Literature / New Jedi Order

"I had fought the worst of all wars, and witnessed the redemption of evil. I have seen balance restored to the Force, but order can turn to chaos, as it did when I was born. Now, with my loved ones and my loyal allies, I face a new challenge unlike any before... And I'm not sure if this time, we can win."

—Luke Skywalker, in a commercial promoting Vector Prime

New Jedi Order is a Star Wars Legends series set twenty-five years after Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The galaxy is at peace. The Rebellion has become the New Republic. The Empire is reduced to a shadow of its former self, its surviving leaders much more reasonable (still authoritarian but not outright dictatorial), and a treaty exists between the Empire and the Republic. Luke Skywalker's new Jedi Order is still small, but growing—about a hundred all told. He also got married four years ago to a wonderful woman, also a Jedi and who happens to have once wanted to kill him. Their courtship was adorable. Han Solo and Leia Organa have been hitched for seventeen years, and have three teenaged children, all prodigies and strong in the Force.

Then the Yuuzhan Vong come, at first on a small scale in the form of weird biological ships, carrying warriors that scar and tattoo and mutilate themselves, attack a few nothing worlds on the edge of known space. They're turned back, but then more come, and more, enough to conquer a galaxy, it seems. Fearless and fanatical, they crusade against the infidels and their machines and all of them, seemingly, don't exist in the Force. In their numbers, philosophy and ferocity, they promise to take a greater toll than the entire Galactic Civil War.

They do.

And then things get really bad.

The New Jedi Order was the first novel series Del Rey Books produced once they acquired the license to produce Star Wars Legends novels from Lucasbooks after Bantam lost it. Originally intended to have twenty-five books, it ended up as a still-sprawling nineteen-book series over five years of both in-universe time and real time, composed mostly of hardcover one-shots and softcover miniseries, written by several authors. It was embroiled in controversy from the start, with the killing of Chewbacca at the end of the first novel. It continued by killing a small host of minor, secondary, and non-movie major characters, including several fan-favorites, and ended up exploring the very meaning of the Force, and whether the Dark Side existed at all. (Short answer — not really. Long answer — yes, it does, but not as previously thought.) The published novels are in chronological order as follows (hardcovers with a indentation, softcovers with two, even though they aren't necessarily direct sequels).

• Vector Prime (1999) — R.A. Salvatore
  • Dark Tide I: Onslaught (2000) — Michael A. Stackpole
  • Dark Tide II: Ruin (2000)
  • Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial (2000) — James Luceno
  • Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse (2000)
• Balance Point (2000) — Kathy Tyers
  • Edge Of Victory I: Conquest (2001) — Greg Keyes
  • Edge Of Victory II: Rebirth (2001)
• Star By Star (2001) — Troy Denning
  • Dark Journey (2002) — Elaine Cunningham
  • Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream (2002) — Aaron Allston
  • Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand (2002)
  • Traitor (2002) — Matthew Stover
• Destiny's Way (2002) — Walter Jon Williams
  • Force Heretic I: Remnant (2003) — Sean Williams and Shane Dix
  • Force Heretic II: Refugee (2003)
  • Force Heretic III: Reunion (2003)
  • The Final Prophecy (2003) — Greg Keyes
• The Unifying Force (2003) — James Luceno

The series also featured several short stories and e-book novellas set in the duration. These include:

• "Recovery" (2001) — an e-book later reprinted in the paperback edition of Star By Star and set sometime after the events of Balance Point.
• "Emissary of the Void" — a six-part story published in various issues of Star Wars Gamer and Star Wars Insider magazines, set after the events of Rebirth.
• "The Apprentice" (2002) — a short story published in Star Wars Gamer #4 and set during the events of Dark Journey.
• "Ylesia" (2002) — an e-book later reprinted in The Joiner King and set during the events of Destiny's Way.

Additional stories set during this era, but not published concurrently with the series include:

• "Revenants" (2003) — a short comic published in Star Wars Tales #18. As with all Tales stories published in issues #1-20 it was considered Canon Discontinuity.
• "Or Die Trying" (2004) — a short story published in Star Wars Insider #75 and set sometime after Refugee.
• "Equals and Opposites" (2004) — a short comic story published in Star Wars Tales #21.
• "A Practical Man" (2006) — an e-book later reprinted in the paperback edition of Sacrifice.
• Star Wars: Invasion (2009 — 2014)

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Provides Examples Of:

