5. Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith (1996) – Tom Veitch & Kevin J. Anderson
The entire Jedi Order is stymied by a bunch of college kids with approximately the same powers as The Scarecrow. The Jedi leadership coolly stands aside and let Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma make the most lame-brained decisions possible, because a Jedi must choose his own path, even if that path involves murdering billions. Ulic falls to the Dark Side because of a Sith poison; gee, is it just me or does this make it seem like Palpatine took the hard way with Luke in RotJ? Where was the hypodermic when Palps needed it, right? The book climaxes with Exar Kun and Ulic deciding to start a war to shake the galaxy because some dude that was blue told them they should.
The scary part? I haven’t even gotten the stupidest thing yet.
MOMENT YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Nomi Sunrider mounts a massive rescue mission to snatch Ulic away from the Krath. Nomi and her friends defy the Council, blast into a city packed with civilians with their warships, whip out their lightsabers and kill a few folks, risking all their lives. So that Nomi can walk up to Ulic and alert him to the fact that his own rescue team isn’t going to take him with them. THE **** YOU TALKING ABOUT WOMAN?! DID YOU FORGET TO LOOK UP ‘RESCUE’ IN THE DICTIONARY? BECAUSE I THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY TAKE THE PERSON YOU’RE ‘RESCUING’ WITH YOU.
If you thought, as I did, that Gav and Jori stopped behaving like rational humans in Fall of the Sith Empire, you won’t even believe this stuff. Does anyone have a rational thought in this entire story? Is anything actually motivated or do they just do all this stuff because the writer says they have to? How many times are you going to tell me that Shoaneb has no eyes? Because that last one is actually kind of obvious, dude, since, you know, I do!
At this point, these stories become so actively stupid that they actually make you dumber just from having them in your house.