That's going too far!

A staple of my life might just have come to an end. I might have to boycott reading the Star Wars books. I own just around 80 of these novels, and have read about more than 90% more than two times. But they've done something to heinous that I'm not sure I'll be willing to read them anymore.

So here's a spoiler alert, although I'm pretty sure nobody will care if this is spoiled. Except for perhaps Chris, who shares my love of Star Wars, but you never got into the books, so I'm figuring you'll be okay with it.

Now you all know that I'm generally fine with, and even am glad for, main characters dying. I think it gives us a more emotional attachment to characters if we know the author isn't afraid to knock a couple of them off. Kudos to JK, OSC, Joss Whedon, and various SW authors (to name a few) for doing so. But Karen Traviss, author of Sacrifice has gone too far. I really am contemplating boycotting the rest of the SW series because of what she's done.

Now, I know it's not her fault, and that she's following an outline created by LucasArt bigwigs (stupid George Lucas), but still. Star Wars has already killed off some of it's best characters, first in the movies, and then in the books. Usually it's okay since they provide other interesting characters to fill in the gap. But that's just not possible with this latest death.

When Chewbacca died, I didn't really care, mostly because he has no dialog. His purpose is really just to serve as Han's conscious, so it could be filled with Han losing his way (for a while) and later by Leia. No big deal. Later, they killed of Anakin Solo, and I was much more pissed off, but still got over it because he didn't have much depth, and well, I've always been more interested in his siblings. I'm probably biased because they're twins.

But now, now they've gone and killed the single character who (if I had to) I would claim as my favorite. Of all time. This character is Mara Jade Skywalker. Part of the reason that I'm not okay with this is that Jacen Solo has been come a pain in the butt who I really just don't care to read about. And he seems to be all this recent series is about. It is all about his descent to the dark side, and how it parallels his grandfather's, but I really don't care. We've already seen all that in the newest trilogy of movies, and really, it way too closely parallels his grandfather's. Couldn't they have thought of something new. I guess they considered not killing of the Padme character new.

Of course, I saw this coming, since nobody can really write Mara Jade the way that Timothy Zahn can, and she has basically been put into the role of being where Luke is and not having much of a plot of her own. She has become redundant. So she could die and it won't ruin anything, but will serve as a catalyst for Ben (her son) to get really pissed off and defeat Jacen.

But I don't care! Kill Luke instead! They didn't even have the decency to let Zahn write her death, they gave it to some author nobody's even heard of. Stupid George Lucas. I see this being the end of Luke, eventually, which will be nice, but that might just be the end of the whole series. Even though there are enough of the second generation to make things interesting, but sadly, the authors only use the younger generation for filler when they need it. And really, since I know nobody is interested, or probably even read this, I'm going to stop. But I still haven't decided if I'm going to keep reading the books.