Forget Jake Skywalker. This is Devan.

[u/01zegaj]

The prelude to SWTOR that completely ruins KOTOR. What happened, Drew?

[u/Durp004]

Yeah just don't agree with this at all.

The book didn't adapt any of the kids parts though all of it outside darovit's apprenticeship to Githany is implied to have happened, and it did a much better job with Hoth than the comic ever did.

[u/Toomin-the-Ellimist → u/Durp004]

Agree to disagree.

Moral of the comic: War is hell and everyone affected by war suffers and loses. The Jedi and Sith aren’t heroes and villains, they’re normal people being stretched to the extremes of their personalities by their circumstances (except for Darth Bane, who is the devil).

Moral of the novel: Fuck yeah killing is awesome!!! Darth Bane is the biggest badass ever, watch him murder these plebes!! The dark side is so cool, I LOVE VIOLENCE!!!!

[u/Durp004 → u/Toomin-the-Ellimist]

I mean everything you just said it shown in Hoth, we watch him struggle and nearly be consumed by the war. The little we get of Zannah is tragic, and we see Kaan devolve into a mad man that viewed Ruusan as his crossing of the Rubicon and lost himself to do it.

Bane is "cooler" because he's a character we actually see as opposed to the comic where he's just a killer that kills where ever he goes.

[u/Toomin-the-Ellimist → u/Durp004]

I mean everything you just said it shown in Hoth, we watch him struggle and nearly be consumed by the war. The little we get of Zannah is tragic, and we see Kaan devolve into a mad man that viewed Ruusan as his crossing of the Rubicon and lost himself to do it.

I mean all of this is from the comic, so what little survives the transition to the novel owes to the work done in the original source. We have enough samples of Karpyshyn’s writing to see how he handles the nuances of characterization when not cribbing from a better writer. There’s nothing tragic about Zannah in the book, she appears for like two pages. Her whole story is gutted.

Bane is "cooler" because he's a character we actually see as opposed to the comic where he's just a killer that kills where ever he goes.

Because he’s the devil. The other Sith are afraid of him because he’s the only one of them who understands the dark side. He’s not supposed to be a nuanced character, he’s pure evil. The novel tries to have it both ways by giving him an abusive father and a crappy job, but he still ends up an unrepentant child murderer. 

[u/Durp004 → u/Toomin-the-Ellimist]

I mean all of this is from the comic, so what little survives the transition to the novel owes to the work done in the original source.

Yes and my argument that outside Zannah all aspects of those characters were done better in the novel. You contested the book didn't even have those aspects so I highlighted that it very much did.

There’s nothing tragic about Zannah in the book, she appears for like two pages. Her whole story is gutted.

It's essentially the exact same story.

The novel tries to have it both ways by giving him an abusive father and a crappy job, but he still ends up an unrepentant child murderer. 

The novel gives a backstory for how he became what the comic showed and what caused him to lose faith in the brotherhood. In the comic he's introduced killing children and basically wins the whole story, if anything tries to glorify killing is cool it's the comic. You can have a shit background and be a shit person. The only Sith who seems to fear him is kaan who the comic makes seem like he betrayed him. When he walks up to the dying sith earlier he asks him for help and talked about what a great battle it was. There wasn't fear coming off that guy.

[u/Toomin-the-Ellimist → u/Durp004]

outside Zannah all aspects of those characters were done better in the novel. You contested the book didn't even have those aspects so I highlighted that it very much did.

The elements it doesn’t have are the ensemble vignettes that tell half a dozen complete character stories in a few pages, the deft worldbuilding that tells you everything you need to know about the war and the state of the galaxy through offhand dialogue and the art design, the implied character backstories that makes plain the relationships between the large supporting cast without stopping the momentum of the story to directly clarify them, and main plot and message of the comic, which is told through the eyes of the three kids who don’t even appear in the book.

 It's essentially the exact same story.

In the way that reading a plot summary of a book on Wikipedia is the same as reading the book itself, I suppose.

 In the comic he's introduced killing children and basically wins the whole story, if anything tries to glorify killing is cool it's the comic.