• 0% Approval Rating: As the war goes on, Fey'la's approval rating tanks. By Star by Star, this makes him pretty desperate.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: In the last book, Jacen manages to attain Oneness with the Force and uses it to lay a major smackdown on Onimi.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Several, unfortunately, as a side-effect of the multi-author format. The Great River, the Insiders, and Tahiri's destiny were probably the most notable.
  • Enforced with Anakin and Tahiri, between whom Master Ikrit prophecies something great. Given Anakin's death in Star by Star, this never comes. One of the Solo children was always going to be killed off, with Jacen being chosen for it but plans were swapped around when George Lucas nixed Anakin being the hero of the series (reportedly not wanting him confused with his grandfather). Thus Anakin was killed off instead of Jacen. And then Jacen went to hell in the next series anyway.
• Acid Attack: The voxyn can vomit acid (which is, unusually, not depicted as stereotypical Hollywood Acid, but rather mucus that happens to be strong enough to burn through faces), and their blood is both acidic and a neurotoxin.
• Action Mom: Leia, Mara Jade, post-Rebirth.
• Actually Pretty Funny: After Han's tirade against the Empire and their superweapons, the imperial who provoked this has a reaction that suggests she actually agrees with him.
• A Day in the Limelight: Dark Tide for Corran Horn, Agents of Chaos for Han Solo, Edge of Victory for Anakin Solo, Dark Journey for Jaina Solo, Enemy Lines for Wedge Antilles, Traitor for Jacen Solo and The Final Prophecy for Tahiri Veila.
• Agent Provocateur: Nom Anor, several times in different disguises.
• Alien Blood: Yuuzhan Vong blood is either tar-black or deep blue, Depending on the Writer.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Played with in the Force Heretic trilogy, which visits the Chiss homeworld Csilla for the first time in Legends. The protagonists are baffled by a library of paper books and a card catalog: the rest of the galaxy has been all-electronic for so long none of them have ever seen paper before (George Lucas didn't allow any paper to ever appear on screen in the first six films for this reason). The Chiss still use them due to considering them more durable than electronics in Csilla's climate.
• Aliens Speaking English: In Vector Prime, Threepio is quickly able to translate Yuuzhan Vong, a language from outside the galaxy, because it's similar to one of the six million languages he does know (which, for added strangeness, hasn't been spoken in three hundred years). (Eventually we learn that a remnant of the species' Genius Loci homeworld made it to this galaxy thousands of years earlier, though the text never draws a connection). Additionally, major Vong characters are all conveniently able to speak Basic, which makes sense for the diplomat Nom Anor, but not for most others (their tizowyrms explain being able to understand it, but responding is another issue).
• The Alliance: By the end of the series, the Galactic Alliance, Empire, and Chiss are all working together to stop the Vong. Nas Choka ruefully reflects that the brutality of the Vong's policies prevented them from building an alliance of their own.
• All Myths Are True: In-universe, Zonama Sekot. There are many legends about the wandering, living planet. Danni Quee says, "Every astronomer who's worked the Outer Rim knows about Zonama Sekot. They know it doesn't exist, for starters."
• All There in the Manual: "The Apprentice" and "Ylesia" are akin to missing chapters belonging to Dark Journey and Destiny's Way respectively.
• Alternate Company Equivalent:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong have been compared to the Borg.
  • They also have similarities to the Tyranids and Zerg (extragalactic invaders with organic technology), the Dark Eldar (aliens who have a religion centered on pain and death) and the Drow elves (highly organized and intelligent race of fanatical villains who are also prone to infighting).
  • Official artwork sometimes, particularly in the Invasion comic, depicts them with very Klingon-esque ridged foreheads (in the novels, Vong are described as having long, sloping foreheads but no ridges are mentioned). Both cultures happen to be Proud Warrior Races and significant enemies of their setting's primary protagonist faction. And like the Klingons, down the road they end up allies of the protagonists.
  • They also have a lot of similarities to two other species in the Legends continuity, the Ssi-ruuk and Yevetha (both introduced when Bantam Spectra had the license, before Del Rey acquired it). Both species are Scary Dogmatic Aliens that invade Republic/Imperial space from outside. The authors seem to have noticed this: both species are destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong offscreen.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Subverted. The Vong are introduced as being this, but it's gradually revealed to be a function of their totalitarian government and toxic religion rather than something inborn. Later on, several Vong characters are given sympathetic character arcs: Harrar, Vua Rapuung, Nen Yim, and even Nom Anor to a degree.
• An Arm and a Leg: Tsavong ritually sacrifices an arm to the gods in Star by Star. He was initially just going to go with a hand, but decided to bump it all the way up to the whole limb, just to be on the safe side.
• Anti-Magic: Zig-Zagged. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creations, alone of all life yet encountered, do not have a presence in the Force, which means Jedi precognition, telepathy, and illusions don't work on them. However, Force-sensitives find a number of Required Secondary Powers that do work:
  • Telekinesis is effective as long as you're moving something other than the Yuuzhan Vong himself. Such as propelling a rock as a bullet or bludgeon, Streen's signature wind powers, and Force lightning (the latter discovered by Dark Jedi encountered in Star By Star).
  • Jedi are able to root out disguised Yuuzhan Vong by looking for people they can see but can't detect with the Force.
  • Anakin, and later Jacen, find an alternate way to use the Force to attune themselves to the Yuuzhan Vong, though this means temporarily losing access to their normal powers.
  • The Vong being Anti-Magic to the Force is ultimately justified: Their destroyed Genius Loci home planet, of which Zonama Sekot is a fragment, closed them off to the Force for their heinous actions.
• Apocalypse How:
  • The first thing we learn of the Vong doing is unleashing a bioweapon on Belkadan, utterly wrecking the planet's biosphere.
  • Everything on Ithor is dissolved by a Vong bioweapon. Then the crashing flagship sets the atmosphere on fire.
• Appeal to Flattery: How Lando tries and fails to convince Luke and Mara to "run the belt" in a two-seat TIE, and how he successfully talks Han and Chewie into it.
• Arch-Enemy: Several heroic characters get one:
  • Nom Anor to Mara.
  • Viqi Shesh to Leia.
  • Warmaster Tsavong Lah to Jacen and Jaina.
  • Shedao Shai to Corran.
  • Shimrra to Luke.
  • Onimi to everyone.
  • Subverted with Nen Yim and Tahiri. They have very personal reasons to hate each other (Nen was part of the team that experiemented on a captive Tahiri; Tahiri killed Nen's mentor while escaping), but when they actually meet up again, they're initially antagonistic, but end of letting go of their hate for each other and end up in something of an Odd Friendship. Of course, Tahiri's Vong memories were adapted from Nen's, so it's perhaps unsurprising that they would develop a strong rapport against all odds.
• Arc Welding: Supposedly, a lot of Palpatine's actions were to prepare for the coming invasion, at least according to Empire supporters. Thrawn's definitely were.^note Zahn had previously elaborated and/or retconned (depending on your point of view) Thrawns's motivations into wanting to protect the galaxy from invaders in Hand of Thrawn. The NJO established that the Vong were the threat he feared, and later books like Outbound Flight support this.
• Arc Words:
  • Vergere to Jacen: "Everything I tell you is a lie."
  • Vergere to Nom Anor: "Everything I tell you is the truth."
  • Vergere to Jacen: "I was only waiting for you to ask."
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence Many Jedi die.
• Asshole Victim: The Yuuzhan-Vong wipe out the entire Yevethan race. Considering what the Yevethans were like, the rest of the galaxy isn't exactly sad about it.
• Asteroid Thicket: Lando's Folly, from Vector Prime. Exaggerated even by Star Wars standards of this trope.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: The Vong call the Colony Drop form used against Sernpidal "Yo'gand's Core" after their first Supreme Overlord, who pioneered the tactic.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Palleon's opinion on the various superweapons the Empire liked using. Good for intimidation, bad for defending.
• Ax-Crazy: Onimi. See Omnicidal Maniac. The Yuuzhan Vong themselves (mostly the warriors) come across as this at first, but it rapidly grows more complicated.
• Badass Boast: On Borleias in Rebel Dream, a platoon of YVH droids use the following battle cry, calculated to maximally infuriate the technophobic Vong:
  "We are machines! We are greater than the Yuuzhan Vong!"
  • The boast works like a charm; the Vong troops in question break cover in a rage and are summarily torn to pieces.
• Back for the Dead:
  • The Ssi-Ruuk, who we haven't heard a peep from since The Truce at Bakura, come back late in this series. Supposedly, they want to make a truce with Bakura, for mutual defense against the Yuuzhan Vong. In reality, it's a trick to pave the way for a new invasion, which is itself a trick so the P'w'eck slave race can overthrow and destroy the Ssi-Ruuk. Which was all organized by a Vong agent to begin with.
  • Within the same miniseries, the Yevetha—which had barricaded themselves within the Koornacht cluster since the events of the Black Fleet Crisis—are scouted late in the conflict. The mission reveals the Vong had completely wiped them out offscreen, along with their rebuilt fleet.
• Battle in the Rain: Prior to being rescued by Luke and Jacen in Onslaught, Mara and Anakin do battle with a number of Yuuzhan Vong warriors who're chasing them in the rain. Additionally, while the text of Ruin didn't set Corran and Shedao's duel during a thunderstorm, an illustration in The New Essential Chronology did so.
• Beam Spam:
  • The tactics adopted by New Republic pilots to take down Yuuzhan Vong fighters is to fire a large number of lower-powered shots to exhaust the coralskipper's dovin basal, before switching to quad-fire mode (which involves firing all their guns at once) to punch through its heavy armor.
  • Upon reverting from hyperspace in the middle of an enemy fleet in Rebel Dream, the Lusankya does this immediately and in all directions (seemingly at normal power, too). Its ability to do this as a matter of course proves quite useful for the requirements of Operation Emperor's Hammer later in that book, too.
• Becoming the Mask: All along, Ganner Rhysode is only a conflicted Glory Hound, trying to fight his own "glory sickness" and fearful of not living up to what he is supposed to be—a hero. It is not until the events of Traitor that he finally learns his lesson, with Jacen's help, and makes his choice: he accepts his role as a sidekick, buying time for what Jacen has to do. His You Shall Not Pass!-type of Dying Moment of Awesome is the direct result, earning his title of hero among the Yuuzhan Vong.
• Beneath Notice: The reason YVH-M droids, Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids in the shape of the Mouse Droids, work so well. Most people never notice a regular Mouse droid as it goes about its work, allowing them to find infiltrators without anyone getting suspicious.
• Big Bad: Supreme Overlord Shimmra until Onimi's big reveal.
• Big Brother Bully: Mildly, with Jacen and Anakin. Jacen isn't deliberately trying to be one, but a lot of his interactions with Ani are rude and condescending. After the incident with Centerpoint Station, Anakin finally gets fed up of Jacen and refuses to listen to him at all, even when Jacen's trying to reach out to him.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Kre’fey swooping in to save the fighters and refugees on Dantooine.
  • Pallaeon and his Star Destroyer in Ruin. Up until then, Kre'fey and his troops figured they were screwed; their best option was "die, but don't let the Vong win". Palleon, and Jagged Fel's clawfighters, manage to save them.
• Bio-Armor: Vonduun crabs, they can even resist lightsabers. Though they're fatally allergic to baffor tree pollen.
• Biotech Is Better: Played with. A lot of Yuuzhan Vong biotech advantage comes not from their tech being objectively better, but from it being different.
  • The dovin basals they use for shielding and propulsion aren't necessarily better than standard engines and shields, but their ability to create microsingularities to gobble up weapon's fire is something the New Republic never dealt with before, but rapidly find a trick to work around. Those same dovin basals can use their gravity-altering abilities to yank the shields off NR ships, but extending the ship's acceleration compensator envelope outside the shield radius nullifies that trick.
  • Vong plasma weapons aren't that much more destructive than standard laser weapons, but have a damage-over-time component that's difficult to deal with once a blast strikes the hull.
  • The one thing in space combat that is categorically better than anything the New Republic can offer is grutchins, the Yuuzhan Vong equivalent of torpedo weapons: think the Buzz Droids from Revenge of the Sith, but much bigger, shaped like a giant space-borne locust with acid-dripping mandibles that pretty much literally eat starfighters for breakfast, and even able to pursue ships into hyperspace. No counter is ever found for them, and they quietly disappear from the series shortly after their introduction.
    • Grutchin do reappear in Force Heretic 1, where they easily devastate the Imperial fleet. It is implied the New Republic/Galactic Federaiton has gotten a lot better at spotting and shooting them down at range.
  • On the gound, Yuuzhan Vong ranged weapons are distinctly lackluster, having no real equivalent to a blaster (their thud bugs are quite a surprise, but easy to deal with once you're aware of them) and Vong warriors have to close to melee range to do any real damage. Unfortunately, their armor and weapons are capable of withstanding hits from lightsabers, so it takes a rather impressive amount of blasterfire to down the average Vong (though as their armor leaves their faces exposed, headshots work pretty well if you're a good marksman).
  • Their long range communication devices, villips, can reach interstellar distances despite being relatively compact and having transmission the New Republic can't detect, but they lack the flexibility of traditional comm gear, as each villip can only communicate to its partner. One Yuuzhan Vong pilot even privately envies the ability of starfighters to communicate voice to voice with one another, compared to his own coralskippers.
  • The yammosk war-coordinator does work much better at coordinating Yuuzhan Vong forces than voice-to-voice comms, right up until the New Republic figures out how to jam them.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Viqi Sheesh's first scene in Hero's Trial has her come across as the reasonable one in an argument. She turns out to be the head of the Peace Brigade.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Vong are defeated and the Galaxy's at peace, but the damage the Vong caused isn't gonna heal, and everyone's future is uncertain.
• Black Cloak: Nom Anor wears one of these in Vector Prime with the intent of reminding Leia of Darth Vader.
• Blood from Every Orifice: Anyone who breathes in Elan's plague in Hero's Trial, including Elan herself.
• Blood from the Mouth: Shedao Shai, when Corran skewers him with his lightsaber.
• Blood Knight:
  • Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Some priests have interpreted that their millennia long voyage through the intergalactic void was because the gods banished them for enjoying it too much. They're right.
  • In Destiny's Way, Admiral Kre'Fey requests more Jedi Knights to boost his forces. It's made almost explicit that Luke and the Council agree partly because the presence of Jedi around will keep Kre'Fey from straying into Blood Knight territory (the Bothans just declared a Guilt-Free Extermination War in revenge for the death of Borsk Fey'lya).
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: What makes the Vong so scary: they do horrible things, but they do them with the unshakable belief that it's all not only morally justified, but morally required. At least until later in the series, when they start to realize that there are other ideas out there that might have merit.
• Body Horror: A number of examples are present, such as the coral seed implants used to enslave and modify the physiology of non-Yuuzhan Vong. In the case of the Yuuzhan Vong themselves, implants are marks of honor. Failed implants are dishonorable and tend to rot while still attached. Other bad things can happen, as in the case of Tsavong Lah's sabotaged radank arm implant, which threatened to transform him into a radank.
• Bodyguard Legacy: Defied at first. After Chewbacca's death, some of his family step up to assume his Life Debt to Han Solo (and by extension, Leia, Luke, and the Solo children). Han refuses them since he's still raw from Chewie's death and doesn't want anyone else, especially Wookiees of Chewie's own family, dying because of him. He eases up on this stance by the end of The Unifying Force.
• Bond Creatures: Yuuzhan Vong ships, their amphistaffs, Jacen and the World-Brain.
• Bond One-Liner: We don't see Mara fighting a Vong infiltrator during Onslaught, only hearing her after-action report to Leia; "He just went to pieces."
• Bookends: The first and last scenes of Traitor begin with an identical five-paragraph passage about hyperspace.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Yuuzhan Vong's slaves, especially the Chazrach, but some captive humans as well. A more subtle version of this was what the shapers had in mind for Tahiri, but that future was (probably) averted by Anakin.
• Bring My Red Jacket: Luke all but cites this trope by name in Dark Tide I when he sees Jacen in a dark red combat jumpsuit.
• Bus Crash: The last survivors of the Firrerreo species from The Crystal Star are mentioned to have had the planet that adopted them attacked by the Vong off-screen, and the species is now functionally extinct.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!/But We Used a Condom!: Mara's first few thoughts on discovering she's pregnant.
• The Caligula: Supreme Overlord Shimrra. Some of this is probably a side-effect of Onimi's mind control, but a lot of it's implied to be his real personality.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Cleverly used in combination with Reporting Names.
• Call-Back:
  • The YVH droids' armor is made from laminanium, the self-healing metal that the Qellan ship in Black Fleet Crisis was made of.
  • In Destiny's Way, Vergere recounts the broad details of her part of Rogue Planet for Jacen (as well as anyone who hasn't read that book).
• Calling the Old Man Out: Leia and Jaina's reunion in Balance Point is not a happy one, because Jaina thinks her mom is using her connections for personal gain.
• Cassandra Truth: Leia's initial attempts to warn the New Republic about the Yuuzhan Vong are ignored by the Senators assuming she's either trying to distract attention from the Jedi's bad publicity, or making a grab for power, like all humans.
• Chased by Angry Natives: Happens to Luke and company in the first chapter of Refugee.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Using a Jedi Mind Trick on animals in Onslaught. Early on, Corran and his son use it to prank Ganner. Later on, they use it to set some animals on the Vong warriors, saving Corran from death.
  • The not-a-Swiss-army-knife Anakin gives Han in Hero's Trial. First he uses it for eating on a cruise ship, and at the climax it saves him from hideous death.
• Chronic Back Stabbing Disorder: The Yuuzhan Vong never follow through on their deals to spare planets, though in at least one case (Ithor), the Vong who made the deal to spare the planet (Shedao Shai) was not the same as the one who gave the order to destroy it (Deign Lian).
• The Clan: Yuuzhan Vong "domains". They have a stronger sense of familial loyalty to their domain than they do to their immediate blood relatives.
• Les Collaborateurs: Viqi Shesh, the Peace Brigade. The Peace Brigade are convinced there's no way to beat the Vong, and so surrender in the hopes they'll be spared. Shesh is just doing it to save her own ass, and get a little something as a reward in the bargain.
• Colony Drop:
  • In the very first book, the Yuuzhan Vong drop Sernpidal's moon onto the planet itself, killing thousands in the process (including Chewbacca during the half-successful evacuation attempt). This is actually a military tactic called Yo'gand's Core, named after the first Supreme Overlord of the Yuuzhan Vong. It gets used again at least once during the war (against the planet Kalarba), and Shedao Shai at one point threatens to use it on Ithor.
  • During their assault on Borleis, the Yuuzhan Vong use a dovin basal to sweep the planet's orbital defense platforms out of the sky and plunge them into the planet's atmosphere. They repeat this on Coruscant.
  • It's heavily implied that the Yuuzhan Vong had to leave their home galaxy and seek a new one (thus creating the conflict for this series) because they used that tactic too much, leaving too few habitable worlds for them to live on.
• Combat by Champion: The fate of planet Ithor is decided by a single battle between Corran and Shedao Shai. And then ignored by his subordinate, who torches the place even after he's lost.
• Combat Pragmatist: The YVH droids. When the demo unit discovers that its lasers, normally capable of being dialed up to take out a starfighter in one shot, are powered down for the demo, it simply strangles the Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators watching its demonstration.
• Combat Sadomasochist: All the Vong have strong elements of this, given their religious fetishization of pain, but Domain Shai takes it up a notch by doing things like using the Embrace of Pain, a torture instrument, as a means of meditation.
• Conflict Killer: As Palleon dryly observes, the Empire was one for the Galaxy, and without them, the New Republic is falling into infighting and idiotic bickering. The Vong aren't this for them either, as the New Republic continue self-sabotaging right up until the Vong are kicking in their door.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Early in Agents of Chaos Mara and Luke snarkily go over his various girlfriends of the week from before her (Luke even wondering where Akanah has gotten to), with Mara asking whether she should still be worried. Later on has a character discussing ship-types comparing the Millennium Falcon among other ship-types to Nubian J-Type starships (the book was released in 2002, when Attack of the Clones was just out).
  • The last book has a ship infected by a Vong-destroying plague head towards Zonama Sekot. Wedge jumps into an X-Wing and takes off after it, comparing the two to Luke and the Death Star. He needs to pick a call sign and chooses "Vader".
• Continuity Porn: The books are replete with Continuity Nods to earlier works in Legends, everything from The Corellian Trilogy to the X-Wing Series and Hand of Thrawn.
• Continuity Snarl: Shares a page with the rest of Star Wars Legends.
• Cool Old Guy: The main characters from the movies have begun to verge into this, particularly Han, who's a good ten years older than Luke or Leia. For an evil version, there's Czulkang Lah, Warmaster Tsavong Lah's father.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Several characters argue that if The Empire was still in power, its more centralized, militarized government would have been quick and decisive in defeating the Yuuzhan Vong, whereas the New Republic's hesitation to fully commit to war led them to squander chances to end the Vong invasion sooner. On the other hand, Han Solo points out that the Empire over-relied on Awesome, but Impractical superweapons with glaring flaws.
• Covers Always Lie: There were no Trade Federation vessels in Ruin, Jedi Eclipse didn't feature Han and a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, Wedge didn't fly an X-wing in Rebel Dream (well, not in combat, anyway; he did fly Luke's for recon), and X-wings weren't present in Traitor.
• Crew of One: Rebel Stand has the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya crewed by a single person when used for a ramming attack on the Yuuzhan Vong command ship. Somewhat justified, as the attack had been planned well in advance and the Lusankya specially modified for it.
• Culture Clash:
  • Early in Hero's Trial, a Vong is talking with a captive from Obroa-Skai, and they get into a discussion on religion. The Vong is totally confused by the idea of doing good not because your gods command it, or because it'll bring reward but doing good because... you know, it's good.
  • On the non-Vong side, Jagged Fel has some early teething troubles thanks to being a human who grew up in Chiss territory, which makes him come across to others as an inconsiderate berk, even when he's apparently trying to be nice. Plus, it's also hinted he's just got No Social Skills anyhow.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Several of the Vong's most crushing victories (Coruscant, Borileias, Ithor, etc), were only won at the cost of huge losses on the Vong side. This eventually reaches the point where, about halfway through the series, they literally run out of reserves, and are forced to adapt a more defensive strategy.
• Dark Is Not Evil: According to Vergere's philosophy, there is no separate "dark side", and the techniques traditionally associated with it are therefore not evil. Note that Vergere does not reject evil as a philosophical concept, merely that the dark side itself doesn't exist as an external corruptive force. The notion is essentially that whether you stand in the light or fall to the dark is all down to your own decisions.
• Darker and Edgier: Mostly due to the Vong, who are not only some of the most brutal villains the Star Wars universe produced, but also among the most successful, managing to break the back of the New Republic and seize a large chunk of the galaxy, along with killing numerous named characters and countless extras.
• Darkest Hour: Star By Star in its entirety, which ends with the Battle of Coruscant and Anakin Solo's death.
• Dead Guy Junior: Luke and Mara's son, Ben, is conceived and born during the series.
• Death Glare: Fey'la gives Viqi Sheesh one during Star by Star when she starts trying to "interpret" his words in a negotiation (which is a pretty big no-no in political circles). It's enough to momentarily get her to shut up. Fey'la's on the receiving end a short while later from the Bothan ambassador, which he takes to mean he's never going to be allowed back to Bothwaui while he's alive.
• Decade Dissonance: It barely resembles even the other Expanded Universe novels for tone.
• Decisive Battle: Book Ends Destiny's Way, which is essentially the war's version of the Normandy invasion. It begins with the Alliance ambushing and destroying a sizable Yuuzhan Vong fleet at Obroa-Skai, seeking to assassinate Supreme Overlord Shimmra who turned out not to be aboard. After this, Shimmra complains to his generals that the loss of this fleet means the Yuuzhan Vong no longer have any strategic reserve and berates them for advancing into the galaxy "over a rampart of our own dead". The book then ends with the Alliance luring in and decisively destroying a fleet led by Warmaster Tsavong Lah at Ebaq 9; Lah ejects and is killed on the ground by Jaina Solo. The war continues for another five books, but after Destiny's Way it's pretty much all downhill for the Vong.
• Decoy Protagonist: Anakin is set up for several important storylines but thanks to real-life workings, he ends up becoming one for his older brother Jacen.
• Defector from Decadence: The Jeedai heretics.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Vong see themselves as noble heroes purging a terrible taint from the galaxy, but their culture is so plain crazy that it's difficult for either the audience or other characters to have any sympathy for them whatsoever. This has the added bonus of making negotiating with them nearly impossible. Perfectly summed up when it is revealed that the best translation for "peace" in the Yuuzhan Vong language is "appropriate submission of the conquered to the conqueror."
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Han, in Dark Tide, makes only two appearances, one for both books. In fairness, he's having a bad time. Also, Threepio.
  • Tenel Ka in the second half of the series. The last book that really focuses on her goes over, in great detail, her grief over the apparent death of her long-time Love Interest Jacen Solo. Then Jacen comes back — and Tenel Ka is barely mentioned. She makes a brief cameo when Jacen returns to the Republic, but doesn't interact with him in any way. Jacen, for his part, doesn't even spare a thought to the girl that's one of his oldest friends and also been in love with him since they were 14. Later writers would avert this in future story arcs, making her a major character again and playing up her relationship with Jacen.
• Depending on the Writer: All but inevitable in a series with nineteen books and almost as many writers. The major example is the Vong's "immunity to the Force." Originally, it was just intended that the Force couldn't detect them, then it was that the Force couldn't affect them, then it was that the Force couldn't affect them directly (you couldn't Force Choke them by telekinetically squeezing their windpipe, but you could move the air away from their heads), then it went full-circle to being able to affect them normally, but not sense them. Star By Star also makes the Yuuzhan Vong vulnerable to Force lightning.
• Didn't See That Coming: A Vong infiltrator in Onslaught takes a child hostage so Leia can't shoot her. There's a tense moment as she aims at Leia... and then, thanks to Danni Quee's emerging force powers, the clip of her gun falls out.
• Disastrous Demonstration: Subverted when Lando demos the YVH droids. He ends the demonstration and the droid promptly opens fire on the crowd, causing a panic. Except it's aiming at the ooglith masquer-wearing Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators watching the event. The droid is acting exactly as designed, and when it discovers that its blasters had been locked in powered-down mode for the demo, it improvises and crushes the infiltrators to death.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Runs up to a Disc Three Final Boss, actually. The series is that long.
  • Vector Prime has the Praetorite Vong, an advance guard defeated by technobabble in the same book they're introduced. Replaced by Shedao, Domain Shai.
  • Shedao Shai leads the invasion of the Outer Rim Territories from the second book until Corran Horn kills him during single combat on Ithor in Ruin. Replaced by Warmaster Tsavong Lah.
  • Tsavong Lah, in turn, is killed by Jaina Solo after the Alliance inflicts a decisive defeat on the Vong at Ebaq 9 in Destiny's Way. Supreme Overlord Shimmra, introduced several books earlier, is set up as the final villain. Then it turns out in The Unifying Force that his court jester Onimi is the real Big Bad.
• Discriminate and Switch: Jagged Fel's first meeting with New Republic officials doesn't go well when he walks right past Fey'lya, leading to him being accused of being a racist human. He shoots back that if he was, why the hell would he be working with Chiss? He ignored Fey'lya because he's a politician.
• Disney Death: At the climax of Onslaught Corran is considerably injured and poisoned by one of his Yuuzhan Vong opponents. Resigned to his fate, he experiences a floating sensation and concludes that this must be what it must feels like to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Later, Corran is revealed to be alive, and that floating sensation is revealed to have been his companion using telekinesis to lift Corran out of his sticky situation.

