That could be true about Ashoka never turning, on the other hand, she had her own brushes with the Darkside. Ashoka feeling like the Jedi betrayed her could've been cultivated into anger and hate, with the right influence, which Palpatine was all about influence. Also, Khajiit doesn't think Obi would have been a very good target for recruitment by Palpatine because he hadn't had a falling out with the Jedi Order.

Palpatine would never recruit Ahsoka anyway since he had Anakin. Rule of Two, and all that.

This post has been edited by hazmick: May 7 2017, 05:24 PM

Oh Khajiit wasn't saying he would recruit her to make her a Darth.

Every force user has their brushes with the dark side. It is part of using the Force, and growing in power. Everyone feels hate, anger, and fear at some point or another. But not everyone allows them to rule their lives. Obi-Wan watched Maul murder the woman he loved. But he still didn't fall. I just think that Ahsoka is made of the same stuff as Obi-Wan, not Anakin.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: May 7 2017, 05:57 PM

Oh ok, Khajiit see's your point.

Oh look. ModDB has Jedi Academy mods.

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: May 8 2017, 12:52 AM

Got some Jedi Academy pics for you folks!

Female Twi'lek Jaden Korr

With her unique Lightsaber.

Stealth!

Stormtroopers doing what they do best...

Jaden attends orientation provided by a living legend!

Angry after Rosh pulls an a-hole move during training...

... and she lets him know about it!

"I can feeel your anger!"

She let it go, but man is this guy annoying!

"What piece of junk!"

"Shhh! Somebody's coming!"

Twi'lek's FTW! Is that outfit one of the vanilla ones? Or a mod?

I thought the stormtroopers doing what they do best would be shooting and missing!

What a piece of junk!

Yes, her outfit is the first vanilla torso, and either the second or third vanilla legs. The only thing modded (on her character model that is), is her skin color and her saber blade color. Khajiit downloaded two mods, one was a general texture overhaul and the other was Jedi Academy Enhanced which added things like RGB saber blade sliders, player tint (which on most characters is clothing color, but skin color on Twi'lek), a couple of new force powers (one for each alignment), and some other tweaks.

Regarding the Stormies, that's exactly what Khajiit was getting at! Jaden is at point blank range and they still didn't hit her! This usually leads to the thing they do second best, which is what the Stormie on the right is doing!

I have read the first few issues of the Poe Dameron comic, and learned a few things. Firstly some timeline things.

4 ABY - Battle of Endor
5 ABY - Battle of Jakku (with it the end of the Empire, and the seed of the First Order traveling to Wild Space).
28 ABY - The novel Bloodline (and the first glimpse of the First Order being somewhere out there)
34 ABY - The Poe Dameron comic and following it The Force Awakens movie.

In Poe #1 we find that there is some sort of peace between The First Order and the New Republic. The Resistance fighters are under strict orders not to fire upon the First Order unless they are fired upon first. The reverse seems to be in effect as well.

That seems interesting, as I would have expected the First Order to burst upon the scene by immediate attacks upon the Republic. But instead in the 6 years between Bloodline and The Force Awakens they seem to have slowly emerged, but not gone to open war. I now suspect that they were biding their time until Starkiller base was operational. In Bloodline Leia knows very little about the First Order, not even their name. Just that there is some nameless threat growing beyond the edge of known space that most of the Republic is ignoring (but some are secretly financing).

By Poe #1, Leia and the Resistance clearly know what they are up against. In fact Poe has been intercepting intelligence reports from First Order spies.

In Bloodline Ben is still at Jedi school with Luke. So his betrayal and murder of the other Jedi took place somewhere between 28 ABY and 34 ABY. I just realized that one of the first things Anakin did when he fell was kill the Jedi younglings in the Temple on Coruscant. It looks like the first thing Ben/Kylo did was kill all of Luke's other students (though my guess is they were not children). So following in grandpa's footsteps.

