The Yuuzhan Vong

I feel like I want to take my blog in a new direction. I haven't posted in a long while, and I seriously need to get into writing more often. So, what I want to do now is write blog posts on specialized topics I'm interested in. And yes, some of these topics will contain spoilers, so deal with it. Some of these topics are about stuff from years ago, so even if I spoil stuff, you should have had plenty of time to check it out by now.

What I wanted to start off with is this: I read a comment on TV Tropes saying something about how a lot of fans complained that during the New Jedi Order story arc of Star Wars, that they didn't like how the villains of the story, the Yuuzhan Vong, won most of the battles during the beginning to almost two-thirds of the story arc. The series contained a whopping total of twenty-one novels. So, in about fourteen of the novels, the Yuuzhan Vong won.

And here is where I defend the writers. We need to rationalize this, even though we may love the jedi, and the new republic. The Yuuzhan Vong:

They are a race of aliens who came from outside of the galaxy. They use living weapons. They cannot be sensed in the force, and for a good amount of the story arc, it was debated if they were even part of the force. Their culture was a caste system, something akin to India's caste system, however far more violent and binding.

Violence is their culture. They will not give up, they fight until they all die. They capture any survivors and implant them with seeds to force their captives to become slaves. All of their technology is like nothing anyone in the Star Wars universe ever encountered. And that is why it is believable that the New Republic had a hard time dealing with them.

The picture above is of a Coralskipper, a plant ship that the Yuuzhan Vong grow. It is armed with a creature called a Dovin Basal, which creates gravitic anomalies that propel the ship, and also creates miniature black holes to defend itself against attacks. It took several books before anyone really managed to fight against these ships with any luck. It makes sense that it took a lot of time to understand these ships, because no one encountered it, but after they did their research, the New Republic could hold it's own against them better. But it took books.

Now, with the ground troops, it also makes sense that fighting against them took time. Their weapons and armor are alive.

This Yuuzhan Vong warrior is holding a snake-like creature called an Amphistaff. It switches from being a whip to a spear-like weapon, and of course, it can bite and spit acid.

The armor that the Yuuzhan Vong wears is called Vonduun Crab, and because of its thickness and the fact that it is alive, makes cutting the armor with lightsabers difficult.

Next up is the Ooglith Masquer, an Amorphis creature that covers it's host and makes it look like pretty much anything. Many of the Yuuzhan Vong donned these creatures in order to infiltrate the New Republic and carry out spy missions.

The picture above is of a Villip. A plant that connects to others of it's kind. It acts akin to a radio transmitter. Because of how these things worked, it took the New Republic a while to pick up any form of chatter from the enemies. To fight an enemy completely blind is very difficult.

Finally, I come to one of the more disturbing looking creatures that the Yuuzhan Vong have, the Yammosk. It acts like a a highly powerful computer system, and sends out orders to all the ships and warriors in it's reach. Again, it took books before the New Republic could come up with any strategy to defeat these creatures.

But what is perhaps the most important is this: During the war, both sides learned how to deal with each other. And as such, both sides developed new weapons and strategies, but in the end, the New Republic (which changed it's name to the Galactic Alliance), the remnant of the Empire, and the other original galaxy denizens won out because they were far more adaptable. However, it takes time to come up with strategies, and it takes time to understand an enemy, especially if the enemy is nothing like what you may have encountered before.