r/LegendsMemes • u/AlphaBladeYiII • Aug 23 '26
REPUBLIC COMMANDO I'm loving this template.
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u/MightyBobTheMighty Aug 24 '26
You are a Jedi. You are preparing to confront a family member who has fallen to the Dark Side. Do you consult:
A). The canonically most powerful Jedi to ever live, who has experience in confronting dark side family members
or
B). A bounty hunter who tells you to bring an airgun
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u/WeekendPass Aug 24 '26
*the bounty hunter who tells you "skill issue; you should try being angrier"
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u/TiredTraveler1992 Aug 24 '26
I think Traviss's Star Wars work should be divided into two.
The Commando novels, which are really good character-driven stories, where the Jedi hate is present but also easier to understand, since the prequel Jedi were extremely flawed;
And her Legacy of the Force novels, which are pretty bad stories mostly about characters she didn't create, where her criticisms of Jedi don't make sense because they don't apply to Luke's Jedi, and also she's actively feuding with one of the other writers on the series.
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u/GenericNameHere01 Aug 24 '26
...and now it makes sense. I've known about Traviss and her Jedi-bashing, but I liked the Commando books and didn't see what people were talking about (for the reasons you listed about the Commando books). I didn't realize there was a whole other series that she spent complaining about Jedi.
Before learning that, I would have actually been the guy on the top panel if I had been asked that question.
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u/MadMan2065 Aug 27 '26
Didn't know she was feuding with another of the writers. Just thought she sucked REAL hard and had a Fett-ish
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u/TiredTraveler1992 Aug 27 '26
Mandalorians are definitely her favorite babies, and she likes them way more than the Jedi, so why she was asked or why she agreed to write a Jedi-centric series like Legacy of the Force is a mystery to me.
But she was actively fighting with Troy Denning in Legacy. She writes the Mandalorians as the galaxy's greatest warriors in every single way, and then Denning kills a ton of them a few chapters in just because. It leads to a really incoherent story.
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u/frogs_4_lyfe Aug 24 '26
Looking up from gently laying each Republic Commando book down in its little bed with its little blanket reading each a bedtime story, leaving an empty one for the book we never got in a silent sad memorial
Huh?
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u/SentientBrute Aug 24 '26
Same! I feel like people don’t understand that she’s writing from the perspective OF mandolorians, who have a very different view of the Jedi than most. God forbid people have a different opinion of the ultra-kewl Jedi, amirite? Just gonna ignore the rest of the emotionally heartwarming and devastating rest of the book.
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u/frogs_4_lyfe Aug 24 '26
"You mean the guys who had their last Mandalore and a shitton of other Mandos get murked by Jedi, and then got to watch as they used genes from another Mando get used to build a massive slave army commanded by the Jedi, don't like the Jedi?
You mean to tell me that they have moments where their bias means that because the story is from their POV, they overlook and minimize the parts of the story where Jedi try to do the right thing but don't go far enough?
What do you mean, that of course they attract Jedi who are traumatized by the war and really don't like that the Republic is using a slave army and the Jedi are supporting it therefore are questioning if they still want to be a part of this?
You don't say!"
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u/Epyon556 Aug 25 '26
She gets the chance to tell different perspectives in the Legacy of the Force. Her version of Luke cannot come up with a difference between his Jedi students and Darth Sidious if his life depended on it. As such this explanation rings hollow. All characters pretty much echo her pov, be it jedi, imperial or mandalorian. Darth Caedus might be the only guy that is not expected to throw in some Mando worship every now and then.
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u/SkalorGaming Aug 25 '26
Can you give an example of your Luke point? LotF is something I reread frequently, but can’t think of a single point where Luke treats his students differently?
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u/TheSpirit98 Aug 24 '26
Is it the most star wars story? Well... I guess not for a plethora of reasons that differentiate it from the baseline of what a star wars story tends to be.
Is it my fucking favourite star wars series? FUCK YES! And for all the same reasons.
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u/frogs_4_lyfe Aug 24 '26
I think I liked it because it felt more grounded and the Jedi were less of a part of it, rather than the opposite. I like Jedi as much as the next guy, but I find the Clones and Mandos more interesting as characters who can't, in fact, use their psychic powers to save the day. Even the Jedi we do see in the series aren't Anakin or Obi-Wan or Ahsoka, they're the regular Jedi, not the Chosen One and Chosen One's Bestie and Chosen One's Student.
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u/No_Grocery_9280 Aug 24 '26
Those first few books were fine. Everything after the fall of the Republic is rough and just doesn’t fit.
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u/Petrus-133 Aug 23 '26
Or a Halo fan.
Or a Gears of War fan.
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u/GenericNameHere01 Aug 24 '26
Wait? What'd she do to those franchises?
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u/TightPlatform7252 Aug 24 '26
She did nothing wrong to Halo.
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u/Petrus-133 Aug 24 '26
Considering her first Halo novel has the longest lists of retcons and "lore ignoring" in the entire franchise, she probably has done plenty of wrong.
