Closing out Emperor's Plague

Oh boy, let's talk about racism.

This whole arc (book 7 Shards of Alderaan to 11 Emperor's Plague) is about a group of villains who are trying to oppress and/or genocide humans in the same way that aliens were under the Empire. I said this half jokingly before, but I don't think there's any chance modern Disney-Wars goes there, and I think a lot of major publishers would shy away from it in general. I'm going to land firmly on the side of "yes, you can still discriminate against majority groups" and "yes, that's still wrong", but not write a whole essay about it.

What I am going to talk about is the complete failure by AM to actually do their minority (mostly Wookie) characters justice. The main characters of the series as a whole are (roughly in order of importance): Jaina, Jacen, Tenel Ka, Lowbacca. Zekk claws his way inbetween Jacen and Tenel Ka around book 4, and Raynar is also working his way up, though still below the Solos and Zekk.

I've said before that Lowbacca has kind of gotten skipped over or short changed on focus books, and it's really apparent here, where this entire sub-series should've been a Lowbacca book. Jacen and Jaina really have fairly low stakes and development here. They go look for Lowbacca and Raynor's dad, they're occasionally in trouble, but they're going to fight to stop the bad guys and protect humanity, because why wouldn't they? I have no idea why AM felt the need to shoe horn Raynar and his family into the plot at all (there's no reason the bounty hunt plot has to be Raynar's dad instead of a new character. Hell, Peckham would've been more interesting and personal for Zekk).

Lowbacca, on the other hand, has all kinds of great opportunities for conflict and growth. To what degree does he know/approve of what the Diversity Alliance is up to? Will he betray his friends? How does his relationship with the Solos balance against his relationship with Rabba?

Zekk does most of his light>dark>light switch in these books, and Lowbacca could definitely have gotten a similar plotline to contrast.

Sirra has been a minor guest character throughout, and could've probably managed an arc here (she's mostly sidelined so far, the DA could give her a chance to break out), or at least had some conflict with Lowbacca as she is more supportive of the DA than him. Instead, she's just kind of drug along by him and Raaba.

Raaba, by the way, is the one who gets slighted the most here. Lowbacca never really "goes over" to the Diversity Alliance. He agrees to check it out, finds out they're holding the Solos hostage, and gets out. Raaba is in the Alliance, and gets into conflict with her friend with it. And she just bops along with minimal angst until about 3/4 of the way through the last book in the set. Lowbacca is the obvious choice of main character since he's (sort of) one for the whole series, but she could have a similar plotline, and maybe even do more with it.

Last, and least, is Lusa is for some reason brought back appearing in Crystal Star. She's in a sort of mid-point between Lowbacca and Raaba, in the Alliance initially, but realizes she wants out fairly early on. Her plotline is mostly about wanting to bang Raynar who, again, doesn't really even need to be in these books. Again, if we run out the minority metaphor this is the token hot Asian chick who exists only to follow around the boring rich White guy. Boring? Offensive? Shitty writing? Probably all of the above.

As usual, I will attempt to give AM a slight out here. Not enough to excuse the all around shitty writing or idiotic plotting. One that makes you go wonder why they even tried to write this flaming porta-potty of an arc. Around the same time these were being published, Scholastic was running Animorphs. Early on, the human characters all got books in a regular rotation (Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, in that order, with occasional interruption). Ax (the token alien) and Tobias (the Christ-figure, cum-trans-allegory, cum-semi-alien) each get one book every two rounds, effectively sharing a slot/getting half a slot each. This was a directive from Scholastic, who felt the non-human narrators would be too hard for kids to connect with. This was eventually rescinded, and they get a bit more later on. Maybe, if I wanted to be nice, Berkley/Penguin told AM the same thing. Again, the smarter thing to do would've been to just torpedo the whole plot (or at least cut it to 1 or 2 books instead of 5), but maybe.

Probably not. AM just suck.