This also implies that Rey was marooned on Jakku sometime before Luke's school fell. In her flashbacks she was a young child when she was left on Jakku. My guess is around 8 years old. That would put it at around 24 ABY. Four years before Bloodline. But why would Luke send her to Jakku more than four years before Ben/Kylo fell and killed everyone. Assuming that is why she ended up on Jakku? Maybe one has nothing do with the other (but I doubt it, considering Rey's vision seems to have put here there). Or maybe Lucasfilm mucked up the timeline already...

This post has been edited by SubRosa: May 9 2017, 03:01 AM

Khajiit is very interested in Rey's lineage and circumstances. This one thinks it's obvious she will be a descendant of Anakin, but which sibling, Luke or Leía? Could Rey be a Solo and Ben not even know? If she is Luke's daughter, who was her mother and why did he leave his own child an orphan on Jakku? So many fun questions!

I wouldn't be surprised.

Maybe Luke knew what was going to happen with his school, but either couldn't or wouldn't stop it and sent Rey away as a contingency plan. The Force works in mysterious ways.

Khajiit has no doubt that Luke thought it would be best for Rey to be on Jakku. What could've transpired to bring him to that awful decision? That leaving a young girl alone on a strange planet is better than what might happen if she stayed with him? It may be like you said, Ben/Kylo destroying his academy, but Khajiit *suspects* it may be something deeper than that. Maybe something with Snoke?

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: May 9 2017, 06:20 AM

I read up to the most recent Poe Dameron comic today. I also finished Before The Awakening. It is basically three short stories, one each for Finn, Rey, and Poe. They tell their stories before The Force Awakens.

Finn's was perhaps the most illuminating. He was one of the best stormtroopers in his training unit. But he had one terrible flaw. He felt compassion. First he tried to help one of his squadmates who was failing. Then later they were brought in to supposedly restore order at a mining outpost that supposedly was being manipulated to rise up because of Republic agents. It turns out the miners were slaves trapped on the asteroid the mine was in, slowly being starved to death and suffering injury after injury from the unsafe working conditions. They staged a strike. Captain Phasma met with their leaders to negotiate. Which is to say, she ordered Finn and his squad to kill them all. Finn didn't do it, but the others did of course. In the end Finn is being sent out on the mission to Jakku, feeling that there is something wrong with him, because he does not belong.

Rey's story does not really impart much new. Just mostly about how life sucks on Jakku. The biggest revelation might be that in her At-At home she has a Y-Wing monitor screen and some flight simulator software (the realistic kind, for training pilots), which she uses all the time for both entertainment and to learn to fly. That is why she is such a good pilot. It also shows where she learned so much about starship mechanics. She has spent her entire life not only stripping wrecks, but at one point she even took a crashed freighter and got it working again using parts cannibalized from other ships.

Poe's story starts with him flying for the Republic, and shows how he joined the Resistance. It ends just as he is given the assignment of finding Max Von Sydow (and right where the Poe Dameron comic begins. His story shows us a lot more of the Shadow War going on between the First Order and the Resistance. Both sides are technically adhering to the Galactic Concordance that officially ended the rebellion, and while each is under orders not to fire on the other, that rule gets broken a lot. It just happens when it's out of sight and unproveable. The First Order seems to be buying time for Starkiller Base to be finished. The Resistance is buying time to build up strength for the inevitable war.

All in all the book gives a lot more background to the new Force Awakens era, and really helps set up the movie and its characters.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: May 10 2017, 09:33 PM

That's very reminiscent of the background in SWtOR - the Sith Empire and Republic technically have a peace treaty, but by either working through intermediaries, having people pretend they're working alone, or doing stuff in very remote locations, they manage to have a pretty big conflict going on in secret.

Seems some things never change.

That might be where they got the idea from!

I don't really mind it, because they have shown that both sides have a reason to continue the farce of peace. It is obvious that it will not last.

Speaking of working through intermediaries, that was in Poe's story. He and two other pilots had a mission to get the evidence that a Republic Senator was working with the First Order. The senator was taking numerous trips to the borderlands between Republic and First Order space. Leia wanted to get the navigational data from his ship's computer to prove he was actually traveling to FO space. But the senator wiped the data every time he landed. So Poe had to intercept his ship in space, board it, and get the info. They did so by using some old Z-95 Headhunters and impersonating pirates. The First Order showed up to 'rescue' the senator, and Poe and company had to fight their way out.