• Do Androids Dream?: Picked up and dropped, depending on the author, but fairly prominent in the James Luceno novels.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The Yuuzhan Vong's leader is Shimrra, the Supreme Overlord, a god king who truly looks the part. At the liberation of Coruscant, it's revealed that he's been controlled through the Force by his jester Onimi, a being so far beneath him he was considered little more than a pet.
• Don't Think, Feel: Jacen is caught up in this conundrum, dramatically overthinking about how he feels about the Force and being a Jedi and what their role in the galaxy should be.
• Dirty Coward: Fey'la's cabinet scram from Ithor the minute it looks like actual fighting is going to happen. Borsk himself sticks around, mainly because Leia's also there, and he doesn't want her getting any glory.
• The Dragon: Several levels in the Vong hierarchy.
  • The Warmaster's job is to lead the military and act as the Dread Lord's bodyguard and enforcer, so it's basically Tsavong Lah's job description.
• Dramatic Irony: The Vong believe referring to a person by part of their name is a grave insult, which is why Tsavong Lah refers to Viqi Shesh by her first name only. She, meanwhile, things it's a sign of respect and their deep connection.
• Drives Like Crazy: Wonetun of the Wild Knights Squadron tends to fly his Skipray blastboat with the same sort of abandon usually reserved for starfighters whilst keeping the inertial compensator dialed down low enough that hapless crewmembers struggle between avoiding either falling unconscious or throwing up.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Chewbacca gets a freakin' moon dropped on him.
  • Lusa, introduced in The Crystal Star and a recurring character in the Young Jedi Knights series, is mentioned in Star by Star as having been one of the voxyn's victims, ambushed in a field. Off-screen.
  • Eelysa, from The New Rebellion, is mentioned quite a bit through the first quarter of the same book, until she took is suddenly cornered and killed by a voxyn, which is only mentioned via her students sensing it via the Force.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Luke's saved the galaxy many times and he's still not trusted by some people in the middle of a war where he and the Jedi have the few resounding victories against the invaders.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The Vong culture and military presented in the first few novels were even more dogmatic, masochistic, and incompetent than in later books. Explained in later books as being characteristic of the Praetorite Vong and Domain Shai, who made up the vanguard and may or may not have been put there so the rest of the Vong wouldn't have to deal with them.^note This is all but canon for the Shai; Ruin ends with Deign Lian proudly reporting to Tsavong Lah that he arranged Shedao Shai's death. It's more ambiguous with the Praetorite, but it's clear that Da'Gara and co. were not well-liked.
  • Several aspects of Vong culture were also clearly not hammered out as of Vector Prime. Shapers are referred to as "alchemists", and don't seem to be a separate caste, as Nom Anor's dabbling in Shaping is presented as a path to advancement, while later books make it plain that it's eccentric and borderline-heretical. Too, Da'Gara and Nom Anor are presented as Yomin Carr's direct superiors, despite the fact that he's a warrior and they're intendents; later books would always structure the chain of command along caste lines.
  • The yammosk in the first book is also significantly more powerful and threatening than any others which would appear later and is revered as something close to a demigod by the Vong. Later yammosks are treated as, essentially, living supercomputers — highly valued and useful, to be sure, but not the superiors or even equals of the Vong themselves. Justified retroactively: the yammosk in Vector Prime is said to have been defective.
  • "Coralskipper" is treated as the name for all Yuuzhan Vong craft in Vector Prime, from small one-man starfighters to larger, multi-crew vessels. Later books would have the New Republic identify them by their closest analogue to a traditional craft, and would reveal proper Vong class names for many of their larger ships, while "coralskipper" was used exclusively to mean "starfighter".
  • One not related to the Vong: the series began before the movies had really clarified the idea that good guy Force users had green or blue lightsabers (or purple, if they're Mace Windu) and only bad guys had red (since the series began in the same year The Phantom Menace came out), so there are one or two Jedi using red lightsabers here and there, without being evil.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • The Unifying Force for the series as a whole. The Yuuzhan Vong surrender and give up warfare, but dozens of planets have been devastated or destroyed, 365 trillion people lie dead^note and that's just the agreed-upon figure; nobody has any actual idea what the real number is, the New Republic has fallen, and the Jedi Order is in tatters.
  • There's also the Ithorians. While Ithor was devastated by the Vong, by the time of Star Wars: Legacy its surface, while still requiring oxygen masks and pressure suits, is starting to regain some of its former plant life.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: Averted. It's not until the Galactic Alliance readopts the asymmetric warfare strategies that helped the Rebels beat the Empire and combines them with such Imperial tactics as Orbital Bombardment that they start to gain the upper hand.
• Eldritch Abomination: Several different species of Vonglife, most notably yammosks and their cousins, dhuryams. Picture a giant octopus with hundreds of tentacles, a keen but utterly alien intelligence, and tremendous telepathic powers, and you have some idea of how freaky these things are. They're generally not as outright evil as their masters, but their alien-ness can be every bit as dangerous. Many of the Vong gods also have this feel to them.
• Elite Agents Above the Law: In Destiny's Way, Luke has a less-than-cordial encounter with a New Republic politician named Fyor Rodan, who wants to remove this trope from the Jedi. He seeks to make the Jedi Order a formal branch of the New Republic military, which among other things would make it possible to Court Martial Jedi Knights who fall to the dark side or otherwise go rogue. Luke prefers to keep the Order independent, feeling, as the Old Republic's Jedi did, that their purpose is to serve the Force rather than the political and military needs of the Republic.
• Elite Mooks:
  • An ordinary Vong warrior is more than a match for a Jedi, if they catch them unawares, mainly because Vong Force immunity means the Jedi's usual Combat Clairvoyance trick doesn't work on them. Later in the series, they become somewhat less formidable as the Jedi become wise to their weak spots. They're still probably the most impressive mooks in the entire GFFA.
  • The GFFA develops its own Mecha-Mooks countermeasure in Star By Star with Tendrando Arms Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids, equipped with self-healing structural materials, a blaster cannon that can bring down a coralskipper at full power, and a sensor package capable of ferreting out disguised Vong. They're devastating when deployed, though too expensive for common use.

