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EXPANDED UNIVERSE LEGENDS: SAGA-ERA

References may be incomplete, misfiled, out of order or simply wrong. I am not much for the EU and many of these come strictly by hearsay. Feel free to contact me to suggest new relevant information, correct a problem on these pages or share hot, hot stories of Splinter of the Mind's Eye-era sibling lust.

DARTH MAUL’S ADVENTURE JOURNAL

I had this in the Episode I section for the longest time, because it takes place during the events of said film. And because I was lazy.

Anyway, in Darth Maul’s very own kids’ book, we find that en route to Tatooine, he meets some Togorian pirates. And he chops one of their hands off. Yep. He sure does.

… You know, it gets really difficult to write good hand-chopping jokes after a while. Why do I bother with this site? I don’t know, I just don’t know. Maybe this site is my own personal adventure journal. The adventure of life. I need a girlfriend.

And while we’re on the subject, Maul doesn’t strike me as the journal-keeping type. Does he write crappy poetry in it? Maybe long, strident whines about the girl in math class who won’t go out with him? I think emo Sith would be an awesome concept. Besides Anakin, I mean.

CLONE WARS (TV)

The good one, from the Powerpuff Girls guy. I just watched the first volume of the Clone Wars series on DVD and it would appear that Obi-Wan chops Durge’s arm off. I couldn’t tell when I watched it online back when it first came out because this was back in the day when Internet video was still sort of new, and I couldn’t see anything but blockiness and pixels, much like my continued attempts to view scrambled late-night cable porn.

Anyway, Durge is able to extend tentacles and pink spaghetti (or something) from his severed limbs to reconnect them. I think it’s a metaphor for something, just not sure what. Possibly life.

In volume two, Anakin’s robot arm blows up, and a bunch of dudes pull their robot arms off. Close, but no cigar! Still, sometimes I get the sense this is just what they do in this franchise when they can't figure out what else to do.

CLONE WARS (COMICS)

In Republic 52: The New Face of War, Part 2, our victim is Zule Xiss, whose name comes directly from the heavy metal band I formed in high school. Our cutter is Asajj Ventress, and our venue is Ohma-D’un, the largest moon of Naboo.

All this comes during kind of a dark turn in the franchise. See, Ohma-D’un was a Gungan settlement after the Battle of Naboo, a bunch of ’em were put on spaceships and brought there to see what they could do with the place, and then the Separatists decided to use it as a testing ground for an experimental swamp gas weapon. That’s right, it turned into essentially a Gungan death camp, which comes directly from the fan fiction you wrote in high school.

Xiss survives this fight and later gets crushed by a Republic AT-AT. Like I said, kind of a dark turn.

In Republic 66: Show of Force, Part 2 (hey, Force, I get it, a pun), Mace Windu goes up against Harll, a bounty hunter who thought he might give hunting Jedi a try, which I suspect greatly raised his insurance premiums. Harll looks an awful lot like Wolverine but is apparently of a felinoid species, which makes me wonder if this is technically a chopped-off paw and not a hand.

I’ll give Harll credit: he takes the matter pretty well, if this frame of the decisive incident is any indication. Anyone looking at this panel would think that Harll had the upper, well, hand.

PURGE

This is a comic book about Darth Vader killing people. Ya figure, why not give the people what they want.

And just check out that cover art. You know you’re in for something good here.

I’m always a fan of Adam Hughes’ sexy comic book girls, but that’s a topic for another time. On that there cover is Sia-Lan Wezz (no, I don’t know what kind of a name that’s supposed to be, either), and Vader has stabbed her in the tits and chopped off a portion of her anatomy. Guess which. Just guess. I dare you. I want you to think real hard. Good. Good.

Man, now I want to start a new site. The Stabbed Tits of Star Wars. Maybe then some people would actually visit the site and click the stupid Google ads.

But yeah. Later on we run into yet another example of Anakin/Vader’s arm being used as the target for everyone's fetishistic abuse. (And you’re not even done reading this page yet.) Or maybe someone forgot that Vader’s robotic hand in Jedi has already been explained about six hundred different times.

See, some dude called Tsui Choi, who sounds suspiciously like the guy who runs my local Thai takeout, chops off Vader’s hand. Vader takes the hand, holding a cortosis blade (I’ve never really bothered to learn what cortosis is, but it sounds dirty somehow), and, as punishment for stealing Iron Man’s armor, chucks said blade and hand at Kofi Annan. I mean, Koffi Arana. That joke was really funny in the first decade of the millennium, I swear.

Look, let’s just keep this moving along, shall we?

DARK TIMES

So here’s one you never expected. Arms and whatnot cut off with swords. Not lightsabers, old-school swords. These are the hipsters of our series. It’s, like, cho sun is all mainstream, man. The analog swords gave you the best sound fidelity. You’ve probably never even heard of swords.

Or maybe it’s steampunk. Or just plain retro. I gave up figuring out these sorts of trends when I turned thirty. (I launched this site in high school. Christ, am I old.)

