The Callista Trilogy/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Non Sequitur Scene: In the Hoth sequence in Darksaber, Luke and Callista are attacked by a horde of wampas which seem to be commanded by the wampa whose arm Luke cut off in The Empire Strikes Back. This is never commented on again anywhere in the Expanded Universe. Even Wookieepedia ignores it, and they have articles on everything.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: The only genuine such moment - and probably the only proper crowning moment Admiral Daala ever manages - occurs in Darksaber when she gasses the Imperial warlords and unifies all of their fiefdoms when it becomes clear that they won't stop their feuding and fight the New Republic. Too bad her absolute failure to capitalise on the result undermines it.
  • Deader Than Disco: After Darksaber, no-one could take the "superweapon of the week" plots that had previously dominated Star Wars Expanded Universe fiction seriously anymore. In a weird way, we might have Kevin J. Anderson to thank for the subsequent new directions (eventually resulting in the Yuuzhan Vong arc) taken by the EU.
  • Die for Our Ship: Callista major fault is that she's not Mara Jade.
  • Mary Sue: Callista aboard the Knight Hammer. She actually manages to take out a Super Star Destroyer with a single torpedo (I guess Imperial damage control was slipping) and to cap things off she tries to take out the Imperial big bad, all in one go.
    • Actually, she set over two dozen Tie bombers to send their concussion missile payloads into the engines and other bombers, which practically gutted the Knight Hammer's engines. Not quite one torpedo, although the Mary Sue bit may still stand.
  • Narm: The Hutt Death Star and Callista angsting over losing her powers.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Everything Palpatine does to Lemelisk in the flashbacks.
  • Relationship Writing Fumble: Daala and Pellaeon are (presumambly) merely meant to professionally respect each other but it's very easy to read an element of sexual tension between them.
  • Sequelitis: Taken as a stand-alone novel, Children of the Jedi is really quite good, and it would probably be held in much fonder regard if it hadn't been followed by Kevin J. Anderson's clusterfuck.
  • Squick: Huttese pornography. You may now clean up your lunch.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A crime syndicate just stole the schematics of the original Death Star? Awesome! Wait a minute...
    • Actually, I think this was mentioned by Madine, but it was determined that even if somebody DID buy the Death Star's blueprints, 1. Very few people actually had the resources to build it anyway, and 2. Those that did were presumably being watched by New Republic Intelligence. Also, the Hutts wanted to reduce competition in the Superweapon department.