• Enemy Mine: Anakin and Vua Rapuung, a Jedi and a disgraced Vong warrior who care little for each other, but team up to take on the Shapers.
• Enigmatic Minion: Vergere. Nobody's quite sure what she wants or why she's helping the Vong. She was actually a good guy... or maybe she was actually a Sith double agent. She's complicated like that.
• The Epic: Nineteen books, five years of in-universe time, and a borderline-apocalyptic war that shakes the galaxy to its foundations. It's the largest and most sweeping of any of the multi-book or comic arcs in Star Wars Legends, and its scope is unmatched by anything in the entire Star Wars 'verse with the possible exception of the core twelve movies.
• Epic Fail: On Anakin Solo's part at the Battle of Fondor. When the Vong unexpectedly attack the strategic shipyard world, Anakin takes control of Centerpoint Station (a Pointless Doomsday Device from The Corellian Trilogy), but then at Jacen's unexplained urging refuses to fire it (probably a result of the early books' poorly explained aversion to using leftover Imperial superweapons to fight the invaders). But the station is still active, so his cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo grabs the controls and fires it himself. The ensuing blast destroys half of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet, and the Hapan fleet that just arrived to reinforce the defenders, and smashes part of Fondor's moon, and clips the planet on its way past (cue Inferred Holocaust). The battle becomes a Pyrrhic Victory for the Republic (and that only because the opposing general withdraws in fear of further such attacks) and causes a political shitstorm in the Hapes Consortium that tips the balance of power to its Evil Matriarch Queen Mother Ta'a Chume, while the sudden death toll carried through the Force causes her daughter-in-law Teneniel Djo to miscarry. Meanwhile Sal-Solo, who was the villain in his first appearance and did a stint in prison for an attempted coup against the Corellian system's New Republic government, is lauded as a war hero on Corellia and gets himself elected Governor-General (setting up part of Legacy of the Force). To cap it all off, Centerpoint Station is damaged to disablement by Sal-Solo's manhandling, and Anakin admits afterward that if he'd fired Centerpoint Station himself, he could have taken out the Vong fleet without causing all that damage.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Tsavong Lah is disgusted when he hears about the familial dysfunctions the Solos go through while Han is grieving for Chewie. Justified because the Vong considered loyalty to one's family/domain to be of paramount importance.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: Subverted after the Yuuzhan Vong remake Coruscant in the image of their lost homeworld Yuuzhan'tar, Jacen (stranded there) sees the beautiful rainbow-hued planetary ring dominating the sky and realises how it inspired the Vong's brutal mindset by appearing to be a bridge to the gods. (Yuuzhan'tar is basically a Death World, and with the gods so close to hand, they must want it that way.)
  • Also, Shimrra has rainbow-hued eyes.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong share a lot of similarities with the Yevetha, genocidal xenophobia and love of pain and bloody deaths among them. About halfway through the war, in exchange for having a group of planets that feared a Duskhan League resurgence surrender to them without a fight, the Vong dispatch a battle group to N'zoth and glass it, wiping out the whole species.
  • Ditto the Ssi-Ruuk: Like the Vong, they're a race of invaders from elsewhere with a rigid caste system, a fanatical religion, a reptilian Slave Race, and a fondness for truly horrific technology. Infiltrated by Vong agents, their Imperium ends up subverted, thrown into disarray, and ultimately invaded.
• "Eureka!" Moment: While working with Cal Omas to reform the Jedi Council in Destiny's Way, Luke has a realization about the old Order and their relationship with the Old Republic — or more specifically, the Supreme Chancellor. Because the old Order was insular and secretive, their primary link to the world outside the Temple was the Supreme Chancellor. While this arrangement benefited both parties, it was also a double-edged lightsaber. Once a malevolent figure like Palpatine got into the Chancellor's Office and became that link, it was game over; Palpatine was able to cut off, isolate, and destroy the old Jedi. This makes Luke realize the new Council must never again be so isolated.
• Evil Overlord: Shimrra, who's actually called the Supreme Overlord.
• Exact Words:
  • Shedao tells Elegos he plans to have him send a message to the New Republic they cannot misinterpret. Said message is Elegos' corpse.
  • The Ithorians supposedly have it as a rule that no outsider can step foot on Ithor. Except not exactly.
  • Early in Hero's Trial, Priestess Elan asks Vergere if she's ever seen a Jedi use the Force. In a move that'd make Obi-Wan seethe, Vergere states that yes, she certainly has. She just doesn't specify to Elan that this is by way of having been a Jedi before the Vong abducted her (which the reader might not necessarily know about, and Vergere doesn't make explicit in the book until the very end).
• Eye Scream:
  • Corran Horn's first fight with a pair of Vong troopers has him take out the first, and more inexperienced, with a lightsaber to the eye, thanks to the unique design of his lightsaber (it has a second focusing crystal that he can engage to suddenly double the length of the blade). He notes it only worked because they didn't expect it, and it won't work on the second.
  • Vua Rapuung's method of taking out an opponent involves gouging out his eyes with his fingers and then lifting and throwing him aside by his eye sockets.
• Family-Values Villain: To a degree. Brutal and vicious as they are, the Vong have an incredibly strong sense of familial loyalty and devotion, far stronger than most humans do, though they tend to aim this at their domains (extended families or clans) rather than at immediate blood relatives. Played interestingly in the Force Heretic books, where Tahiri's Vong personality re-emerging makes her more unstable and violent, but also causes her to glom onto the Solos even more tightly than she ever had before, as they were the closest thing to living family she had. Other characters explicitly discuss how in-line with Vong family values she's acting.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Ryn aren't well-liked, to put it mildly.
  • The Vong also hate all other species, and are only marginally fonder of their Shamed Ones. That last bites them in the end.
• Fantastic Rank System: The Vong have one. See the trope page for details.
• Fantastic Slur: The Vong call all other species "infidels". The inhabitants of the galaxy develop a number for the Vong, notably "scarheads", but the worst is actually the word "Vong" by itself- since the Yuuzhan Vong are named after their premier god, Yun-Yuuzhan, they get really touchy when his name is removed from theirs.
• Feeling Their Age: Admiral Ackbar wasn't a young man when he was with the Rebellion. By Destiny's Way, he getting very old and infirm, to the extent he can barely be out of water for very long. He's still got his military chops, though.
• Flesh Versus Steel: GFFA vs. the Yuuzhan Vong.
• Foreshadowing: Partway through Dark Tide: Ruin, Mara sadly reflects that she'd like to have kids with Luke, but it's not really an option when she's got an apparently incurable disease and there's a war on. Later on in the series, she ends up getting pregnant anyhow.
• Freak Out: Voxyn do not like ysalamir. Just being near one causes them to go berserk, and they will tear themselves apart to get at them. Voxyn hunt through the Force, and ysalamir block it out.
• Freudian Excuse: It's implied that being caught in the crossfire during the Silentum-Abominor war (a war between two races of robots) is the reason for the Yuuzhan Vong's vicious technophobia.
• Full-Name Basis: The Vong always go by their full names, which are compose of their personal name followed by their domain (extended family) name. So for example, Tsavong Lah is Tsavong of Domain Lah, and omitting the "Lah" would be incredibly insulting, implying he has no standing in his family (though members of the same domain seem to be allowed some leeway here). Notable exceptions include Priests (who rarely use their domain names) the Supreme Overlord (who's transcended his domain) and the Shamed Ones (whose domains don't want them).
• Gaia's Lament: Duros, thanks to centuries of mismanagement, but the Empire taking over really didn't help. The atmosphere is so polluted it's poison for pretty much everyone. The rich and powerful of Duros don't mind so much. After all, it's somewhere to send all the "troublesome" people they've got, and some of them are a little incensed that the New Republic is trying to fix this. After the Yuuzhan Vong conquer Duro, they're shown to have cleaned it up.
• Gambit Pileup: Particularly in the last book, when Shimrra actually Onimi, Nom Anor, Drathul, Scaur, and the protagonists' plans all run into each other and create quite the spectacular mess.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Used to horrifying effect by the Vong.
• Genius Loci: Zonama Sekot, a living planet.

• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: As Anakin starts going on a round of It's All My Fault, Jaina smacks him around the ear, since self-absorbed wangst isn't going to help while they're still in peril.

