Listen, I love the Battle of Hoth, but this chunk of book just keeps going forever.
I swear to god, every time Luke is saying goodbye to his dudes before a space battle, it’s SO GAY. The bit with Biggs in the last book and now Han, I just….ugh. so gay.
THE MOST GAY: “The young commander began to walk away as memories of exploits shared with Han rushed to his mind. He stopped and looked back at the Falcon, and saw his friend still staring after him. As they gazed at each other for a brief moment, Chewbacca looked up and knew that each was wishing the other the best, wherever their individual fates might take them.”
THE. MOST. GAY. THING. TO EVER HAPPEN. IN STAR WARS.
Even with Chewie there to be like “yeah, those bros...no homo-ing their best wishes through long, lingering glances.....just dudes being pals.....”
Listen, minus the incest, Han, Luke, and Leia is a really great canon ot3 and you can’t stop me from saying that.
Also gay, but now with robots!!: “Artoo whistled and tooted a good-bye, then turned to roll down the ice corridor. Waving stiffly, Threepio watched as his stout and faithful friend moved away. To an observer, it may have seemed that Threepio grew misty-eyed, but then it wasn’t the first time he had gotten a drop of oil clogged before in his optical sensors.”
Gay robots with bad syntax: what more could you possibly want from this series?
“But above all this activity and noise a strange sound could be heard, an ominous thumping that was coming nearer…” Listen, I know I use too many commas in my writing, but would it kill them to put a comma after their conditional clause??
Oh god. Okay, here we go:
“There must have been a dozen of them resolutely advancing through the snow, looking like creatures out of some uncharted past. But they were machines, each if them stalking like enormous ungulates on four jointed legs.
Walkers!”
There is so much happening here i cant even decide where to start. Ungulates???? The exclamation point on the one word paragraph. Dinosaur and ungulate similes within two sentences of each other.
The next paragraph is even wooorseeee:
“With a shock of recognition, the officer identified the Empire’s All Terrain Armored Transports. Each machine was formidably armed with cannons placed on its foreside like the horns of some prehistoric beast. Moving like mechanized pachyderms, the walkers emitted deadly fire from their turnstile guns and cannons.”
Listen, my dudes, are they ungulates, dinosaurs, or elephants? You have to pick one.
“For a moment, Luke thought of some of the simple tactics a farm boy might employ against a wild beast.” Whatever works for you, babe.
“whoea” is not a spelling I’ve sen before, but you do you, my man.
I love that Rebel is capitalized every time. Lends authority and…idk weight? to the organizaion?
!!!! Rogue Two has a name?? His name is Zev!? Who knew…
Every time they refer to lightsabers as “laser swords” I both die a little inside and laugh uncontrollably.
“Luke dropped hard to the snow and became unconscious.” I’m not sure what it is about the phrasing of that that’s so damn amusing, but…became unconscious. Sure.
I feel like the Hoth bit of the movie takes way less time than it’s taking here in the book. Not that I’m complaining–I love the battle of Hoth–but it feels…slow. The pacing is off. And I’m wondering how much of that is because visuals are so much quicker than words…
Anyway, I’ve an essay in me about how certain stories are better suited to certain mediums, but today is not the day for that essay.
I’m...really glad that they eventually standardized that the droids are referred to by their numbers in narration and their phoenetic spellings only in dialogue. Because every time I see “See-Threepio” written out, I die a bit. It’s so ridiculous.
and by “eventually” I mean “by the time they got around to the Force Awakens novelization and not a moment sooner.”