I also did not have time to mention that the Poe Dameron comic shows us how Black Squadron was formed, and puts names and a little backstory to a few of the faces in those X-Wings in the movie. Sadly it is only a few, as one character dies before the film, another deserts/goes on the run after rescuing his wife from slavery, and a third actually gets a promotion to leading a different squadron.

Another interesting thing I am seeing is that it is not an accident there are so many young faces in the First Order in the movie. From what we saw of the First Order's creation at the end of the Empire's End trilogy, and now in the new books, the FO is not simply a continuation of the Empire. It is new, built around those feral children that Admiral Sloane took with her to Wildspace after Jakku. That explains why Hux is a general and yet still in his twenties. All of the First Order people were taken as children and molded into what they are. Like Finn. It makes them very loyal, since they have never known anything but the propaganda the FO wants them to know. But it also makes them inexperienced. They spend a lot of time training. But there is training, and then there is real action. They have not seen action.

The Poe Dameron comic introduces a First Order spy named Terex, who is actually a former Imperial Stormtrooper who fought on Jakku. After the war he became a pirate, and much later joined the First Order when it returned to the known galaxy. Captain Phasma does not like him much though, she is pretty contemptuous of him in fact. Because he was part of the old Empire. The First Order consider themselves superior to that, untainted. So while the First Order is essentially the successor to the Empire, they consider themselves above it.

In contrast many of the Resistance fighters and leaders are veterans of the Rebellion. From Leia and Ackbar on down to fighter pilots like Lu'lo (we see him both the Shattered Empire comic and Poe Dameron comic) and Snap Wesley (he was a mid-teen during the Rebellion, but he flew an X-Wing at Jakku). The First Order might have numbers, but the Resistance has the experience. The difference really shows in their dogfights.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: May 11 2017, 02:56 AM

You wouldn't know that the film though, where Finn seems to spend most of his time trying desperately to not die while people are constantly swinging things at him.

I hope the next film actually lets us see the "elite soldier" side of him, because it's something I've felt the films have always been missing. It's always criminals, Jedi, pilots, or politicians that save the day, but never simple soldiers.

Pilot: Thank you it belong to my brother whose now deceased .

This post has been edited by Dark Reaper: May 10 2017, 11:26 PM

I just caught something while watching TFA. When Rey is giving the list of former owners of the Falcon, one of the gangs she mentions is the Irving Boys. When Poe pretends to be a pirate in Before The Awakening, he told the crew of the ship he was hijacking that he was one of the Irving Boys! So that is a nice little tie-in.

I also noticed that in Maz Kanata's cantina, when Maz tells Finn that he can trade work for passage on a ship, it is the Crimsion Corsair that she is pointing to, from The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku.


I agree. Finn seems to be basically an everyman character, who is very easy to relate to, feel sympathy for, and laugh with. But I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that the top 1% of the stormtrooper class is not quite the same as the top 1% of the jedi, senator, or smuggler class...

This post has been edited by SubRosa: May 11 2017, 12:22 AM

Okay . . . question for you guys. Anyone else get irritated when good stuff is deleted from the script and replaced with, well, not so stellar material? George Lucas had plenty of opportunities to make a GREAT story in Revenge of the Sith but he left some major stuff out. Substance.

In the original script for Episode III, Padme was a major character in planting the seeds and contributing the creation of the Rebel Alliance. The novel and deleted scenes explains some of it when Padme and major characters like Bail and Mon Mothma speak about Chancellor Palpatine and his position in the senate.

Apparently, Padme was going to kill Darth Vader . . . with a knife . . . on Mustafar . . . Wow.

Obi-Wan shows up. Vader freaks out . . . and fighting begins.

Here's the video. It starts at 28 minutes in.

George. What the hell George . . . .What. The. Hell.