• Gilligan Cut: When Han and Chewie "run the belt" in a two-seat TIE Bomber, the audience in the control room marvels at their effortlessly elegant piloting skill. Cut to the cockpit of the Bomber, where Han and Chewie (who barely even fits) are lurching from disaster to disaster, and their effortless and elegant maneuvers are half complete mistakes.
• A God Am I: Invoked by both Jacen and Jaina at various times to mess with or deceive the Vong. Played straight with a twist by Onimi- he believes that the twins (and several other Jedi) are gods, but that if he kills them, he can become a god himself.
• Go-Go Enslavement: Downplayed. When Danni Quee is captured in Vector Prime, she's described as wearing only a poncho, and pretty clearly naked underneath. Justified, as the conditions of her capture require the Vong to pretty regularly put an ooglith cloaker on her, and they require large amounts of bare skin to work (the Vong also likely found her machine-made garments offensive). When Jedi Miko Reglia joins her in captivity, he's only wearing a pair of tight shorts. Neither case is played for Fanservice (at least, not on the Vong's part), as Yomin Carr's internal monologue had made it quite clear he finds Danni physically repulsive.
• Going Native: An interesting one with Nom Amor. He is totally onboard with the whole "take over the galaxy" bit, but as time goes on he becomes less dogmatic than some other Vong.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: The New Republic makes overtures for assistance from other galactic powers, like the Hapans, Imperial Remnant, and Chiss Ascendency. How helpful they are varies Depending on the Writer.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Yuuzhan Vong pantheon, particularly Yun-Yammka, the War God. Subverted. The entity the Yun'o are derived from, the Genius Loci of the original Vong homeworld, was benevolent, and Yammka never actually existed at all.
• Groin Attack: Both of Aaron Allston's books have one somewhere. Vong warriors wear skirt-plates, but don't seem to have anything under them. Lando just shoots one and lets his YVH dispatch it while it's screaming in more pain than even a Vong can handle, and Mara...
  [...] in the middle of a quite elegant snap-kick against Mara, was receiving her lightsaber thrust up and under his skirt plates.
• The Grotesque: Averted. Onimi is hideously deformed, even by Vong standards. He doesn't turn out to be a very nice person at all.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: The Bothan cultural practice of ar'krai, introduced in this series and which enlists every able-bodied Bothan to not only defeat their foes, but exterminate them altogether and grind their homeworld to dust. It's only been declared three times in their entire recorded history. After the fall of Coruscant and Borsk Fey'lya's Heroic Sacrifice, the Bothans declare ar'krai on the Vong, and the Dark Nest Trilogy mentions that there are still extremists trying to carry it out.
• Gunship Rescue: The arrival of the Errant Venture in Conquest.
• Half-Human Hybrid: As a result of a Shaper's experiment, Tahiri ends up half human, half Yuuzhan Vong. Her coming to terms with this is a huge part of her character development.
• Happily Married: Briefly averted by Han and Leia in the early part of the series following Chewie's death, but soon rectified; played straight with Luke and Mara.
• The Heavy: Nom Anor gets by far the most face-time and development of the major villains. For a stretch in the middle of the series, he shares the spot with Tsavong Lah.
• Heel–Face Turn: Most of the Vong in the end, most notably Nen Yim, Harrar, and Nas Choka. Subverted with Nom Anor, who sides with the heroes in the final battle, but for his own selfish reasons. And then tries to kill them after the conclusion of said battle.
• The Hero: Ultimately, Jacen turns out to be the hero of the story, as his bond with the World Brain enables the invasion of Coruscant, and he kills Onimi, the true mastermind behind the war. Editor Sue Rostoni commented that, in many ways, NJO ended up being his series.
• Hero Killer:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong in general and literally, in Chewie and Anakin's cases.
  • The voxyn, bio-engineered Vong creatures made from Myrkr's vornskyrs, are Jedi killers.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Many, most memorably Jaina and Leia when Anakin dies.
  • Jaina again at the end of Dark Tide: Ruin, after her wingman dies in the fighting.
  • Han spends most of the first part of the series (up until the Agents of Chaos mini-series, at least) going through one over the death of Chewie. Among other things, he grows a Beard of Sorrow and for a short time becomes estranged from his family.
• Heroic RRoD: Anakin Solo dies of this in Star By Star, leading to the above.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Practically every good character who dies and is important, and quite a few who aren't, probably a few villain characters, too.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Corran, after the destruction of Ithor, gets saddled with all the blame for it by the New Republic, and he decides to distance himself from the Jedi so as to spare their name getting dragged into the mud with him.
• He Who Fights Monsters: A major theme, especially with the Alpha Red arc. Also the Yuuzhan Vong's backstory.
• History Repeats: The Yuuzhan Vong capture Borleias as a stepping-stone to the New Republic's capital Coruscant, just as the New Republic itself did two In-Universe decades earlier in the X-Wing Series.
• Hollywood Tactics: Played straight, averted, subverted.
• Homage: Traitor has many parallels to Dante's Inferno.
• Homeworld Evacuation: The Yuuzhan Vong underwent a home galaxy evacuation, after massive wars of conquest and then internecine wars they started devastated so much of it that it was rendered incapable of sustaining their civilization (their actual homeworld was destroyed first, and it's implied that they were the ones who did it). After travelling through the intergalactic void for millennia, they finally found the Star Wars galaxy—and decided to take over.
  
  Out-of-universe, it was also speculated that they were fleeing the Silentium-Abominor War, which would explain their belief that technology is unholy. Word of God confirmed the reverse was true: a Star Wars' blog entry clarified a line by Harrar in The Unifying Force that the Vong had actually kicked out the two robot species, which also fled to the GFFA.
• Honor Before Reason: Jacen gets so bent up about whether to use the Force or not that during Balance Point he vows off using it at all, even to do something like grab his lightsaber and save himself from being eaten by giant bugs.
• The Horde: The Vong start off as this, and then morph into The Empire after taking Coruscant.
• Hostile Terraforming: A specialty of the Yuuzhan Vong.
• If You Kill Him You W Ill Be Just Like Him: Played straight, averted, subverted, depending on which book you're reading.
• I'll Kill You!: Ganner does not take being pranked by Corran terribly well. At all.
• Immune to Bullets: Voxyn are covered in scales which are, naturally, capable of deflecting laser bolts. Aiming for the weak points can help, but they're tough without those, and persistent enough to not care.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy: Mara and Luke realizing she's pregnant means having to deal with the fact she's pregnant while she's got a disease that in every other case has proved fatal, along with the fear the disease might damage the baby in some way, in addition to everything else going on. It doesn't take Mara long to start having nightmares.
• Improbable Piloting Skills: Blackmoon Eleven/Wedge Antilles.
• Incendiary Exponent: Han Solo, speaking of the Vong's yorik volcano cannons in the New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology:
  "During the civil war, the Imperials just chased us into asteroid fields. Now the enemy shoots the asteroids at us. And they're on fire."
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • During a debate on the nature of the Old Jedi Order in Ruin, one advocate for militarizing claims that since there are no records the Jedi weren't warriors, they can't prove they weren't, and anyone who says otherwise is just reaching, QED. For the record, the person saying such turns out to be going a little nuts.
  • When Luke tells Kre'fey about the time he and Mara found the Empire of the Hand, Krey states there are those in the New Republic who would take Luke's hiding this knowledge as proof he was trying to create a Jedi hegemony using the Chiss. Corran even points out how that doesn't make a lick of sense, which Krey acknowledges, just noting it's what might happen.
  • A guy from Obroa-Skai pleading for assistance from the New Republic somehow comes to the conclusion it's the Jedi's fault the Vong invaded and conquered his world.
• Internal Reveal: The Vong don't learn Jacen and Jania are twins until some way in, which comes as a huge surprise to them (since the amount of times Yuuzhan Vong have had twins can be counted on one hand). Not even their double-agents bothered telling them because it was just such an obvious fact to them.

• It Is Beyond Saving: In Star by Star, witnessing the New Republic senate continuing to engage in politicking, finger-pointing, blame shifting and currying even as the Vong are planning to kick down the door brings Leia to the realization that the whole thing isn't worth fighting for, and she therefore quits.
• It Only Works Once: Corran figures his extending lightsaber trick won't work on the second Vong warrior he's facing.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: In Star by Star, Ulaha tells Anakin that she'd only slow the infiltration team down thanks to her many injuries, and without her their chances of success skyrocket. She soon sacrifices herself to distract the Yuuzhan Vong.
• Jedi Mind Trick:
  • One is attempted on Booster during "Star by Star", partly because of desperation. He shrugs it off.
  • A Sith Mind Trick is used on Anakin by Lomi Plo when she and her apprentice decide to get out of there, temporarily wiping his memory that they exist.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Given his severe physical frailty, Ackbar wonders whether Fey'la had a point not letting him come out of retirement.
• Karma Houdini: The entire Yuuzhan Vong race. While genocide might go against Jedi principles and the entire morality of the Star Wars, considering that the Vong destroyed entire planets, killed trillions of innocent beings, and even exterminated entire races (not only in the Star Wars Galaxy but their own home galaxy as well), it's understandable that many in-universe (and among the audience) felt cheated when they were allowed to depart in peace after the war's end. This is arguable, though: among other things, the victorious allies forcibly disarm the Vong, and the Shamed Ones, previously the lowest of the low in their culture, become the new ruling class instead of the previously exalted warrior caste.
• Kick the Dog: Almost all of the Vong do this at some point.
• Killer Robot: The Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids, who're programmed to kill Yuuzhan Vong and protect New Republic citizens and personnel. The Dark Nest Trilogy later had them reprogrammed to hunt Killiks.
• Klingon Promotion: Viqi Shesh gives it a try in Star by Star, hoping to bump off Borsk so she can be Chancellor. It fails, and Nom Amor is assumed responsible, which he's pretty annoyed about.
• Knight Templar: Most of the Vong are like this, viewing the inhabitants of the galaxy as corrupt infidels who need to be converted or exterminated, and some on the New Republic side become like this against the Vong. Lampshaded by Nom Anor in Traitor- "The problem with fanatics was that they had a tendency to take everything ten steps too far."

• Language Equals Thought: The Vong don't have a word for "peace". The closest they've got is "total, willing submission".
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Yevetha, the just-as-racist-and-genocidal inhabitants of the Deep Core that gave the New Republic some trouble several years before, is subjected to a brutal invasion by the Vong during the war.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Vector Prime, there's talk of how the new Jedi are beginning to rediscover how the old order used to operate, much like how Star Wars fans did with the contemporary release of The Phantom Menace.
• Lensman Arms Race: A tactical variant, as both sides adapt and refine their tactics to overcome each others' special abilities:
  • Vong volcano cannons are easily shrugged off by New Republic deflector shields, until the Vong learn their dovin basals can yank the shields right off a ship's hull. The New Republic quickly learns to extend the acceleration compensator envelope to protect their shields.
  • To bypass the shielding singularities Vong ships use to protect themselves from enemy fire, the New Republic develops "splinter fire," lowering the power of their laser weapons so they can fire faster and quickly exhaust the dovin basals, then fire full-power to damage the ship itself. Late in Ruin, the Yuuzhan Vong adapt to this by generating weak voids to defeat splinter fire, which the Republic quickly defeats by upping the power and smashing through with brute force.
  • Missile weapons such as proton torpedoes, being slower-moving, are even less effective against dovin basals. In response, Kyp Durron, a Jedi, fires a torpedo with the rocket motor switched off and aims it with the Force to hit enemy ships. With no active drives, the Vong dovin basals don't know the torpedo is incoming until it's too late. The Jedi Order quickly builds on this by introducing the "shadow bomb", a proton torpedo casing with the drive and warhead removed and replaced with baradium (the powerful explosive in thermal detonators).
  • Also used literally, as the New Republic works hard to find a way jam yammosk coordination. The Vong respond by deploying backup yammosks.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: A couple of Dark Jedi encountered in Star by Star discover that Force lightning works just fine on the normally Force-immune Vong.
• Living Ship: The ships of the Vong.
• Love Epiphany: Tenel Ka finally realizes she loves Jacen after he's captured by the Vong, and she mistakenly believes he's been killed.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Shedao Shai's forces in Ruin run headlong into a trap on Ithor, the New Republic forces using their anti-technology attitude against them. By the time Shedao figures things out, one of his guys has already triggered the trap.
  • What finally does Tsavong Lah in during Destiny's Way. Admiral Ackbar cooks up a strategy relying on the Vong martyrdom culture and their unwillingness to flee or disobey orders, baited with the Jedi. Tsavong falls for it, partly because he can't conceive that it could be a trap (he almost does, but then brushes it off because he wouldn't do such a thing).
• Mad Scientist: Most Shapers, Mezhan Kwaad most of all.
• Malevolent Mutilation: Embraced by the Vong with religious fervor.
• Mama Bear: While Mara doesn't go full gear until the next major series, there are definite and rather obvious shades of this trope, starting from the moment she discovers her pregnancy.

• Mauve Shirt: Many Jedi and some characters from past books.
• Meaningful Name: It's no coincidence that a figure named Vergere is the one who leads Jacen through his symbolic death and rebirth in Traitor.
• Memetic Badass: In-Universe example. Ganner Rhysode's incredible Heroic Sacrifice makes such an impact on the Yuuzhan Vong that he becomes a god in their minds, dubbed Yun-Ganner.
• Mile-Long Ship: The series adds several more to the franchise's collection. These include the New Republic Viscount-class Star Defender battleship originally designed as a counter to the likes of the Executor-class star dreadnought; the Yuuzhan Vong koros-stronha^translation "worldship", primarily generation ships but fully capable of defending themselves; and the Yuuzhan Vong kor chokk^translation "grand cruiser", warships such as Shedao Shai's Legacy of Torment that serve much the same command-and-control and heavy battleship role as super star destroyers.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Discussed by Luke in "Ruin", when one of the Order starts seeking out a means of building superweapons to fight the Vong. Luke raises the point that you can talk about the horror of what happened to Alderaan, but...
  Luke: We all know the story of Alderaan. We know what happened to Caridia. We remember the Krytos Virus, but somehow, getting your brain around the idea that billions of people are dead is very tough. You can feel very bad, devastated, over the death of one person, but can you multiply that a billion times when a planet is destroyed?
• Mirroring Factions: Brought up metaphorically by both sides, but also seen literally in their military technologies. Take the YVH droid and the voxyn, for instance — both are carefully engineered for their targets, both are horribly beweaponed and Made of Iron, both can sense the difference between their prey and regular humans. Later on, there are the Slayers, who consciously attempt to mimic the Jedi. In neither case does this end well for the Vong, though, since their culture and technology prevent them from mass-producing their elites.

