hmm, rereading my post it appears i was being pretty distracted

 

allow me to briefly clarify

 

I liked the Force's portrayal in Destiny's Way. I feel it transcended a lot of the traditional concepts of what the Force means to us

I suppose I'll have to reread that one. It has been almost two years since I picked it up... It's so sad rereading those old books now, particularly when I know that a character is going to die/get a crap hand in life.

 

All the same, I still cannot recommend Traitor strongly enough. It looks at the Force and the Yuuzhan Vong in all sorts of new ways, and quite literally messes with your head!

Personally I think the writers have epically mismanaged the post-vong era. They took the most ethically centered and pacifistic character of the Vong War (Jacen) and made him a sith... Those two plots do not mesh, and the complete failure of the writers to understand the separation of the Empire of the Hand and the Chiss Ascendancy is downright criminal. To my mind they need to declare the entire series of books from Dark Nest onward to be infinites type non-canon, there was such a wealth of options for new storylines in the post vong environment I'm forced to wonder how dumb they have to be for the maddening plotline they came up with.

I'll agree with you that Dark Nest was painful, and that Jacen's fall was a little bit hard to follow, but in the end I can see how things go with Jacen falling. Up until Traitor he was totally pacifist, happy-go-lucky Jedi boy. Come Traitor, Vergere messed with his head considerably, and made him a tad too open-minded. He still saw her very much as his mentor, and when Lumiya showed up as another potential Vergere, it was enough to make him want to at least try it as a Sith.

 

He was already open-minded to start with, and for all he knew, the Sith really were just misunderstood individuals. Heck, I thought that they were- a bunch of decent guys given a bad rep by a few psychopaths. Granted, this is after reading Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover just a little while before (love that book) and it gives a very good argument for the Dark Side, one that was good enough to seduce me to it and then some.

 

I just wish that Jacen's sith-ness hadn't been so mismanaged. Up until Inferno I was liking Sith-Jacen. As soon as he became Darth Caedus, it was like somebody pressed the "evil button" and the "psychopath button." His character was drastically altered, and he stopped acting rationally, or with the goals that he became a Sith with accomplishing. I've made no secret my hatred of Troy Denning and his works, but in this case I have to say that everyone showed a drastic drop in quality following Sacrifice. Hell, Sacrifice wasn't too good in my opinion, but it was still decent. Inferno, though.... it was just a steaming pile of crap in my opinion.

Actually the thing with Jacen post Traitor was that he started obeying what he saw as the will of the force... That makes him a servant, and as Mara Jade has stated a couple times, the essence of the light side of the force is service to others. The essence of the dark side of the force is selfishness, and he never once struck me as being selfish after Traitor, if anything he seemed more selfish before his semi-apprentice hood with Vergere.

 

Dark Nest utterly smashed a number of relationships and completely misinterpreted the Chiss Ascendancy and Empire of the Hand. Moreover I think the way the rebirth of the sith order is handled is absolutely dreadful, and the portrayal of the post-vong environment and structure of the GFFA is simply wrong. Cal Omas is I think defined by Destiny's Way, and from that point on his entire character and his goals were completely ignored by everybody. Where is this new era of federalism that he's pushing for? The wisdom you could feel and the sense that this was a man who knew that the weight of trillions of lives lay upon his shoulders. It's just gone.

 

Moreover the outbreak of the GFFA civil war and the rise of the sith happens WAY TO FAST. They just got through a full scale war with the vong, no one is going to be capable of full-scale military conflict for decades... It's like no one in Lucas Licensing looked at the plot and thought... hmm, shouldn't the jedi get a little breather?

 

A new threat or a sith return would have been fine, but they should have kept it low-scale... a simmering pot instead of a full blown pressure cooker.

Is George Lucas a simple plagiator?

 

A couple of days ago I saw a WW2 b-movie called "The Dam Busters" where there were some particular scenes of which I had a strong familiar feeling to it. It reminded me pretty much of the Death Star attack in Episode IV. So let´s take a look.

 

At first here the original scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvc70ptopqw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIpjgF6SWiU&feature=related

 

And now here is the scene of the movie "The Dam Busters":

 

Even some dialogues seem to be similar. You can call it either a plagiat or a homage. I leave that up to you.

 

Lucas himself claims that he was rather inspired by the WW2 movie " 633 Squadron". I haven't found an original scene from that movie so we would have been able to compare it. But there´s a funny vid where they have redubbed the original scene with the dubs of Star Wars.

 

And here "The Dam Busters" also go Star Wars:

Enjoy!

I think there's a quote somewhere about it. Yes the spaceship fights were modeled directly on WW2 films. It is what Lucas wanted. So yes, he copies them