Or, I am Yun-Yuuzhan's strongest soldier.

The Yuuzhan Vong, antagonists of the 19 novel New Jedi Order series were one of the most interesting things to happen to the Star Wars EU, ushering in an unprecedented era of storytelling that moved beyond the episodic format the novel side of the franchise had been engaged in at the time. To this day, among old and new readers, the series is remembered quite fondly. However, they are also mired in an incredible amount of misunderstandings. If you hear about the Yuuzhan Vong from people who haven't read the books, it's often in the context of them being one of the 'bad parts' of the old EU, which justified the rebooting of continuity, an experimental idea gone wrong, a justification for the Empire's brutality, a manifestation of 90s era edge, or as antithetical to the spirit of Star Wars. Every single one of the common complaints about them is either regurgitated fanon from people who never even bothered to read a wookieepedia article, or flat-out falsehoods that could be disproven by actually reading the series they were in. To wit, I saw a complaint describing them as "bugs" a couple of days ago, which is not just false, but disproven by even looking at a picture of them.

These are most common complaints I have observed online, and as we shall see, debunking them is not hard.

1: "The Yuuzhan Vong are Warhammer 40000 rejects, ripoffs of the Dark Eldar/Tyranids"

The Vong have no real similarities to the Dark Eldar, and the only real commonality they share with the Tyranids is making use of biotechnology. Aesthetically and thematically, they are completely different from either faction. The Dark Eldar are faithless, hedonistic pirates with a vampiric addiction to souls. The Tyranids are essentially animals with no desires or goals save to feed upon more biomass. The Yuuzhan Vong are a fully sapient society, which is both remarkably solemn and ascetic. They are fanatically religious xenophobes wandering the stars in search for a new homeland after they destroyed their own galaxy in a catastrophic civil war thousands of years ago. Ironically, they are more similar to the Imperium of Man than anyone else in 40k! But given the overall obscurity of Warhammer in the late 90s, it is highly unlikely that it was a factor in the writing of the NJO series. It is hard to believe now, with Warhammer being a multimedia juggernaut, but back then there were almost no games, and Black Library (the publishing house) did not exist until 1999.

This is further confirmed if we look at a timeline. Codex: Dark Eldar, the species to which the Yuuzhan Vong are most often (and erroneously) compared to was released in late 1998. This was the first appearance of the Dark Eldar in Warhammer - they did not exist in any material prior to the game's third edition, the core set of which was released in October 1998. The NJO round-robin interview published in the paperback version of The Unifying Force, the final novel of the New Jedi Order series details that the meeting in which the series was conceived and plotted out according to author James Luceno was held in Skywalker Ranch in March 1998, with a second one following in May 1998 to hash out further details. Vector Prime, first book in the New Jedi Order series was released in 1999.

For the Yuuzhan Vong to have been influenced by the Dark Eldar, it would require that writers and editors with zero known interest in gaming to steal ideas from an obscure tabletop game, steal from a faction which didn't exist yet, and apply these stolen ideas in such scattershot fashion that the end result bears no resemblance to its inspiration.

2: "The Yuuzhan Vong are bad because they don't exist within the Force, betraying the base concept of Star Wars as a franchise"

While it is true that the Yuuzhan Vong seemingly do not exist within the Force and are in fact immune to direct applications of it, the idea is one of the core mysteries of the series, something that the protagonists struggle with across the books and gets resolved by the end. While it serves a 'mechanical' storytelling purpose in being a challenge to the Jedi and their powers, it doesn't exist solely for that purpose, nor does it come out of nowhere.

3: "The NJO is grimdark and the Vong are edgy"

This is a more complex question. To the first, I would say that while the NJO is on the whole a fairly serious series, it does concern a massive war that upends the galactic status quo. Characters die, iconic locations are destroyed. But things like that happen in war, and they happen in the movies too. It is not enough for characters to die to declare that a series is 'grimdark' - is say; the prequel trilogy grimdark because most of the cast is killed off? I would say no. The NJO series remains on the whole fairly optimistic, culminating on a triumphant note for the heroes, with their enemies being defeated through reaching a new understanding. As for the Yuuzhan Vong themselves, tastes are at the end of the day, subjective, as are judgments like 'edginess'. But I would remark that if the Vong are 'edgy' and thus bad, how about longstanding Star Wars baddies like the Sith? Would you examine them under the same lens? After all, the heroes are tortured by the villains in every single film of the OT, with Leia in ANH, Han in ESB and Luke in RotJ.

Now, there is a final elephant in the room to address, which is the depictions of the Yuuzhan Vong in art. I would agree the art portrays them in a very dark and disturbing way, always dressed in black, with spikes everywhere. Now bear with me, but the depictions of the Yuuzhan Vong in art are abjectly terrible, and completely unlike their descriptions in the actual books, often to the point of being the exact opposite of how they are described, or artists inventing completely new physical traits. To give an example, whereas vonduun crab armor, the warplate used by the invaders is depicted as black and spiky in the art, sometimes with exposed skin, it is described in the actual books as being smooth, enclosing and coming in all sorts of colors, according to Domain. Some Yuuzhan Vong warriors wear pink and silver armor! That's the level of discrepancy you're working with, between books and art.

Mind you though, as inaccurate as the art is, none of it depicts them as "bugs". I still have no idea where that one came from.

4: "The NJO books follow on a long trend of the EU being fascist-friendly, by presenting the Yuuzhan Vong as both a rationale and an excuse for the Empire in general and Palpatine in particular"

This one is actually entirely wrong. It stems wholly from fanon and misreadings of a passage from The Essential Guide to Warfare (a book that it is worth noting, came out years after the NJO series was finished). To start with the latter as it is easier to debunk, the passage in question is an in-universe work of propaganda written decades after the Vong War by a character who is explicitly characterized as an Imperial apologist, out to lionize Thrawn and whitewash Palpatine. It is not consistent with the NJO books, the portrayal of either Thrawn or Palpatine in other EU material, nor are these motivations ascribed to them anywhere save the rantings of an in-universe crank who spends his time complaining about how children are 'Force-fed Mothmatist propaganda'. As for the idea that the NJO series presents the Empire as being stronger, or able to handle the invasion better, I would suggest that much of the series strongly implies this would not work. When the idea is explicitly brought up in Destiny's Way, Han Solo proceeds to brutally shoot it down. When the Imperial Remnant fights the Yuuzhan Vong at various points in the series, they don't perform any better than the New Republic, lose their capital, an enormous chunk of their fleet and in fact would have been completely destroyed as an effective fighting force if not for the protagonists saving Pellaeon.

5: "I don't like biotech, biotech is dumb"

Well, personal tastes, I guess? I don't see how biotech is inherently dumber than hyperspace or fighters that work like WW2 planes. But maybe it makes sense if you're parroting opinions from early 2000s fansites, knowingly or not. Also, using mini singularities as shielding and means of propulsion, wearing a living crab as armor, or glinting bug jewelry that's biting at your ear is cool, and I don't care what anyone else thinks.

The next time I hear someone complaining about how the NJO and the Yuuzhan Vong were one of the 'bad things' about the EU while clearly not knowing shit about either, I'm going to beat them with forty Nostrils of Palpatine for their insolence.