• Moral Myopia: Shedao Shai is appalled that the evacuees of Dantooine at the end of Dark Tide: Onslaught leave their dead behind. Never mind that they were running from a Vong attack they couldn't resist, and didn't have time to pick up every corpse.
• Morton's Fork:
  • The Peace Brigade ironically find themselves in this situation by the later stages of the war. By this point, the galaxy at large finally understands and accepts collaboration or cutting deals with the Vong is a fool's bargain; they've broken their word too many times to trust any more promises of peace or mercy. So the Brigade now has no choice, but to remain allied with the Vong to protect themselves from the Galactic Alliance (who will be coming for all their heads should they win the war). But it's not an alliance of equals, because the Vong are now using them as cannon fodder (and will have no more use for the Brigade if they win the war). Either way, the Peace Brigrade loses.
  • Vergere dryly observes that no matter how she answers, the New Republic will take it to mean she's a spy. Answer too vaguely, she's obviously hiding something because she's a spy. Answer in too much detail, it's obviously rehearsed, and she's a spy.
• Mundane Utility: The Force is what gives the Jedi their power. It allows them to move objects with their mind, influence the weak-minded and animals... during Dark Tide: Onslaught, it's used by Kyp as a glorified umbrella to keep sand off him.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Saba Sebatyne's reaction to inadvertently killing hundreds of her fellow Barabels by destroying a Yuuzhan Vong slave transport in anger in Remnant. She's troubled by what she had done, which leads her to attempt a daring capture of a similar slave ship later on in the book.
  • Nom Anor, of all people, has one after he sics a bunch of warriors on a gathering of Shamed Ones (Shamed Ones who were following his teachings, no less) and saw them get slaughtered. It didn't really lead to a full-on Heel–Face Turn, but it did show that Anor was starting to develop standards.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: In Star by Star, Ganner Rhysode gets the Yuuzhan Vong terms for "low-caste person" and "dung of a rotting meat maggot" confused.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: A couple of Vong examples, most notably Nom Anor (who's utterly evil in a way completely different from his fellows- they're fanatical Knight Templars and he's a manipulative power-grabber) and Nen Yim (who is too coldly logical to go along with the more... crazy beliefs of her people, though she only starts openly going against the grain near the end). Harrar, a Yuuzhan Vong priest who appears several times throughout the series, also shows himself to be a pretty reasonable and open-minded person.
• Mythology Gag: Winking references to the movies are not uncommon here. Some books are just more subtle about it than others.
• Never Found the Body: Nom Anor, leading to many fans speculating that he actually survived. However, he never reappeared after The Unifying Force.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Luke — and later Kyp — is able to manipulate the little singularities which Vong ships produce to absorb attacks, making them into somewhat bigger singularities which swallow the Vong ships. Neither of them does it more than once, though—Luke goes unconscious from the effort, and while Kyp doesn't pass out from his effort, he still ends up exhausted. Luke is also able to communicate with a tank of goo made of single-celled creatures that devour all organic matter, nanite-style, telling them "I am not food" so he can climb in and get something. This leads to him ruefully saying, "I should have told it 'My clothes are not food, either.'"
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The antics of Kyp Durron and his followers in Vector Prime sabotage Leia's attempts to warn everyone about the Vong during Dark Tide.
  • A particularly cruel variant appears in Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse. The heroes are considering using Centerpoint Station to attack the Yuuzhan Vong fleet to save the critical shipyard world Fondor, but Anakin is torn over whether or not such participating in such a brutal attack would go against his Jedi training. Meanwhile, his evil cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo is all for using the station, and tries to push Anakin into pulling the trigger. In the end, Anakin steadfastly refuses, so Thrackan jumps in and fires the station himself—proceeding to wipe out most of the fleet that the Hapans had sent to aid the Republic. Even worse, Anakin realizes that if he had pulled the trigger, he probably could have successfully wiped out the Vong without hitting the Hapans, since his control over the station is much better than Thrackan's.
  • Luke setting up a Jedi base in the Deep Core during Edge of Victory after the Yuuzhan Vong destroy his Jedi Academy on Yavin 4 will come back to haunt everyone during Fate of the Jedi. In his defense, he had no way of knowing that the Dark Side entity Abeloth was imprisoned in the Deep Core, or that she would turn the young Force users into sleeper agents in an attempt to free herself.
  • Also in Edge of Victory, Talon Karrde uses his pet vornskyrs as a means of locating and rescuing the Jedi on Yavin 4. However the Peace Brigade make note of this and pass the information along to the Yuuzhan Vong, who then use vornskyrs to create the voxyn.
  • Under normal circumstances, the arrival of the Lusankya and its subsequent pasting of the Yuuzhan Vong task force at Borleias near the beginning of Rebel Dream would have been a Gunship Rescue moment. However, prior to its arrival, the New Republic forces at Borleias were counting on stringing along a merely average Yuuzhan Vong commander and fleet in order to fulfill their goals. When the Lusankya killed that commander and wiped out his forces, the Sorting Algorithm of Evil (all but called out by name by Wedge) dictated that the Yuuzhan Vong send a more wily commander with a stronger task force.
• No One Gets Left Behind: At the times the Yuuzhan Vong are willing to exploit this through the use of refugees or other hostages.
  • Blackmoon Squadron is a clear believer. Despite being all but certain that one of their wounded members was evacuated already, they go back during a planetary evacuation when his abandoned fighter launches, saying they won't leave their own behind. This ends up saving the life of another pilot who was forced to use the damaged starfighter to escape the planet.
• No OSHA Compliance: Just when the Empire starts caring about workers' rights, along come some aliens who think that torture is a good thing.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Explored from several angles through Dark Tide: Ruin regarding the Empire's long list of superweapons. The Jedi actually do have the plans saved in their archives, flagged in case anyone pokes around in them, but having the plans isn't enough - you'd need time, resources and secrecy to build them, and one of the builders had her memories of how she did that erased by Jedi some years back (which she's pretty happy about), and in the modern galaxy, a giant superweapon would kind of draw a lot of attention. Luke and Mara do wonder about whether the name "the Eye of Palpatine" means there's a back-up somewhere, since he did have more than one eye, but if there is, no-one's ever found it.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Vuuzhan Vong don't appear for most of Onslaught, only showing up in the flesh in the final third, but the characters see a lot of their handiwork in the meantime.
• No True Scotsman: Vergere is... not remotely approving of Luke's reforms to the Jedi Order, regarding them as not proper Jedi. Jacen's about the only one she figures is closest to her idea of Jediness.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Onimi is Shimrra's court jester and personal slave—he's obnoxious and has a cruel sense of humor, but is largely harmless except when acting on Shimrra's direct orders. Except that he's actually the Big Bad, a ridiculously powerful Force-user, and an Omnicidal Maniac. Shimrra was never anything more than his tool.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Responsible for problems with refugees, governmental mingling of head with sand.
  • In the early stages of the war, this was the main weapon the Yuuzhan Vong had against the New Republic. Infiltrators and collaborators kept the New Republic from fully reacting to the Vong threat pretty much until they were knocking on Coruscant's doorstep. Notably, fleets that could have been sent to out slow, halt, or even turn back the Vong advance early were kept in defensive formations around valuable Core worlds that were in no danger whatsoever of attack.

• Obviously Evil:
  • The Vong are religious fanatics who enjoy torture and killing, though it should be noted that Blue-and-Orange Morality is in play here; from the Vong perspective, it's the "infidels" who are Obviously Evil.
  • It takes Jacen one conversation with Shesh, which doesn't last more than five minutes, to peg her as being utterly untrustworthy, comparing her directly to pre-Clone Wars Palpatine. Once Jaina passes on this concern to Leia, it takes her only a few moments consideration to figure that, yeah, Shesh is super-suspicious.
• Oh, Crap!: Everyone but the Bothans have this reaction upon learning that Alpha Red was deployed on Caluula, and an infected Yuuzhan Vong ship is heading to Coruscant. The Bothans start to act a little more nervous when they finally accept that the virus mutated and is able to attack other lifeforms.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Onimi, who explicitly tells Jaina during his Motive Rant that he's going to kill everyone and everything in the galaxy. As he believed this would let him become a god, though, it's possible he intended to create a new universe to worship him afterwords, but as he never gets that far we don't know for sure. He's nuts either way.)
• Only a Flesh Wound: Anakin takes a hit saving Jaina from some Vong warriors, but insists it's not that bad and he's fine, really. Eventually, medical examination proves it's not. His spleen's ruptured and unless he does something soon he'll be in much worse trouble.
• Only in It for the Money: The initial head of the Peace Brigade is a former smuggling associate of Han's who's just in it for the credits. Then he dies horribly.
• Orbital Bombardment:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong use the conventional ships-firing-on-planets form a few times, but they're also inordinately fond of the Colony Drop.
  • Operation Emperor's Hammer in Rebel Dream, a.k.a. Operation Infantry Can't Do Shit About Super Star Destroyers.
• Operator Incompatibility/Phlebotinum-Handling Requirements: The New Essential Guide To Vehicles and Vessels mentions that the Skywalkers modified the bridge airlock on the Jade Shadow so that it could only be activated from outside if one used the Force to operate the internal mechanisms.
• Outside-Context Problem: This is a large part of why the initial Vong invasion is so successful. The Vong know the capabilities and limits of galactic technology, while the galactics do not know anything about Vong biotech.
• Paint It Black: Partway through the series, the Millennium Falcon gets a new paintjob of solid black. It helps hide the laser scarring.
• Parting-Words Regret: Before Balance Point, Han and Leia have a nasty argument. During the book, Leia really hopes that they meet up again, because she doesn't want their last words to one another to have been what's implied to be some heavy-duty swearing.
• The Power of Friendship: Jacen's befriending and mind-bond with the World Brain not only saves his life and that of the Brain, but also sets in motion the events that topple the Vong from their rule.
• Planetary Relocation: After conquering Coruscant, the Yuuzhan Vong go to work terraforming it into a replica of their original homeworld Yuuzhan'tar. This includes using their gravity-generating dovin basal creatures to move the planet closer to its sun to alter the macroclimate. They also shatter one of the planet's moons to create a ring system, and throw the other two moons out of orbit entirely.
• Powerful People Are Subs: There's a joke about this from Luke and Mara of all people in Destiny's Way after Luke has a less-than-productive meeting with Fyor Rodan, a New Republic politician who wants changes in the Jedi Order's role in the war.^note Specifically, he wants them incorporated into the regular military chain of command with all that entails, especially in terms of accountability, whereas Luke favors the status quo of a largely autonomous order.
  Luke: He kept calling me "Skywalker". Because I don't have a title—I'm not a senator, I'm not a general any longer, I'm not an ambassador. He used the word like an insult.
  Mara: He could have called you "Master". Like I do sometimes.
  Luke: I don't think it would be the same as when you do it.
  Mara: It better not be... Skywalker.