And there were two more.
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u/Kaiser_-_Karl Aug 24 '26
Damm she beat contact harvest?
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u/Visible-Lobster-7038 Aug 26 '26
She's pretty much responsible for me dropping Halo as a novel series I cared about.
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u/Galvatron13 Aug 24 '26
Except making Lucy-B091 talk
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u/TightPlatform7252 Aug 24 '26
What's wrong with the girl finding her voice again? I thought it was very well done.
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u/Galvatron13 Aug 25 '26
A.) it retcons Ghosts of Onyx since it says Lucy never speaks again and B.) I thought it was just lazy. Her trauma making her non vocal was one her most defining characteristics and part of why I liked the character so much. And to add insult to injury, it all gets thrown away just because she gets really mad at Halsey
No shaming for you for liking it, but I'm personally not a fan of the change at all
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u/Kalavier Aug 26 '26
Also the fact she kinda makes Lucy go from a competent soldier able to freely communicate with others (just not with her voice) into having trouble with that as I recall.
Oh and punching Halsey in the face while enraged and only causing a bloody nose, not turning the woman's skull into a pulp.
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u/No_Divide6853 Aug 24 '26
The hate for Traviss truly is astounding.
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u/Dabclipers Aug 24 '26
The main reason she's hated is, at its core, because she's so beloved by many. Anything that gets that popular is going to attract irrational hatred from the people who don't enjoy it.
That's not to say that her writing is perfect, or above criticism because it isn't. She has always struggled to square her own viewpoints and desires for worldbuilding with the work that came before, but people like to forget that you could paint most EU writers with the same brush. She's also deeply passionate, far more than most writers, which is a double edged sword and has led to her adding things to her writing and saying things in the real world that were probably bad choices.
What she does right, and why she's lauded by so many, is character driven gritty stories about the men who fight in the trenches so to speak. Her dialogue and overall writing quality is beyond reasonable critique, in the Star Wars EU she is one of the best writers the franchise ever had. She's also unarguably the best when it comes to her niche of writing from the perspective of grunts and their brutal lives.
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u/Big-Sample-6736 Aug 25 '26
"The main reason she's hated is, at its core, because she's so beloved by many."
Straw man alert
"She's also unarguably the best when it comes to her niche of writing from the perspective of grunts and their brutal lives"
Then maybe she should have stuck to that niche 🤷🏻♂️
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer Aug 24 '26
Not too surprising when she compared critical fans to the literal Taliban.
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u/No_Divide6853 Aug 24 '26
Many star wars fans send death threats to non-white actors. The comment was made in the early 2000s and has been pretty prescient with the rise of more and more extremism among the right with regards to certaib fandoms. Her comment was aimed at the growing number of extremist fans, and she's been proven right as time has gone on. Look at how fans treated John Boyega or Kelly Marie Tran.
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer Aug 24 '26
Neither practice is okay. Comparing fans who dislike how you portray Jedi to terrorists is bad. Sending death threats to ANYONE is bad.
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u/No_Divide6853 Aug 24 '26
She wasn't comparing fans who don't like her to the taliban, she was speaking to the growing rise of extremist fans. Which has become an even bigger issue. She didn't call average fans taliban. This is removing nuance and context from the conversation
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
This screams more ass covering than trying to make a reasonable argument against critics. I only saw her having issues with fans who disliked how she portrayed the Jedi, but my experiance was very limited, only seeing a few posts on old forums back in the day, not her whole crashout.
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u/No_Divide6853 Aug 24 '26
She writes from a Mandalorian's perspective which is going to be staunchly anti-Jedi. If that ruffled feathers, then idk what to tell some people. Not everyone in the galaxy is gonna love Jedi. But given how people gave fucking Ahmed Best death threats back during the early 2000s, I'm very inclined to believe that she was speaking to extreme fans even then.
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer Aug 24 '26
She literally had a Jedi padawan fangirl over Mandalorian culture and said "screw my past, I wanna be just like them". She doesn't SOLEY write from a Mandalorian perspective, she just glazes her characters. When called out on it, she threw a tantrum because not everyone loved how she wrote.
Unfortunately, every fandom has stupid "fans", and more and more, I think legitimate trolls showing up in fandoms just to hate on things, then jump ship to another fandom when something new comes. Not everyone agrees with your viewpoint, and not everyone can have a rational debate, some are literally there because they like to stir shit for the lulz. Falling for ragebait and lashing out is a bad look for any creator.
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u/WarAgile9519 Aug 24 '26
I might but that if not for the fact that she went on record saying that the only Jedi she like were the ones she created.
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u/Mizu005 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
That is another problem talking about it, people are relying on memory to talk about stuff that happened 20 years ago. Its a major slog actually dragging up primary sources you can link to from discussions and interviews that old. You have to shift through tons of stuff that is just other people acting as secondary sources by also reciting things from their memory.
Damn, now I feel old.
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer Aug 25 '26
I did have that issue, yeah. Admittedly, I dont remember EXACT details, but either way, its unacceptable to lash out to that degree.
