arihndas-pryce: gffa: HMM.  NOT SURE IF I’M SUPPOSED TO FIND THESE GUYS AS EVIL OR NOT?  LUCENO IS W

arihndas-pryce: gffa: HMM.  NOT SURE IF I’M SUPPOSED TO FIND THESE GUYS AS EVIL OR NOT?  LUCENO IS WRITING THEM PRETTY SUBLTLY. I mean, I’m not sure that’s actually a flaw here. This isn’t a book that’s supposed to question morals or ethics. This book is “this man is bad, and here is how he orchestrated his bad deeds,” and portraying that sort of story is a perfectly legit goal for a book to have, IMO. I thought it occupied this really interesting place among Star Wars novels in that it’s sort of half novel, half historical/biographical text. It’s got one foot in reality, playing to us readers as a novel, but somehow seems to have its other foot in the SW universe acting as a text that some lover of pop history living on Chandrilla or Naboo or Coruscant ten years after the rebellion might pick up from the Modern Galactic History section of Space Barnes and Noble. Subtle? Naw. Interesting exercise in explicating some pretty important events and the players who drove them? Heck yeah. THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AMBIVALENT BUT I HAVE FEELINGS AND HAVE TO GET THEM OUT.  ^_~  I actually entirely agree with what you’re saying!  And where I was coming from was more complicated (but even less funny than the above and way more ambivalent and I feel like after all the tortured navel gazing ambivalence that was my series of posts on Life Debt, nobody needed me inflicting more of that on them)(AND YET HERE I AM ANYWAY orz) but your thoughtful commentary engaged me a lot!In theory, I get what the book is doing (or at least I think so, given that I’m only a seventh of the way through it) and my reaction is coming from two other sources that aren’t really about this one specific moment:- I recently was trying to reread Catalyst and I don’t know if it’s that I went for the audiobook this time (which is how I’m listening to Darth Plagueis) but I found that I didn’t get swept up in it the same way I did when I first read it, largely because, wow that narration was super, super in love with Galen Erso in every description of him.- This was actually not a great choice of quote for what I’m feeling, but it was the one that I stopped on because I’d been rolling with the book fairly well so far, until I got to “vulgar morality” and just could not stop picturing Demask literally scrunching up his face and going, “Ew, morals.”Okay, three other sources:- I’ve consumed a fair amount of dark sider pov stuff lately (Maul: Lockdown, then The Force Unleashed, lots and lots of Dark Lord of the Sith comics, the Darth Vader vol 1 + Star Wars ongoing that delve into Vader’s pov) and the deeper I go, the more it starts to feel a little over the top for me.You combine those things together and I’m not sure Luceno is putting me in the right headspace for this kind of book.  I recognize that he’s got a problem on his hands in that he’s writing from a dark sider’s point of view, but I’m not sure how much the narrative is genuinely intending that they’re not meant to be reliable.  Awful people, yes!  And it’s Star Wars, you can’t escape that one of the founding premises of it is that the dark side lies and twists things and is unreliable!  But I’m not sure how much Luceno is intending that with the things Plagueis does/thinks and it’s leaving me kind of wrong-footed with this book.Maybe if I hadn’t been feeling put off by the reread of Catalyst where it felt very much played straight that the narrative being a big ol’ love letter to the focus of its story and how that maybe wonder if this book is trying to play it straight as well–even outside of how Plagueis would be writing a love letter to the dark side, which I agree is totally a thing that dark siders do!–then that’s where it’s kind of losing me.I’m very much not arguing in favor of trying to make things more “realistic” or morally gray (because Star Wars, at its heart, isn’t and shouldn’t be about gray morality, imo, that goes against what George Lucas said was the point of the story–that there’s a good side and a bad side here and that the world works better if you’re on the side of good) or trying to make Plagueis kinder or softer.  I don’t even mind the over the top lack of subtlety about his actions!I guess I just wish it were paired with more concrete narrative intentions being made clear–and maybe that’s more on me because of how much dark side stuff I’ve been consuming lately and how I feel like Star Wars maybe does need to be ham-fisted about these things because I Have Met Star Wars Fans And I Don’t Trust Them.So, like, I’m very willing to be convinced that this novel is doing what it’s doing on purpose, because… I guess it comes down to, I’m not interested in the dark side being cool without it coming with the message that the dark side is also deeply uncool because of what it does to people and how it makes them horrible and awful.  Not just “oh, they do bad things, but they’re still pretty cool!” but “whoa, gross” or “holy shit, that’s so sad, think of what they could have been if they hadn’t been ruined by the dark side!” -- source link
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