• Prefers Going Barefoot: Tahiri Veila. It's explained as liking the cool floors after feeling only hot sands she previously lived with.
• Privateer: Han and Talon Karrde go on a series of raids against Vong-allied shipping transporting supplies and captives. He mentions to one aggrieved captain that since he's only targeting the Vong, he's a privateer, not a pirate.
• Prolonged Prologue: The prologue for Star by Star is eighty-six pages.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: Nom Anor spins a bunch of fanciful tales while claiming to be the Prophet Yu'Shaa... then the tales come true.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Vong put the Spartans to shame when it comes to being a psychotically obsessive warrior race.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Nen Yim. She's a Yuuzhan Vong "shaper" (a scientist and engineer) who pulls some nasty Playing with Syringes on Tahiri under the direction of a more senior shaper, but she's motivated by wanting to develop the clout to save her domain's dying worldship and is overall a pretty decent person by Yuuzhan Vong standards.
• The Purge: The Jedi, again, but this time those poor droids get to join them.
• Purple Prose: During Corran and Shedao's fight at the end of Ruin, the prose takes an unusually elaborate way to say Shedao licks the blood off his staff.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Wedge's forces on Borleias manage to hand one of these to the Yuuzhan Vong, sacrificing a Super Star Destroyer (but not its crew or weapons; they were all relocated to other ships) to destroy a worldship and one of the Yuuzhan Vong's best generals. The Yuuzhan Vong gain the planet, but with far greater losses than Wedge's forces suffered. Said general is fully aware that his victory was not worth the cost, and reports as much to the Warmaster, all but spelling out its a blow from which the Vong are unlikely to recover. Meanwhile Wedge achieved his primary objective—to delay the Vong while what was left of the Republic got itself sorted out and became the Galactic Alliance—albeit at a greater cost than he intended.
• The Quisling: The Peace Brigade, ostensibly a group working for peace between the Vong and the GFFA but who are really under the direction of their infiltrators such as Nom Anor.
• Ramming Always Works: Vergere helps deal with the problem of taking out the two thousand Yuuzhan Vong troops on Ebaq-9 by flying an A-Wing into the military base. The result is a colossal fireball which takes out the artificial atmosphere, causing all the Vong troops to suffocate in seconds. It also kills her in the process. And Tsavong Lah manages to survive.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Admiral Kre'fay for the Republic Forces, Palleon for the Imperial Remnant. Suffice to say, the whole war would go a hell of a lot easier if it were all up to them... but Kre has to answer to his bosses, and Palleon has to deal with the Moffs, and there's only so much rule-bending they can get away with.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Han's rant in Destiny's Way to an Imperial Remnant officer who says the Vong wouldn't have been a problem if Emperor Palpatine was still around. Likely a Take That! to the out-of-universe argument about whether Palpatine had built the Empire as preparation for the invasion to begin with.
  "What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong–killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."
• Redemption Equals Death: Borsk Fey'Lya, Nen Yim, Vua Rapuung, Ganner Rhysode (who wasn't evil, but was a colossal glory hound and jerk), and Nom Anor.
• Red Right Hand: The Vong do this to themselves for social, religious, and practical reasons. Special mention goes to Tsavong Lah, who goes so far as to clone a long-extinct monster just so he can kill it and use its talons to replace one of his legs. On the other hand, grafts that fail to take or otherwise behave abnormally are seen as ill omens from the Vong perspective, and are enough to permanently shame their recipient.
• Red Shirt: 365 trillion, as summarized in the final book.
• Relative Button: Shedao Shai is introduced examining the remains of two Vong warriors who were his cousins, killed by Corran Horn. He's incensed even further when it turns out the scientists Corran was protecting medically examined his grandfather.
• Religion of Evil: The Vong religion is half this, half Path of Inspiration because the gods are all either fake or horribly misrepresented.
• Reporting Names: Basically all Vong ships except for coralskippers. Since their vessels are grown rather than constructed, they don't follow a standard template very well. Therefore, the Republic takes to grouping them by size (e.g. "blastboat analogue", "cruiser analogue") or sometimes role ("carrier analogue", "interdictor analogue").
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Yuuzhan Vong's Chazrach slave army will lapse into a killing frenzy when their connection with their masters' influence over them is disrupted. Bossk's cameo in Hero's Trial also follows this trope. Subverted with the Barabel Jedi in later installments — young Ben Skywalker even seems to take a shine to Saba in Remnant.
• Resistance as Planned: Discussed during The Unifying Force by Harrar when he, Luke, and Mara discuss the revelation of Nom Anor being the Prophet. Harrar (correctly) concludes Nom Anor fell in with the Jeedai hersey as a means of surviving his downfall and disgrace after Ebaq 9. The Skywalkers agree, but if that's the case, why then would Nom Anor try to destroy Zonama Sekot — an act which benefits Shimmra and thus weaknes the Executor's position? Harrar's just as puzzled and offers several theories. Among them, he (incorrectly) speculates that it's possible Nom Anor's actually secretly still working for the Supreme Overload. If so, it would mean the heretics are really being used by Shimmra to distract the elite from the ongoing problems with the war effort and terraforming Coruscant (and/or to provide a justiication for purging Yuuzhan Vong society of undesiriables).
• Retcon: A few early inconsistencies were explained away in later books. Stackpole's Vong being even more masochistic than the other writers' Vong was described as being a particular characteristic of Domain Shai.
• Retired Badass: Czulkang Lah, Tsavong Lah's father and an old warrior who's brought out of retirement to fight at Borleias after the Lusankya kills the original commander earlier than Wedge had intended.
• The Reveal: Several, but the most prominent occur in The Unifying Force, where we learn that Shimmra was merely a puppet of Onimi, who had regained a link to the Force by grafting yammosk tissue to his brain, and that Zonama Sekot was the seed of Yuuzhan'tar, the Yuuzhan Vong's original homeworld which they destroyed after it stripped them of their connection to the Force for going genocidal on their home galaxy.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Played straight, subverted.

• Rousing Speech: Leia gives one of these during the fall of Coruscant. Many of those in the New Republic are moved by her words, but it fails in its goal to prevent senators from using badly-needed military vessels to flee the battle.
• Scars Are Forever: In Ruin, Ganner consciously chooses to heal an injury to his face in such a manner that it leaves a scar, as an admonition to himself concerning the arrogance that led him to be injured in the first place. In Rebirth, Tahiri says that she refuses to allow the scars on her forehead to be removed because she "earned" them from injuries inflicted on her in Conquest.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Yuuzhan Vong seem to be a combination of the Nazi and religious forms of this trope. Their culture has a rigid caste system, each of which has a patron god, allows only the use of biotechnology and they harbor an extreme revulsion towards "built things." Rites of passage involve the sacrifice of body parts, the grafting of new body parts, tattooing and mutilation which leaves scars that they view as attractive. They also exhibit a more or less religious devotion to pain, and enslave or kill anyone who does not adhere to their beliefs.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Played straight, or averted, or subverted, Depending on the Writer:
  • In Vector Prime, Sernpidal apparently orbits its star at the same distance our moon orbits Earth. While this could potentially work were Sernpidal's star a White Dwarf it is also the third (or fifth; there are conflicting accounts) planet of that star system.
  • Averted with ehe estimated death toll for the war of an estimated 365 trillion lives. The Star Wars galaxy was stated to have over a million inhabited world, which lowballing an average population of one billion, would give a total population of at least 1000 trillion. 365 trillion casualties would be viable especially since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion caused an unprecedented amount of violence and destruction, with many planets completely depopulated, in the galaxies over 25,000 year history.^note  365 trillion is about 182,500 times the number of people who died - 2 billion - when the Death Start destroyed Alderaan.
  • Also averted with the final battle over Coruscant. One of the most massive battles to ever take place in the galaxy, casaulties were massive on both sides. On the Alliance side along five million people were killed, 300 capital ships were destroyed, and over 11,000 starfighters were destroyed.
  • Star by Star has the Vong take a fleet of refugee ships containing millions hostage, as opposed to the billions you'd expect. The likely explanation is in how many people didn't survive long enough to become refugees.
• Screaming Warrior: The Vong, being berserkers, tend to scream a lot in fights.
• Self-Healing Phlebotinum: During the Yuuzhan Vong War Lando Calrissian uses laminanium in the armor and structural components of his Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids to make them able to take even more punishment. For their part all Vong technology is organic and can heal from varying amounts of damage depending on the item.
• Series Continuity Error: One book mentions that Tenel Ka "held her mother's hands in both of hers". Tenel Ka's left arm was severed in a training accident in Lightsabers and she refused a prosthesis at that time.
• Series Fauxnale: James Luceno said he deliberately wrote The Unifying Force with the mindset that it could be the last Star Wars story ever.

• Shocking Defeat Legacy:
  • Ithor, for a start. The Jedi note that all the planets that have already fallen to the Vong vanguard haven't really been considered "important" enough (except for the people living there), being distant and isolated.
  • The Fall of Coruscant. The Yuuzhan Vong inflict a lethal blow to the New Republic and, for the first time in several thousand years, the lights of The City That Never Sleeps are going out.
  Han Solo: The end of the world. Who’d’ve thought we’d live to see it?
• Shoot the Dog: During the attack on Coruscant, the Vong use captured refugees as shields, banking on the New Republic forces not daring to shoot. Some don't. Some, like General Iblis, do. When Fey'lya orders the military to shoot regardless, several of them point-blank refuse.
• Shout-Out:
  • Take a look at a Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droid, then compare it to a Terminator minus its human disguise. Wholly deliberate, since the Vong (minus scars, tattoos, implants, skin color, and possibly absence of nose) look basically human, and the YVH droids were meant to look like mechanical mockeries of Yuuzhan Vong specifically to piss them off.
  • A pair of Vong creatures are named Beater and Biter.
• Silence, You Fool!: Warmaster Tsavong Lah's first scene has him telling Dieng to shut up before the guy can say him name, even though they're communicating in private.
• Slave Race: The Chazrach.
• Slow Doors: Averted with near-disastrous results for Han and Droma during their run through Ruan's irrigation channels.
• Snub by Omission: Jagged Fel's first meeting with New Republic officials doesn't go well when he walks right past Fey'lya, leading to him being accused of being a racist human. He shoots back that if he was, why the hell would he be working with Chiss? He ignored Fey'lya because he's a politician.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Discussed in Rebel Stand.
  Gen. Wedge Antilles: We were hoping to get a Yuuzhan Vong commander of average skills, with an average fleet, and I suspect that we did. We were going to string him along for as much time as we could, but circumstances today dictated that we wipe him out right away. The next one they send is going to be much tougher, and that's going to make things more difficult for all of us.
• Sorting Algorithm of Deadness: Anakin Solo's a 3.5.
• Space Is Cold: Played straight. Han manages to kill a bunch of voxyn that get stuck in the Falcon's airlock. The combination of cold and exposure to space does them in... eventually.
• Space Elves: Vergere's species are somewhat like this, being long-lived and strange-looking bird folk who don't tend to get out much. They're so obscure that the New Republic don't even realize she's a local, thinking she's some species the Vong brought with them.
• Space Nomads: The Ryn, who aren't even sure where their homeworld is anymore, and wander the galaxy. This doesn't make them very popular.
• Space Pirates: Urias Xhaxin and his band of privateers in Onslaught are of the "normal" variety outlined on that trope page.
  • The Peace Brigade are more like Space Privateers in some books (notably Edge of Victory I), aiding the Yuuzhan Vong for their own profit (though this generally just evens out to earning a fast death).
• Spotting the Thread: In Hero's Trial, Han notices something very suspicious with Elan and Vergere's apparent defection, capture and escape, along with the fact the Vong ship pursuing the Falcon is missing way too much. He manages to single-handedly scupper Elan's entire plan then and there.
• Springtime for Hitler: Played for Drama in the Enemy Lines duology. Wedge's plan at Borleias was to string along a less-competent Vong commander for a while to buy time for the Republic. A snafu (see Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, above) results in that commander's death, and the Sorting Algorithm of Evil spits out a much more dangerous one to replace him (Warmaster Tsavong Lah's father Czulkang Lah). Played for Laughs during the snafu:
  Wedge: Tycho, we're about to achieve a tremendous victory we don't want.
  Tycho: We'll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn't fail when he tried to.
• Spy Satellites: Played straight in Jedi Eclipse.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Anakin Solo and Tahiri Veila have been good friends since Junior Jedi Knights, and start to fall in love after escaping from Yavin 4 in Edge of Victory I: Conquest. Then he's killed during the Myrkr mission in Star By Star.
• Starter Villain: Prefect Da'Gara, the Vong leader from Vector Prime.
• Stepping Stones in the Sky: The final battle of Luke, Mara, and Tahiri vs. Lord Nyax had this, though they had both the Force and the fact that the "stepping stones" were building size making things easier.
• Storming the Castle: The battle of Coruscant.
• Subspace Ansible:
  • Yuuzhan Vong villips, paired creatures engineered to reshape and recolor their bodies to resemble the person on the other end. Because each villip can only communicate to one other villip, mass communication requires them to be organized into "villip choirs".
  • There's a subplot in the penultimate novel, The Final Prophecy, that the Yuuzhan Vong have started targeting relay satellites for the Holonet, which allows galaxy-wide real-time holographic communication. As such, small, fast ships like the Millennium Falcon get put to use as couriers for a time. Of course, it then begs the question of why the Vong didn't do this earlier in the invasion?

