#solo command

[malaikoftadraws]

Tonin, King of the Mouse Droids

inspired by X-Wing: Solo Command by Aaron Allston

BONUS:

[incorrectstarwarslegendsquotes]

Lara Notsil: they call me an undercover agent. the way i’m. under the covers :) cozy in bed :) Tal'dira: they call me a sleeper agent the way i. well. i shan’t say.

[accidental-spice]

Wraith Squadron, everybody

[lajulie24]

Mid-year book check-in!

I was tagged by the lovely @otterandterrier and while my stats aren’t impressive, I like the idea of sharing them and sharing what I’ve been reading. I’m not counting fanfiction in here, because while I have read and enjoyed a lot of that this year, I also want to read books.

Read so far: 4 books (I feel like it’s more but I did a poor job updating my StoryGraph and I figure that if I didn’t remember reading a book it probably shouldn’t count in the total), 1021 pages. All fiction, and my main “moods” for my reads so far are adventurous, lighthearted, hopeful, funny, and dark. The “dark” at the end was kind of funny to see but I guess a lot of my faves are more dark with a happy ending type books.

Two of my books were rereads of Star Wars novels — Solo Command from the Wraith Squadron series and Starfighters of Adumar which is more of a Rogue Squadron-centered book, both by Aaron Allston. I highly recommend both — both are crammed full of characters whose personalities we actually get to see while they are having adventures, and manage to be complex and funny and wonderful.

My two other books are sort of lighthearted fantasy books, both about magic users. The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong was delightful; it’s a story about two mages (well, an apprentice mage and an established mage who has been struggling) who are sent with a cart full of what are deemed to be low-level magical objects to a town that has supposedly lost all its magic, because the mage HQ has been overrun with magical energy and it is causing issues like turning all the cooks into cabbages. So the two mages, both women, go to the town, where their job is to catalog all the magical objects to find out what they do, and then store them safely in town. But the mages end up getting a little more involved in the town (and with each other) than they’d bargained for. I won’t reveal more because it’s more fun to see their personalities and the plot unfold.

The other book, Violet Thistlewaite Isn’t a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz, is also a lot of fun. The titular Violet was until recently The Thornwitch, right-hand to the dark sorcerer Guy Shadowblade. But Guy is dead, and the heroine summoned to kill him gives Violet a challenge: Be good. So Violet settles in the town of Dragon’s Rest to start a flower shop and do just that. But there are obstacles, a big one being her grumpy landlord Nathaniel, a former alchemist who runs the apothecary shop next door with his sister Pru. And when a blight begins spreading across the town and another new potential villain enters the scene, Violet finds that being good is more challenging than ever — but she doesn’t need to face it alone. Again, it’s more fun to discover it, but this one was really cute and had some unexpected turns that were nicely earned in the story.

If you’re following me and have been doing some reading you’d like to share, consider yourself tagged! I want to hear about your books.

[jkcorellia]

🚨RED ALERT🚨 THE ESSENTIAL LEGENDS COVER FOR SOLO COMMAND HAS SHALLA AND RUNT ON IT

finally a good, official image of Shalla Nelprin

[magnetarbeam]

This is exactly how I think it should always sound when Force-users try to describe what they feel in words.

Like, you can't do it without freaking people out at least a little.

[jbk405]

A few days ago I started re-reading the Wraith Squadron trilogy in the Star Wars X-Wing series. I last re-read them about five years ago (I know because I actually found some posts I made back in 2019), and I decided to revisit them because I was in the mood for a simple, White & Black Morality, Good vs. Evil story.

Warlord Zsinj is an evil despot who is trying to conquer the galaxy because of his own desire for power. That's it. There's no attempt to give him a sympathetic background or moral motivation. No backstory about growing up under a Brutal Dictator who oppressed his people and so Zsinj decided to become a Good Dictator and wound up being corrupted by the position. No looming outside threat which forces him to Take Charge For the Greater Good. Just personal ambition, like so many real-life warlords in any era.

He's still a fascinating, compelling character. He's smart enough to not fall to cliche "I will kill my own people at the slightest inconvenience and then act surprised when they turn against me" self-sabotage. He's pays his people well, and actually pays them when it's time. He even lets them actually retire once they've aged out of being useful. So he's a competent, scary threat that takes close to a half-dozen books to be defeated. But he's still A Villain, who the books NEVER try to position as "Maybe he's right after all...."

And I gotta say, it's refreshing to have simplicity like this in fiction every once in a while. I love a morally gray, emotionally complicated story as much as the next person, but eventually if that's all you read then it's easy to forget that sometimes things really are Black & White. And people sometimes get so fixated on "Maturity" or "Complexity" that they try and introduce moral ambiguity where there is none.

So, here it's nice and simple. He's a former officer in the Galactic Empire who struck out on his own after the death of the Emperor, and that's all he has to be.

The series does introduce moral ambiguity elsewhere in the story. Particularly with Gara Petothel/Lara Nostil, a former Imperial Intelligence operative who enlisted in the New Republic military with plans to betray them to Zsinj before realizing that she would rather stay there than return to the Empire. She does have the tragic backstory, and she is wracked by guilt over what he's done. But it's clear: What she did was Wrong, and now she's Making Up For It. The story still has Right and Wrong and she changed sides, there's never a question that she may have been Right before, or that the sides are so similar that it's no different.

This clarity can be a boon all on its own.

[iron-crakka]

han solo you nerf herder you are better than you think you are

(Source: X-Wing: Solo Command, chapter 8)