Lit Dawn of the Jedi: The Prisoner of Bogan #3 (of 5)

It's taken a little bit for me to get really interested in this series, but this issue really helped. All of the references and nods are fun and I enjoyed our fugitives facing their first major confrontation.

I'm also looking forward to how this encounter between Trill and Sek'nos goes. Can't imagine all that well for him.

 

Might just be me but I got a possible Sek'nos Trill hookup vibe from the two when onboard her ship.

 

What if, in a twist of fate.... Xesh ends up being the hero?!

 

I don't think redemption for Xesh would be too much of a twist.

 

Yeah, by the looks of things he's already well on his way to the road of redemption.

 

I don't know if I thought that as much as Trill kind of coming onto him to cloud his judgement. I wouldn't put it past someone as task-oriented as her to do "what must be done" to accomplish her master's will.

 

Yeah she will use all her skills to get the job done

 

I wonder how long it will take Trill to realize that since her master can not find this system without her, she could just trash the ship (or the homing beacon) and be free without ever being found?

 

I guess the Great Sith Revolution hasn't happened yet.

 

Was'n it it the dark jedi exiles 20,000 years later that brought the dark side to Korriban and the sith natives?

 

What many fans have always assumed is:

The exiles brought the Sith ideology to Korriban and the sith natives. Before that, the Sith natives, although darksiders, were more savages than hell-bent conquerors.



Overall, pre-exile Korriban and pre-exile Sith natives have always been very mysterious.

 

Well, the Sith natives weren't primitives, as they already had technology from the Rakata, and in ancient days had gone to the stars and colonized neighbouring systems, even taking the odd Mrlssi or Draethos slave back to Nfolgai according to Sorzus Syn, so even before the Exiles got there the Sith had once upon a time belonged to a much more dominant culture than the devastated remains that the Exiles found on Korriban.

So if one of the Sith characters in DOTJ does somehow end up warping back to their homeworld, it's easily enough just treated as a retcon to cover original inconsistencies of when the Sith Empire was founded back in some of the late 90s sourcebooks that couldn't initially make their minds up about whether it was earlier than the 7,000 BBY that they eventually stuck with.

They'd not be founding the Sith Order, just be going home to rule as another in the long line of kings between Adas and Graush, but one that might actually know how to interpret the devices left behind by Adas (albeit the knowledge then gets lost a second time).

 

Not to mention all the kind of silly back-and-forth (both in terms of IU colonizing, and OOU retcons) between Ziost and Korriban.

It's kind of funny to think back to when the Sith were first revealed in TOTJ, their planet of origin and capital of their empire was Ziost and Korriban was just a giant graveyard. Who even remembers Ziost now?

 

I remember Ziost.

 

I was bummed Ziost wasn't in TOR.

 

So was I.

 

Ziost wasn't in the game? Huh. They visit in the tie-in material, at least.

 

The Kwa are really just the E.T. race, aren't they? I have to agree that playing the suspense card is a bit disappointing. Well, not really disappointing, it's expected, since American fiction has settled into this pattern of creating suspense by simply not telling the audience what all is about (to the point that team leaders don't tell their teams what their plan is - Futurama did a good parody of that, with Amy explaining a heist during a montage, but then the montage is over and she's still explaining as they're already performing the heist). But back to the holocron - we have huge images, we have great concepts, and while we already know both sides of the equation and only the protagonists should still be in the dark, we still don't get thrown a bone except for the fact that the good Stargate aliens didn't like the evil cannibal aliens. Wow, that's a stretch.

Cute brooding Xesh redeemed by the love of the pretty girl? You don't say. And Sith hotshot falling under the influence of the evil Rakatan slave and starting his own dark empire, with Sith slaves? Not improbable, although I guess he'll also be brought back into the fold after doing some questionable stuff.

The thing with DOTJ is, so far it seems like it loves its status quo. For a series that opens with the biggest storm ever, and that operates on a vision of the first "lightsaber" army waging a war of destruction, nobody died yet. Secondary characters simply form cute couples. Why keep the LARP ranger with the Cade-turned-Legolas-hair alive? Why not kill off the brave ranger but keep her in a quasi-coma? And why oh why make these two another couple, which means that the six people on the hunting mission form two and a half couples (pending how serious the connection between Shae and Sek'nos is, but the Je'daii seem to be such a liberal bunch that all younger Je'daii are probably friends with benefits anyway). Wouldn't he have saved his colleague, too, if he didn't secretly love her from the depth of his heart?