• Super-Soldier: Vong Slayers, warriors genetically engineered to counter the Jedi.
  • The rank-and-file Vong warriors probably count, since they have armor and weapons that can withstand lightsaber strikes, are (mostly) immune to Force powers, and frequently have implants that make them more formidable than their species baseline (which is already heavily implied to be larger and stronger than the average human).
• Take a Third Option: Vergere tells Jacen that he, as the one with the power, is the gardener; he must decide if the ones around him are flowers or weeds. The first time we hear this, it's in the context of Jacen trying to treat the wounds of the other slaves on the seedship, and with no way to save them all; naturally he interprets this as his responsibility to choose who lives and dies. But as time goes by he realizes Vergere's true meaning: all the slaves are worth saving. The warriors who kill them? The dhuryam who use them as tools? They're the weeds, and they have lessons to learn.
• Take That!: Destiny's Way gave one to the Bantam era's overuse of superweapons, as well as the assertion by some EU authors that Emperor Palpatine was trying to prepare the galaxy for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. In response to an Imperial Remnant officer's belief that the invaders wouldn't stand a chance if Palpy was still in charge, Han Solo retorts:
  "What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong–killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."
• Taking You with Me: Fey'lya tries this, hoping to lure Tsavong Lah in and get killed so he can blow him up with a dead man's switch. Thanks to Vergere, it doesn't quite work, as Tsavong doesn't show, but it does take out the guy he sent instead. And his warriors. And their fleet. And quite a lot of the buildings nearby.
• Tarot Troubles: In Hero's Trial. Only since this is Star Wars, sabbac cards are used instead. But it's the same gist.
• Teen Genius: Nen Yim is somewhere in her late teens/early twenties (or at least the Vong equivalent) and as far and away the most brilliant Shaper in the whole series. Of course, a lot of that comes from her being one of the few willing to practice a certain heresy called the scientific method.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Ganner and Corran through Dark Tide I: Onslaught.
• Tempting Fate: Jaina swears in her first conversation with Jagged Fel that she refuses to fall for a guy who thinks grim is a perfectly normal state of being. She fails.
• That's No Moon: Worldships, where the Vong are born and raised.
• They Look Like Us Now: The Vong use ooglith masquers to hide among other races. In Onslaught, some of them hide among refugees from one of their attacks.
• To Hell and Back: A symbolic example. Jacen is told early on in his captivity by Vergere that he's dead; that story arc, Traitor, focuses on his maturation as an adult as he journeys through the hell of the Yuuzhan Vong worlds—and his eventual ascent and rebirth.

• Torture for Fun and Information: Most Vong are seriously into torture, though it's a bit hard to call it "cold-blooded" when they see it as an act of religious devotion. Then there's Duman Yaght, the commander of the prisoner transport from Star By Star, who goes out of his way to make his captives suffer just because he's a titanic jerk.
• Transferable Memory: The Vong can generate, remove, and implant memories using advanced shaping techniques. Tahiri finds this out firsthand.

• Uncertain Doom: In "Star by Star", Lomi Plo and her apprentice briefly work with Anakin's team, until they decide they far prefer living and run for it, taking a ship with an injured member of the team with them. The others can't see what happen, but figure they won't get far before the Vong shoot them down. After the series is over, it turns out they survived... sort of.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Dovin basals generate temporary black holes to absorb enemy weapons fire (as well as being Reactionless Drive). Realistically, this should result in the energy equivalent of whatever was shot in (a lot of energy, recall E=mc^2) being released as Hawking radiation when the black hole is switched off.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Justified, in that despite its usefulness (who wouldn't want a weapon that could coil up out of the way, spit poison, be used as a whip, cut up metal, and block a lightsaber blade?), using Yuuzhan Vong equipment generally results in a lot of pain even (or especially) if you do it right. And that's not even counting things like the Vonduun Crab Armor, which will usually try to kill anyone but a Vong who wears it.
  • In the chronologically later Legacy, several characters, most notably Jariah Syn, do use Vongtech regularly, and it's pretty useful, especially against Jedi or Sith, though by that point the Vong were much friendlier and more willing to share their secrets—Jariah had a Vong warrior as a mentor who taught him a lot.

• Veteran Instructor: Czulkang Lah is depicted as the epitome of wisdom (for the Vong) and far more reasonable and rational then many of his counterparts. Rather then delivering brutal punishment as a Drill Sergeant Nasty, he uses very small punishments, the minimum he can for his society, and emphasizes personal honor as a reason to succeed. He is comparatively soft spoken, thinks carefully before acting, and is willing, much like his son, to dirty himself with technology to gain a better understanding of his foes. It helps that he is also a retired leader from before the invasion, reduced to training the next generation of officers after he was forcibly retired.
• The Virus: Alpha Red, a virus developed by New Republic Intelligence and the Chiss to destroy the Yuuzhan Vong and their biots at a cellular level. Many of the good guys are against it, and those who insist on using it are portrayed as monstrous. Turns out the protagonists were right, as the Chiss failed to make it perfect and it started attacking other lifeforms.
• War Is Hell: Probably one of the most brutal examples in Star Wars.
• Warring Natures: Tahiri has this problem after a failed attempt to turn her into a half-Jedi half-Yuuzhan Vong Super-Soldier leaves her with two distinct personalities who are on opposite sides of the war. She finally resolves the issue near the end of the series, integrating both personalities to form, in effect, a completely new one with the strongest traits of both.
• Was Once a Man: The Vagh Rodiek. Nearly happened to Tahiri, but she was rescued before more than mental alterations were made.
• Wasn't That Fun?: Tahiri's reaction after a hair raising insertion (only for the adults, naturally) into a fallen Coruscant.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Coralskippers and their dovin basals can generate singularities to soak up laser-fire... but at the cost of manueverability, and vice-versa.
  • The dovin basal also turned out to have a major weakness when used for shielding that was eventually exploited by the Alliance. Specifically, the singularity they generated was great for intercepting laser blasts, but it took the same amount of energy to generate the singularity regardless of how powerful the incoming shot was (contrast standard shields, which lose power relative to how damaging the hit was). All you had to do was use a More Dakka approach with low-power shots, wear down the dovin basal's energy reserves (or, more accurately for biotech, it just plain got tired), and it couldn't protect the ship any more.
• Weeding Out Imperfections: Grand Admiral Gilad Pellaeon has a personal garden that he enjoys keeping in order, removing the weaker plants and nursing the stronger ones, as a euphemism for the militaristic law of the New Order.
• We Have Reserves: Yuuzhan Vong combat doctrine teaches warriors that to sacrifice their lives and their subordinates is the highest honor. Tsavong Lah follows this trope until they eventually run out of reserves.
  • Supreme Overlord Shimrra actually yells at him for "sending out troops over a rampart of their own dead!" The fact that the Yuuzhan Vong dramatically overextended themselves in rushing to Coruscant, and took heavy casualties along the way, is just about the only thing that lets the New Republic/GFFA regroup and successfully counterattack. Even then, it's a near thing.
• We Will Not Use Stage Make-Up in the Future: Played straight in the Vong's ooglith masquers. Also averted: in addition to the captured masquers and actual vonduun armor, the Coruscant insertion team used liberal amounts of makeup and synthetic armor.
• Wham Episode: Several, many of which involve major character deaths.
  • The death of Chewbacca in Vector Prime
  • Mara learning she's pregnant part way through Balance Point.
  • The fall of Coruscant and the death of Anakin in Star by Star.
• Wham Line: The Unifying Force:
  Onimi: Shimrra was Shimrra. I am I.
  Jacen: The Supreme Overlord.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Discussed somewhat obliquely in Destiny's Way, which includes a scene where Fyor Rodan, a New Republic politician, gets into it with Luke over the proper role of the Jedi Order in the war. Rodan wants to incorporate the Jedi into the regular military chain of command with all that entails, including subjecting them to the military justice system when they screw up. Luke prefers the status quo of an autonomous Jedi Order where the Jedi can follow the will of the Force and intervene in the war as needed.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • A number of characters criticize Jaina for her use of Force lightning after her brother's death, spending too much time with Ta'a Chume, providing a test subject for a Mad Scientist, abusing a life debt and sending pilots on suicide runs, to name a few in Dark Journey.
  • Kyp Durron explodes at Luke when it looks like after years of lecturing about what not to do, Luke's suddenly gone and changed his mind. He's slightly mollified when Luke explains his reasoning.
• What Other Galaxies?: The Yuuzhan Vong are from another galaxy, which earned the nickname of Far Outsiders. They act akin to how humankind sees aliens — an invading species undetectable by common means (in this case, The Force). With an added flavor of Scary Dogmatic Aliens and organically-built technology.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Midway through Vector Prime, the New Republic Defense Force sends an Imperial-class star destroyer, one of the most feared ships in Star Wars and practically a naval task force unto itself, to take out the Praetorite Vong's beachhead. It gets blown away with relative ease (although that's partly because its captain was tremendously overconfident).
  • Early in the series, Leia's Noghri bodyguard, Bolphur, takes out a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, but is clawed to death in return. Leia's reaction: "If the Yuuzhan Vong are powerful enough to take out Noghri with their bare hands..." Leia's Noghri bodyguards suffer this depressingly often, especially in the first half of the series. Arguably, this was also the reason Chewie died.
• Worshipped for Great Deeds: The Jeedai heresy is based around this. After Anakin Solo helped the yuuzhan vong Shamed One (dishonored outcast) Vua Rupaang prove his innocence, the word spread among the other shamed ones that a Jedi (or Jeedai as the word was corrupted into) had helped a shamed one regain his honor. Soon after, cults started popping up that revered the Jeedai as savior figures who could redeem shamed ones. This was further encouraged by the prophet Yu'shaa (really the spy Nom Anor in disguise), who united the various cults into an entire offshoot of the main Yuuzhan Vong religion that saw the Force as the last breath of the creator deity, and the Jeedai as emissaries or avatars of their gods.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Shedao Shai to Corran. His actions are 100% consistent with his code of honor, he openly admires the enemy when they live up to his high standards, sticks to his ethics even when they put him at a disadvantage, and in spite of being even more fanatical than usual for his species is both affable and a pretty good strategist. Unfortunately his second-in-command goes back on the deal Shai struck with Corran after Corran kills Shai in an honor duel over the fate of Ithor.
  • While Nom Amor is panicking over being tricked by the false intelligence that leads to the defeat at Ebaq-9, which has ruined his career and marked him for painful death, he does at least respect the effort.
• Wronski Feint: Wedge Antilles pulls one of these off in Rebel Stand. Pursued by a coralskipper during the evacuation of Borleias while protecting a New Republic freighter from a rakamat (essentially the Yuuzhan Vong equivalent of an AT-AT), he flies his X-wing through the rakamat's legs and the enemy pilot impales the rakamat with his craft.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Ganner's Last Stand in Traitor.
• Yo-Yo Plot Point: The position of Kyp Durron's overzealous faction of younger Jedi zigzags back and forth. They seem to have learned their lesson to respect Luke's authority and not be jerks as early as Ruin, but Aesop Amnesia and different writers complicate this.
• Zerg Rush: The Yuuzhan Vong's slaves.
  • The Yuuzhan Vong strongly favor these tactics, which gradually bites them in the ass as the war goes on and they can no longer adequately defend their territory; following the Battle of Coruscant, Shimrra furiously berates Tsavong Lah for having "earned your victories by sending your troops over a rampart of our own dead!" and the Galactic Alliance estimates that nearly a third of the warrior caste has been destroyed by that part.
  • Played with in that while "charging full-tilt at the enemy with amphistaffs raised" may be the Vong's favorite tactic, but that doesn't mean it's all they're capable of doing. They're actually quite canny if the situation warrants it.
  • Especially early on, they're shown to be remarkably adept in all aspects of warfare, including political and psychological, to the point where one of their favorite sayings translates as "Weaken the hinges of the enemy's fort."

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"Sith? Jedi? Are these the only choices? Dark or light, good or evil? Is there no more to the Force than this? What is the screen on which light and dark cast their shapes and shadows? Where is the ground on which stands good and evil?"

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