Status Updates From Iron Fist: Star Wars Legend...

And that's that. Moves right on into the next one.

He accidentally wrote 'New Alliance' squadrons instead of New Republic once here. Combined New Republic and Rebel Alliance, lol.
The climactic action scene only just ended, and it's about to be over. It always catches me off guard how little breathing room they give the ending in these novels.

It's very fun to have Rogue and Wraith squadrons interacting.

Shalla, in her disguise as a Hawk-bat pirate, was a complete stranger to Zsinj's forces before this mission. She had not been present at the dinner. This insertion team that is responsible for taking control of the new SSD COMPLETELY relied on her to single-handedly clear the way for them. That makes absolutely no fucking sense. You would not rely on an utterly unknown factor for such an important mission.

Oops, falling behind. Anyway, the gang is now pretending to be pirates

Not sure what we're supposed to take away from the whole Castin Donn thing. The only characterization we got of him was that he was racist (well, xenophobic, but that's Star Wars' equivalent of racist), arrogant, and insubordinate. His death was 1,000% his own fault and no one else's. Are we supposed to feel bad for him? Because I sure as hell don't.

I wonder if the earlier bit about Phanan lamenting the fact he had no future was some sort of meta commentary about how he was originally planned to die in the previous book, but Allston changed his mind and killed Jesmin instead. I also wonder if Phanan's bitterness about a lack of love life was some of Allston's own venting. Far as I can tell, he never married, and he would've been ~37 at the time this was written.

I know we're not supposed to examine this, but... it would be impossible to fly a starfighter through a forest (below tree level) without hitting trees. It's possible on a speeder bike, because those are hardly bigger than a person. But a starfighter is like the size of a tank at minimum. The trees would have to be so far spread out that it wouldn't be considered a forest, or you'd have to go SUPER slow.

In the previous book, when they were undercover as the Night Caller, they had to rendezvous with a Zsinj-allied ship called the Hawk-bat. In this book, they named their fake pirate gang the Hawk-bats. That's confusing. Why use that name again? Also, in the wide galaxy of Star Wars fake animal names you could've used, why did you double up on Hawk-bat of all things? So many better options...

As I said before, there's a LOT about this Lara/Gara plot that is really fucking stupid. If I still feel like writing a review by the time I finish, I'll go into detail. Zsinj gets in contact via her cover's 'brother.' She tells Tyria 'oh, that's my brother, Firstname Lastname.' No one would call their sibling by their FULL name like that. That's so dumb! Also, why is she sad? She sent the initial message to Zsinj!

I know I criticized the previous book for having a sequence of filler D&D objectives, because it felt like nothing but padding. But reading off a list of objectives the Wraiths accomplished off-screen feels just as cheap, just in a different direction.

Silvery white with blood red trim is a fucking choice color scheme for an R2 unit. That would be awesome. But the problem is he described it as 'arterial red.' Blood is blue when it's in your arteries; it only becomes red once exposed to oxygen. So that's actually a bad description, lol. Tried to be fancy and screwed it up.

They reiterated some of Face's backstory. His nickname is Face b/c he was an attractive movie star. But he's in his early 20s now, and it's 7 ABY. He was presumed killed as a teen, in hiding for some years. Meaning he was at most ~14 when he stopped being a star. They gave a nickname for being attractive to a CHILD?! That's fucked up. I don't think Allston fully thought out the implications of this...

I've never been completely sure on how the name Zsinj is supposed to be pronounced. I've long since settled on 'Zinge,' kind of like singe but with a Z. But I don't know if that's right. I remember when I was a kid I was pronouncing it like Zin-jee for awhile. I knew it was wrong, but it was another Hermione situation. (I knew I initially was pronouncing Hermione wrong, but I didn't know the correct way.)

There's a LOT about the Gara/Lara plot that is way too convenient and doesn't make any sense, but I'll address the most glaring one. As far as Face and Phanan know, she's just a former farmgirl who was held in captivity as a sex slave. Why the fuck do they think she's a good candidate for military pilot training? It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Not only do you need the aptitude, but you have to want it.

I know the opening scene was just to have a fun action scene to kick everything off and you're not supposed to analyze it, but it was really stupid. First off, a lone person assaulting a table of ~10 military personnel apropos of nothing is idiotic and suicidal. Next, Face being able to tell where people are from based on HOW THEY WALK is stupid as fuck and makes no sense. I thought it was a joke, but no.

Movin' on. I hadn't been switching the edition of these, because I still own the paperbacks of this whole series. But Goodreads has changed the paperback editions of 5, 6, 7, and 9 (all the Allston novels sans the very last) to include 'Star Wars Legends' in the title, and I cannot abide that. Fuck off with that shit. That's not the title of the book!