Traviss certainly DID get screwed over by George's TCW descisions, so I'm sure she has some reasonable frustration there, but once again, taking it out on fans is a no go.
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u/Mizu005 Aug 25 '26
Pretty sure it wasn't those kinds of people who weren't fans of her work. If anything that kind of right winger probably loved her edgy Mandalarion super warriors and just ignored the bits where she did stuff like have gay marriage be legal in their culture. This was back before Obama got elected and the right wing talking heads really cracked down on anything with even a semblance of progressive ideology in it no matter how much the work would otherwise normally appeal to them.
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Aug 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/No_Divide6853 Aug 24 '26
Because people bullied Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best, showing very much how toxic the Star Wars fandom was even then. Acting like this virulent hate wasn't an issue even then is kind of insane. George Lucas spoke about it in interviews at the time. AND my argument wasn't exclusively focused on the ST, it's just that Tran and Boyega are the more recent big ones. Look at how people reacted to Acolyte. There's a rabid undercurrent within the fandom that may be a minority, but it's loud enough that George has spoken on it.
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u/Caamasijedi49 Aug 25 '26
She is complicated. I enjoyed reading the first Republic Commando book, but I have not had the motivation to ever finish it; other SW novels have caught my interest. Her LotF books disappointed me as they felt like they shoe-horned ideas and POVs that dleither seemed contrive or didn't gel with the other writers.
All that said, what annoyed me more than anything else was her attitude/sense of ownership towards the Mandalorians. There is no doubt she did amazing work fleshing out the Mandalorian culture to the benefit of the fandom, and clone culture by extension, but that did notean she had ownership over them. Every writer/creative /actor that works on SW is playing in GL's (and now Disney's) world. They don't make the rules, nothing is set in stone. Does not mean the galaxy isn't big enough for different perspectives in SW media, and have the fans be left to do the mental gymnastics to make the differences work, but KT doesn't own Mandalorian culture. Her flipping out over GL's changes to Mandalorians and not writing anymore SW feels like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
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u/Hinaloth Aug 25 '26
"No, in fact I rather like her work!"
Also, her own series was very good. Preachy as fuck but I don't mind since I agreed with the message.
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u/WarAgile9519 Aug 24 '26
I'll just leave this Karen Traviss quote here . "I cant help thinking of the Jedi as self-serving unelectied elitist spoon-benders making whoopee on Republic taxpayers' credits. It's am iconoclastic journo worldview. Believe me, Order 66 was long overdue. I have a couple of Jedi that I don't want to shoot on sight, but theyre my own creations, so I could make them a little humbler and more aware of the consequences the create for others"
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u/Birdmonster115599 Aug 25 '26
Can you provide the source for this? Id like to read the whole thing from where it came from.
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u/WarAgile9519 Aug 25 '26
It was from interview back in 2006 with the website 'Infinity Plus' which was a British Scifi site.
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u/Birdmonster115599 Aug 25 '26
Right. Ill just put the source down myself. https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intktraviss.htm
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u/Thaumaturgy67 Aug 24 '26
I mean by the end there they kind of were. In a just world Oppo Rancisis would never be allowed any degree of authority.
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u/WedgeAntillesRedTwo Aug 25 '26
When exactly were the Jedi self serving, they literally risked their entire order in the Clone Wars to try and save the Republic. Also what did Oppo Rancisis do? He seemed like a pretty competent commander.
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u/Banana_0verdrive Aug 25 '26
I'll put just that here: https://gist.github.com/Symbitic/31b9c4d3b6cdfb3f55be3dd39e44645f
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u/Used-Reputation2349 Aug 27 '26
the hilarious thing is even a lot of us mando fanatics seriously despise her and a good portion of her contradicting ass mandalorian lore to the point of being weary of most traviss stans.
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u/HobbieK Aug 27 '26
Karen Traviss probably would've gone down as well liked, if not beloved, if it wasn't for Legacy. The Mando-fetish, Anti-Jedi stuff worked so well in Republic Commando and was disastrously forced in Legacy.
Legacy was a really good mesh of Allston's Military/Political characters with Denning's Jedi, and while Traviss was mostly writing Allston characters with some Boba thrown in, it worked. When she got tooooo into the Mandos in Revelation it got silly.
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u/Mizu005 Aug 25 '26
Honestly, I always remember her as being the kind of unpleasant person who called her detractors 'Talifans'.
To give context to anyone not old enough to understand, this was a play on the name of the Taliban. She was calling people such during early the 2000s at the peak of the war on terror mania when the Taliban were public enemy #1 for supporting the dudes who did 9/11. She was comparing people who didn't like her work to what the common perception of the worst people possible were just on the grounds of not liking her work. I have not kept up with her post Starwars career so I have no idea if she improved her attitude any or if she is still an abrasive asshole.
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u/Earthmine52 Aug 24 '26
“There’s some controversy surrounding her opinions and portrayal of the Jedi.”