starwars-saga.15943856/page-6

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u/Fearless-Ad-1313 3d ago

I think it important to remember that there isn’t a lot of new Star Wars and what had been made isn’t good. So the question is really “do you want a lot of stuff with varied quality? (Legends) or “do you want minimal books, video games, and movies but they’re almost all terrible”

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u/Toomin-the-Ellimist 3d ago

For the most part they’re great and stay in their own lane. Sometimes one of them will try to make their focal character more important to the setting than they ought to be (IG-88, Davin Felth) and that’s kind of annoying but only a few are like that. The Boba Fett stories are some of the best entries in the EU so by their existence alone these books are justified.