We’re looking at the Blue Harvest arc. (Guess they had to use that name sometime.) In Issue 13, Mors Demanna is a bit of a local badass and a young kid named Dado’s annoying him, trying to be cool and fight him in a fencing contest, which is what people on Telerath do for throwdowns and such instead of dance-offs. Anyway:

Big ups to a dude named Ricky for pointing all this stuff out, incidentally, and a lot of things on these pages. I usually don’t credit people for these sorts of things ’cause I’m a huge jerk but in this case I feel like it’s good to build up karma.

You may well ask why.

Yeah, that’s Demanna, losing his hand in a sword fight to former Jedi Dass Jennir in issue 17. As ye sow, so ye may reap. I think this may be the calmest reaction I’ve seen anyone give to one of these incidents, by the way. No pain. No histrionics. Just a pretty major case of indignation. Lessons in positive attitude for us all.

The Dark Times continue, much like in real life. In Out of the Wilderness 3, Dass Jennir cuts off a slaver’s hand. (Dass Jennir, incidentally, is what Jennifer Aniston’s name translates to in German.) I do not know why they are riding all the animals and such, but I support it. It’s an environmentally friendly way to kill slavers. This is a very socially-conscious battle.

In A Spark Remains 3, Beyghor Sahdett, which I’m certain is an anagram for someone’s name, cuts off Mezgraf’s hand and delivers a pun that I’m pretty sure proves that ’80s action movies made it to the galaxy far, far away.

Mezgraf’s reaction just got me thinking of Warren Zevon’s awesome song about werewolves. Ar-roooo, werewolves of Orvax IV. I am amused that this creature made it into the Expanded Universe when George Lucas got so mad about a generic werewolf mask being used in the cantina that he cut him out of future releases.

Finally, in A Spark Remains 5, Vader does the lightsaber-throw thing from ROTJ and takes off the hand Kai Hudorra, a Bothan. Ricky died to bring me this information.

Hudorra’s troubles don’t end there. Vader ends up stabbing him in the chest because Hudorra won’t divulge where Dass Jennir is. He tells Vader to go to Hell. Now, Hell has been established in the Star Wars universe ever since Uncle Owen’s line in the original flick, but it might amuse you to know that a great deal of canon-handwringing has been done to establish what Hell is there and how it does or doesn’t line up with the Judeo-Christian version. It’s sort of the theological equivalent of explaining away that one guy in ESB’s ice cream maker.

DARK VENDETTA

A short comic story in Galaxy. Corwin Shelvay gets into a lightsaber battle with High Inquisitor Tremayne. The Jedi cuts off the Inquistor’s arm and part of his face.

Part. Of. His. Face.

Somewhere on a lonely planet, a bored high school kid starts a Web site, The Chopped-Off Faces of blah blah blah. It is viewed as a moderate success.

SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE

Some time after the Battle of Yavin, Luke and Leia crash-land on planet Mimban and get caught up in a hunt for the Kaiburr crystal (it’s like steroids for the Force) in the Temple of Pomojema.

Hand-chops a-plenty, kids! Luke chops off a miner’s hand and a Coway’s hand. I’m told this, anyway. I refuse to actually find the stupid book again and confirm. Because I hate this book. Hate it hate it hate it. And not just because it excludes a major character entirely, or because it has Luke and Leia get romantic and kissy. It’s the writing, pure and simple. Which is a shame. Alan Dean Foster wrote my favorite Star Wars book ever (the ANH novel that reads like a weird 1970s paperback) and followed it up with this. Heaven, hell and purgatory. Okay, no purgatory. Okay, ending this paragraph now.

Vader and Luke get into quite a jolly little lightsaber duel. Luke defends himself and chops off Vader’s arm. This is less effective than predicted, as Vader actually picks up his fallen arm and takes the lightsaber out so he can use it again. Not making this up.

This is an awfully gory book. There are grisly descriptions of many disgusting things, including shootings, stabbings, scorchings and the like. But it has hand-chops. Redeeming, I guess. And at least it’s less fundamentally bizarre than the comic adaptation.

That’s right, folks, we’re about to go through all this again.

Here’s the miner on Mimban. I guess that scene plays the way it does in the novel, with only miner changes. (Oh, don’t make that face.)

Here’s the Coway. He gets both hands chopped off, a real upgrade from the original text, sure to please die-hard fans of the original Coway dismemberment while taking full advantage of all that could be brought to this timeless moment in a new medium.

But fast-forward to the Vader scene for the real magic, as well as several more instances of the sound effect ‘vroop’.

In the comic, published several years after pop culture had unilaterally decreed that Vader was the ultimate badass, he trips over his own chopped-off arm and falls down a pit.

And people try to tell me that his ‘Noooo’ in ROTS hurts his dignity somehow.

I am truly amazed that an adaptation managed to make this story worse somehow. Real effort truly was made. I give it eight out of ten splinters. Vroop.