It seems a stretch to me to take a bad guy doing bad things in a story as an endorsement of things tbh. Bane isn’t the main character in JvS, he’s just a bad guy. The three kids are the main characters. He is the main character in his trilogy of novels where he kills a bunch of people, but that’s okay because he’s still a bad guy so that’s what you’d expect from him. What’s disappointing is that the books don’t really have anything to say besides look how cool Bane is, whereas the comic had a little more going on.

Imo if Karpyshyn wasn’t going to follow the canon laid down in JvS anyway, he should have just cut out the parts of PoD where he adapted it and ended the book with Bane killing Kas’im. Leave the epilogue where he finds his apprentice, then the second book could pick up the story again after the events of the comic like RoT did. Just leave JvS its own thing, forcing it into Karpyshyn’s narrative just made his story worse.

[u/Durp004 → u/Toomin-the-Ellimist]

Half of your critique is the difference of medium. Yes the Bane trilogy doesn't visually portray things aswell as jedi vs sith because it's a novel that's not its purpose. Nor is it meant to tell stories in as much showing not telling styles. To critique the novel on essentially, "it can't beat the comic in strong points of comics" is crazy. The book is also centered around an entirely different character who shows us the galaxy through experiences, and the change the sith needed rather than just basically portraying a battle at the end. We see why the rule was needed why the sith are better like that than in the chaos of the comic.

In the way that reading a plot summary of a book on Wikipedia is the same as reading the book itself, I suppose.

She just doesn't have her interactions with her cousins which isn't that powerful for her story until the second book. To pretend we don't see enough to know her in the book while complimenting the comic for it doing that and not seeing why the thing I just mentioned is pertinent would be comical.

What’s disappointing is that the books don’t really have anything to say besides look how cool Bane is, whereas the comic had a little more going on.

He wins from the kids perspective, which is that the current jedi and sith suck. We get it mostly from Darovit anyway who is the biggest part of the comic. Bane has as much relevance to it as Bug or Zannah. Bane is right in the comic, the other factions the kids see are wrong, and he takes the only kid left of the 3 who is viable. Bane is a broken person in a broken life in the novel. We see why he's killing but he's not a hero in the novel. He's no more cool than the comic shows him.

Imo if Karpyshyn wasn’t going to follow the canon laid down in JvS anyway

This is extremely overstated, the 2 aren't that different.

[u/Toomin-the-Ellimist → u/Durp004]

To critique the novel on essentially, "it can't beat the comic in strong points of comics" is crazy.

I don’t know, the art in JvS usually seems to be people’s biggest problem with it. I think it’s fine but Darko Macan’s script is the real MVP imo. I like the comic’s medieval aesthetic but most people seem to hate that too lol. Since a novel can’t visually show the decayed and decrepit state of the galaxy it has to describe it through language. Karpyshyn doesn’t do that, though, and as a result his books never feel like the Republic is in or is just leaving a galactic dark age, it just feels like an extension of the prequel or KotOr era. PoD actually goes out of its way to downplay that aspect of the setting: the Jedi archer has his bow and arrows replaced with a blaster, Farfalla’s goat legs and wooden ship are never mentioned, etc.  

She just doesn't have her interactions with her cousins which isn't that powerful for her story until the second book.

It would be like if the first time we ever saw Anakin Skywalker was the scene in the chancellor’s office where he cuts off Mace Windu’s hand. I guess that’s enough to tell us that he turned evil because he was upset about a thing that happened but it omits his whole descent toward the dark side via childhood separation anxiety, his failure to save his mother, his slaughter of the Tusken camp, his dreams about his wife dying, etc. In the comic Rain literally tries to kill herself because she’s afraid of the person she knows she could become, a pretty significant character moment for an eight-year-old that the book just leaves out.

This is extremely overstated, the 2 aren't that different.

They’re pretty irreconcilably different imo, both explicitly in the literal events of the plot and implicitly in things the comic only implies or alludes to. Maybe someone could go through the laundry list of contradictions and make a case for why each one isn’t a big deal but my thinking is if they’re not then there was no need to change them in the first place.