I started re-reading (well, re-listening to on audiobook) the Timothy Zahn Thrawn trilogy from the 90s late last year. I'm now halfway through Last Command, and I just had to make a post about what a contrast the books are to the swill we've been served these last few years.

One thing Zahn understood was the characters. He takes them to new places but never compromises on who they are fundamentally. It's fascinating to read about Luke struggling with the burden of founding a new Jedi order, and realizing that he himself is not a teacher, and has no experience in that area. Luke continually sees the best in everyone, especially Mara Jade, and to a lesser extent Joruus C'Baoth. Luke struggles in combat too. He's incredibly powerful and skilled, but taking on multiple opponents, especially enemies like noghri, is a great challenge for him and he doesn't do it lightly. We know what his limitations are because they are demonstrated repeatedly, constantly, through the narrative.

Another thing that really stood out to me is Chewbacca's role in the trilogy. Far from the mere cab driver he is in the DT, in the Thrawn trilogy, Chewie makes a several huge contributions to the story. He is portrayed as extremely protective of the pregnant Leia and gets to kick some serious ass a few times when people come after her. His desire to protect her is challenged several times as Leia undertakes dangerous but necessary missions, and Chewie struggles against his instincts versus what Leia wants. He is shown to be perceptive, intelligent, and highly sensitive to his friends' feelings. He is not the most complex character ever written, but in the Thrawn trilogy he is a character, and I was continually reminded why I loved him in the first place. He's an outstanding supporting character in these books, and is never used disrespectfully or out of character from what we already know about him.

Lastly, there's a scene I just read in Last Command where the core characters, Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Chewie, R2, and 3P0, are all gathered together in a secret meeting after a near-miss with Thrawn's agents. There's a line of dialogue that says something along the lines of "there isn't anyone else we can trust; the people in this room are it." Luke has an internal thought where he looks at each of his friends, which he quickly amends to his family. I just felt so warm and fuzzy at this scene (despite it being a pretty desperate situation for the characters). Here are main heroes, who we've known and loved for 3 films, and now 3 books. At their last hope, all they have is one another. And they believe that's enough, and so do we, the readers, because we've seen that built and paid off dozens of times by now. There is not a single moment in the DT that comes anywhere near this brief scene in a nearly 30-year-old novel. To think that these books were out there, just waiting to be adapted, but never were, to think we never got a scene with all the main characters together again after so many years, and then to think about what we got...It's sobering, and infuriating.

To me, that's Disney's greatest crime: what they didn't give us. What they passed up or discarded or ignored to push forward their own incoherent scribblings. I'm not saying the entire Thrawn trilogy should or could be adapted to film. The events in the story wouldn't matter so long as the characters were there. So long as the film, any film, can capture the feeling of the scene I described above. That's all Disney had to do. They had thousands upon thousands of pages of material written for them that they could have picked the choice elements from. They could have honored the characters, and the fans, and also created something new and exciting that we hadn't seen before in a SW film. Surely it wouldn't have been any harder, or more expensive, than what they did do. They simply didn't care to. They didn't care at all.

It just staggers my mind to think they would spend $4 billion getting this IP and then utterly destroy it within half a decade. To think that two or three individuals at Disney and LF, narcissists to a man (or woman), had the power to do this, in spite of 40 years of fandom, in spite of everything these same people already knew worked with Marvel, they destroyed a cultural landmark. For nothing. For no one to end up happy. I doubt my dream of recasting the main characters and filming an adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy as the new sequel trilogy will ever come true. Until and unless it does, the books must remain the true and worthy successor to the OT. I highly recommend all salt miners go read them, especially if you haven't before. They'll make you smile, and remember why you love Star Wars. And they'll make you furious and sad over what could have been but for the boundless arrogance and bottomless stupidity of a few soulless ghouls in Hollywood.