So we know what the new Thrawn Trilogy covers look like now. And I have opinions (surprise).
The new are above, of course, and below is a line-up of my hardcovers that you will pry from the hands of my dead body.
There are a number of things I like about the new covers - like it’s cool how HttE and DFR create one large cover with Thrawn in the middle. I love Leia’s look on the cover of DFR and for that matter, I like Luke & Han’s looks better too. I love Leia’s outfit design and kinda want to cosplay it. There’s a lot of Thrawn who I kinda don’t care about that much, but I get it - you just pulled him back into canon so you want to sell that point, yadeyadeyada, I can live with the abundance of blue. He’s honestly sort of small on the first covers, and should be a little more prominent really.
But there is something hella missing here guys. Do you know what it is?
Nope, it’s not shirtless weird C’Baoth dude on the covers, I’m like 100% okay with the none of him the new ones have. But on the cover of The Last Command you’ll notice a girl fighting Luke Skywalker, or Luuke? Red hair? Kinda feisty? Trying to deal with a command from the Emperor, that’s oh, I don’t know, the thing the name of the last book comes from?
What is distinctly missing from these otherwise cool new covers? Mara Jade.
Guys, I don’t want to sound like a bitter fan here, I really don’t. But I feel like one of the things they keep talking about is wanting to bring female characters to the front. They’ve given us amazing characters like Rey, Hera, Sabine, and bringing Ahsoka back. In the books there have been a lot of other female characters that have been interesting and well-written. You have Jyn Erso heading the first anthology film. Yay team girls.
But right here in this series of books, you have the introduction of what is probably the most recognizable female character in Legends timeline outside of Leia and you’ve ignored her completely. She’s nowhere to be seen. Not as a character on the cover of the book named for Her Last Command, not with a facial design, not even with her back to the audience in a somewhat dumb design as in the original The Last Command cover.
And I hope that this means that they’re planning on pulling her back into canon and didn’t want to include her because they didn’t want to be set in a design, because that’s about the only reason I can think of that isn’t total and complete bull shit for absolutely no inclusion of a major female character one of the major Legends female characters on a redesign of Legends books.
And right now it just feels like fucking erasure of arguably the most or one of the most important female Legends characters to me. Sure, we’ll keep selling Legends covers, but we’ll take her OFF the cover. And I’m so mad about it. I’m SO mad. Aesthetically, I prefer these new covers, but I will never buy them, and not just because I own the original hardcovers and it duplicates books I already own. If they’d given me an amazing Mara Jade design, I might have bought both… I would, for Mara. But there’s no Mara to be seen.
And sometimes I feel like there is still a really long way to go to recognize female characters in Star Wars. And it makes me really pissed off.
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