The one who actually could die is Sek'nos, and we can't really blame the comic for anticlimatically returning him to the plot right away, because there simply wasn't any chance that a main character would die this soon. But it also makes me wonder if the promise of the first issue - overconfident Sith boy turning true evil, just like Ulic and Exar Kun were marked for darkness from the beginning in TOTJ - won't just result in cheap redemption or even cheaper not-really-darkness-I-was-just-fooling-around-with-Trill. The alternative to a by the numbers plot of the obvious one falling seems to be an even more obvious plot of less numbers, with everyone in their place from the beginning.

And finally, I think I'm going to agree a bit with Darth_Pevra. Early Jedi history could have been much more than the same situations any other incarnation of the Jedi Order faced. Creating a schism between light and dark side - and this is what this is going to end in in the best case - doesn't mean much if it comes simply from a vision. In a galaxy in which there are, for all purposes, already "Dark Jedi" - the Force Hounds - the entire Je'daii dilemma doesn't seem all that important. The Je'daii themselves with their balance are too similar to all kinds of emo Jedi that we have seen so far, especially the Ostrander/Duurseema variety, so it's not really a big step from here to a "fully light side" Jedi Order. TOTJ/Golden Age essentially did the same thing already. A somewhat more aggressive Jedi Order fails to keep their young in check, they stumble over influences from outside dark side factions already in place. Now if we'd seen the original place where all force-sensitivity came from, where we could watch the original schism between light and dark... but watching the Jedi expel their dark ones is hardly original.

 

Yeah. I really hesitate to make any judgments so early on after all the wonderful stuff John & Jan have given us, and of course I'll keep reading this series with an open mind, but Dawn of the Jedi thus far just hasn't been quite as... groundbreaking as I expected. The origins of the Jedi Order is a concept with so much potential, and I don't doubt that there's still quite a bit more on the horizon that John & Jan are waiting for the right time to reveal, but I dunno, I haven't really been wowed with these last few issues. And of course I love Jan's art, but I mean, Hawk is Shado, and now Xesh has both Cade hair and a Cade beard after his time spent on Bogan. I just wish that the series felt a little more like something new.

 

Even Daegen Lok has Cade hair and a Cade beard now. He looks distinctive on the cover of #4, but in the comic, he's like Xesh with ear rings and a slight difference in eyebrows and eye colour.

 

I can agree with some of the points Grey1 and Jeff are making about the series not quite living up to issue #0 but the fact that the characters have similar hair to characters from Legacy doesn't fly with me. It's the same artist, guys. If I had to name what I see as the biggest problem with the series, I'd say it's the vast amount of characters per issue. There isn't really a central character outside of Xesh. I enjoy the series and am expecting more out of it in future issues, but, DOTJ does become a bit of a tangle of characters. Oh yeah, I don't like Force Sabers.

 

I feel like a lot of the tech is way further on than it should be, and that really bothers me. A bunch of the commonly used tropes of Star Wars are here, just in a different package. Lightsabers are Forcesabers that can be easily made from random materials lying around in a Forge, holocrons are just Kwa devices that are also lying around, ships don't seem that different or even designed that much different. Some panels I'm left thinking that this could easily be any time period, nothing screams out "THIS IS THE FIRST EVER STAR WARS STORY ON THE TIMELINE!"



This picture is what I think of when I see Force War. Supposedly, this comes after DotJ, and I sure hope DotJ is leading up to this.

 

I quite like the world building going on in DotJ. Sure, it boils down to darkside (not Sith) versus lightside but aren't quite a few stories involving the Force about that on some level? I must say though, I think I am more keen on seeing the Rakata, Kwa and Tho Yor then the actual Je'daii though. Having said that, don't mind the exploration of the Tython system.

 

I really like the Tython system and the various jedi academies as laid out by Issue 0....I just feel that they are being a bit underutilized in favor of a Rataka invasion.

You have to establish the status quo before you upend it.

 

So, has the Bogan appeared yet? C'mon ... I want to see a character with Winnie Blues, a Mullet, Double Plugga's and Stubbies!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogan