Lit An Analysis of the New Jedi Order and its Role in the Star Wars Mythos

oh snap

 

Jacen's character arc in Traitor:

Jacen pre-Traitor is conflicted over the disconnect with what he wants to be and what he thinks he is supposed to be. Particularly, what he thinks a Jedi is supposed to be. He is desperate to find a way to unify both. He is searching for answers. He wants Uncle Luke to tell him, he wants the Force to tell him, then he wants Vergere to tell him. Without knowing, he never acts from a position of confidence, and it undermines everything that he does. Vergere strips him down to nothing except pure self, and helps him to learn that he can choose. That the only source of truth he can find is in himself. He is looking for truth outside to reflect truth inside, but learns that absolute self-knowledge (which involves freedom, and choice) will lead to truth inside reflecting truth outside. "You will know. When your mind is calm, at peace with the Force." A secondary arc, although linked to his choosing who he wants to be, is that the tragedy in his life has accumulated to a point that it tests his ability to love. He eventually overcomes this, and learns to meet the Universe-which means meeting himself-with compassion, absolute empathy, perfect understanding. Put most succinctly, I would say that Traitor is the story of Jacen learning to seek knowledge in the Universe, rather than truth.

Vergere:
I'm thinking about posting a bunch of Vergere quotes alongside related Yoda quotes, but I've used up all my time and energy for now on Jacen. I will point out that she always refers to him as 'Jacen Solo' and never as just 'Jacen.' That is no accident. I will also leave this here:

Ganner's arc:
Ganner's Traitor arc is just the second half of his NJO arc: Trying->Trying not to try->The end of trying.

Misinterpretation by a majority of people?:
I don't know a majority of people, but the sample I have heard from...

Everything I tell you is a lie:
Pretty straightforward and directly answered in one line in the book, but in the interest of not reducing the conversation to use of mantras I will say that it is about not letting YOUR truth come from other people. What people tell you can guide you to truth, but it will never BE truth.

Choose and act:
Uncertainty is no excuse for inaction. You will never have perfect knowledge, and you will find no truth from others. All you can do is make your best decision based on who you want to be.

There is no dark side:
The boogeyman isn't going to possess your body and compel you to do terrible things. No excuses. Your actions are a result of your own choices. "The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart." "Only what you take with you."

 

Good ol' Ganner

 

"That is why this place is so dangerous," Vergere said with a hint of a challenging smile. "It is filled with what you would call the dark side. I should say: the dark side is very, very powerful here, more powerful than anywhere else on this planet. As powerful, perhaps, as it is anywhere in the galaxy."

"That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go."

"If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do."

"What's in there?"

"Only what you take with you."

 

I still have the idea bouncing around in my head to do Vergere quotes alongside Yoda quotes (with a little Obi-Wan thrown in - "You must do what you feel is right, of course."), but in the meantime I want to talk about Vergere's teachings to Jacen by making my own bold statement that sounds surprising out of context.
Vergere has only ONE lesson for Jacen.
What she wants for Jacen, and not from Jacen, is for him to obtain self-knowledge. But she cannot teach him this directly. What she does teach him, is that you are responsible for your own actions.
Embrace of Pain: Accept pain as a teacher. Avoidance of pain is choice. Pain cannot COMPEL you to do anything. If you run from pain, it is because you choose to. The choice always remains to deal with the pain and act against it. Jacen demonstrates learning this in the Nursery, where he refuses the commands of the dhuryam.
Gardening: I don't really know what else there is to say about this one, or what dots are unconnected between gardening and choice. It's all about that beings die and some can control which ones do and have a responsibility to recognize that they are making that choice.
Choose, and act: I guess there are even fewer dots to connect here. I will add that she rejects the concept of a simple moral rule to be easily applied to give guidance. You have to choose what is the right thing to do ("You must do what you feel is right, of course.").
"Out of control": You are never out of control. You always have the ability to choose your actions, and it is deflecting responsibility to act like you could not have done otherwise.
There is no dark side: You won't be possessed by the devil and forced to commit sin. "The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart." "Only what you take with you."
Everything I tell you is a lie: Truth cannot be handed down to you by others. The decisions you make cannot be blamed on what you are told by others.
'No one chooses the wrong. Uncertainty sets you free.': Back to the idea that you can't blame your decisions on some test of morality. You choose what you believe is right.
'Ask yourself. Where else can one look?': Nothing really to add here.
'In the story of your life, is this your best ending?': If you choose to sacrifice your life, you are responsible for the consequences. What do you gain by doing so? What do you lose?
Armed with the knowledge of responsibility for your own actions, and by extension that what you do reflects who you are, it is clearly ESSENTIAL to arm yourself with self-knowledge. And so he does.

 

I seem to recall somewhere that Stover said that Nietzsche didn't influence Traitor, but I was studying a lot of Nietzsche a few years ago when I re-read Traitor a few times and I see parallels, so maybe Stover's worldview is just heavily influenced by Nietzsche, or it's just a matter of overlap. For instance, the Embrace of Pain: my take on this whole thing is that Vergere is being critical of philosophical hedonism, which is something of which Nietzsche was similarly critical. There's a famous Nietzsche quote concerning this, which I actually used in my chapter-by-chapter commentary on Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Dark Tide II: Ruin, because Shedao Shai is also a critic of hedonism:


What I find particularly amusing is that the fact that Vergere and Shai are similarly critical of hedonism is somehow evidence that her views are invalid. Similarly, I recall years back, there was a poster here that would point to a passage in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter in which Sidious muses that there is no dichotomy to the Force, and given that Vergere supposedly shares this perspective, this serves as evidence that she truly was his apprentice. Such fallacious logic. I suppose that since Palpatine acknowledges the dark side exists in Return of the Jedi and so does Yoda they must be in cahoots? Given the similarity in what Yoda and Vergere say I think we're compiling the evidence that Yoda was a Sith Lord.

Anyway, Nietzsche was also fond of Pindar's quote, γένοι' οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών. The translation I heard associated with Nietzsche (which obviously isn't the one he used since it's in English) is "be who you are." A variant translation on wikiquote is "Be true to thyself now that thou hast learnt what manner of man thou art," or "Be what you know you are."

Of course, in the same manner of Vergere being teh evulz because some of the stuff she says has similarities to Shai and Sidious, these same people will probably argue that having any similarities to Nietzsche is similarly some sort of guilt by association fallacy. Because vegetarianism is bad because Hitler was a vegetarian. I suppose it's noteworthy that Nietzsche has a negative connotation with those that dislike Vergere.

I'd post the relevant Rust Cohle gif concerning Nietzsche but it has a bad word in it. I could post the "time is a flat circle" thing because that's generally associated with Nietzsche through his discussion of eternal recurrence but he didn't really mean that literally. Indeed, his whole point in discussing eternal recurrence is another idea that Traitor touches on:

"Jacen," she said slowly, sadly, "in the story of your life, is this your best ending? Is this your dream?"

Hypothetically speaking, if eternal recurrence was true, is the life you're living the one you want to relive forever?

Edit: Regarding this whole "there is no dark side," I wonder why this is even controversial, even taken literally? Is it because there's this dislike for a universe in which there's no moral guidelines given from up high to adhere to, and thus in some people's minds no reason to be moral? Or is it an attachment to this perspective that the dark side is a corrupting influence that saps the individual of free will? What's the narrative advantage of that? Why do we want our heroes to fall not because of their own shortcomings and choices driving them to become villains, but because the dark side robbed them of free will in a single moment of weakness and possessed them into becoming a villain?

I think Revenge of the Sith thoroughly demolished that idea. I'm not disputing that the dark side, as seen in the examples above with the cave and the Jedi temple ruins, isn't corrupting in the same sense that anger is corrupting, e.g.

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

If anger can be spoken of like the "dark side," what does that tell you? What does Yoda say the dark side is?

"Anger... fear... aggression. The dark side of the Force are they."

Why don't we take Yoda literally here? I don't think anger, fear, or aggression exist in a mystical energy field? And if those things are the dark side... then isn't it true that the only dark side Jacen need fear is the one in his own heart?

 

There's a great Sandman line to the effect that we build our own cages, back into them and then express bewilderment when then trapped in them.

It's interesting to me that the view you sketch persists because if anything, in Legends pre-NJO, the dark side, with Sidious as it's supreme adept, was not so much this overpowering Satanic force but rather a vampiric one that you have to invite in. You can also see that in the aesthetics of DE if you want too. Of course, if that's so, guess what that makes Sid?

EDIT: This brings up another Q - why portray evil as this force that exists to overpower agency and coerce? I'd suggest an answer is that it's a very 20th century image due to long shadow cast by totalitarianism. One that only fell apart in a major way 1991 with the USSR but remains in the form of the likes of China and N Korea. As a general rule totalitarian regime do seek to play down the idea of individual agency, to compel obedience through fear and terror and, in the case of Nazism, did use some very sophisticated psychology to get people to willingly go along with what they did.

And in the aftermath? Better to say 'it's not us, that was... something else'. What stops recognition becoming a more positive thing - after all, if you can recognise when you go off the rails, Sith happens, that can't be a bad thing, right? Ah, but what if someone decides that they are perfect and so can be hugely judgmental of everyone else. These are those who form the 'condemn more, understand less' crowd because they never screwed up, never made a mistake, never did anything bad ever thus they get to be Judge, Jury and Executioner. Appeal? There is none. (Strangely, when zero tolerance gets applied to them, they're the first to invoke the need to be understanding!)

 

Agreed, the idea is pervasive until 1999. And I think that's part of what's being pushed back against in the post-NJO literature. There's an essay I read on Dark Empire that essentially says it's an allegory of drug addiction, and that's the view of the dark side, as a drug that Luke develops an addiction for.

But I think that works whether you view the dark side as a "substance" of some sort that you develop an addiction for, or literally anger or fear or aggression or hate. There's even a word for it, "rageaholic." I don't think that it's particularly interesting, either from a narrative perspective or an analytic one, for the characters to be influenced by this "dark side substance" which we the viewer/reader cannot relate to. Whereas when you break it down to the personal level, it is something we can relate to. I think that's why Lucas painstakingly tried to establish the environment for Anakin to become Vader, most would say to a fault. If the dark side is merely this vampiric force (lol) that anyone can succumb to, regardless of their virtue, even by merely using it out of necessity, that's not an interesting idea. There has to be depth to the character, they have to make the choices that lead them down the path to becoming Darth Vader.

The dark side is more interesting, and has more literary depth, as a label we apply to the psychological shadow, the id, that the character has. Their flaws. Rather than this "dark magic" that they can tap into but in so doing which changes them through inorganic character development. Even in Dark Empire, Luke has flaws which motivate him throughout. He's operating from the hubristic belief that he's the only one that can save the galaxy, and he is "broken" by Palpatine when he fails in that.

 

Yeah, once Luke starts thinking clearly in DE#6 what happens?

Sidious gets his arse handed to him.

EDIT

I'd say it's the invite notion that makes the old EU version work, it's very much a Faustian deal: Hey, Kyp Durron, you want to get the Empire? Sign up with me and you get a Sun Crusher as a signing bonus! And of course everyone thinks they know the risks but can't possibly.

I'd agree Lucas tried but I wouldn't say he succeeded. The most interesting theme that recurs through ROTS is the importance Sidious assigns to isolating Anakin and keeping ObiWan from him. Character depth for Anakin? Errr... Hmm, let's not open that box, OK?

 

Well, I said most people would agree that Lucas developed the conditions for Anakin to become Vader to a fault. It's too on the nose, and it compromised the storytelling to a degree because Lucas wanted to make Anakin as young as believably possible for Episode I to reinforce the notion that he had a traumatic separation from his mother as a child. I don't think that was necessary. But subtlety is not Lucas' strong suit, at least not older Lucas, to such an extent that he added Vader's "noo... NOOO" into Return of the Jedi, lest the audience think Vader was acting on some Sith ambition or something in betraying his master.

I think most of the old EU storytelling involving the dark side is bad, especially if it's reliant upon that. Ulic Qel-Droma's motivations don't make much sense (bad Veitch!), for instance. What's the point of him as a character if he's doing stuff against his character because he invited the dark side in through a Sith poison that made him angry? I mean that's really layering it on and robbing his character of agency; he's a hero that chose to go undercover and lost his free will as a consequence. And he was developed with the flaw of brashness, and I suppose that brashness is what led him to go undercover, but the causality is still one step removed from that flaw. I mean, Ulic Qel-Droma becomes a Sith Lord because he chooses to go undercover. That's it in terms of his decision making influencing his turn to villainy. It's not very good. Maybe that was Kevin J Anderson's influence though. For instance, the scene with Kyp in the temple on Yavin 4 is robbed of any depth in JAT. It's a simulacrum of the cave without any understanding of its meaning and lacking all depth.

The old EU mostly lacked any sense of nuance to it and mostly pastiched the films without any underlying depth. That's why Dark Empire stands out. Regardless of whether it was operating on that paradigm or not (and I'm not sure that it was, since it didn't seem to be influenced by WEG like TTT was, and it was the trailblazer alongside TTT), it still gave Luke real flaws and motivations arising from those flaws to explain his decisions.

 

I'm very tempted to think it was, based on what little we're provided about Ulic in Dark Empire alone.

 

Well, Veitch stepped away from the Sith War series, but was involved with DLOTS, which does have the Sith poison. But he also expressed misgivings with what was done with Ulic's character. In the DE endnotes, he has an entirely different story like you say, and Veitch says he never intended Ulic to be redeemed.

Redemption is one of the most popular stories of that era though, and that was pure KJA. I'd argue the reason it worked was because Ulic was stripped of the Force, and thus that "dark side influence," so the story was written purely as a character piece based upon character motivations, and that's why it works. KJA is capable, he just wrote Star Wars with a superficial level of understanding by choosing to take the mythology too literally, instead of viewing the Force as a means to amplify the characterization. What's really going on here is that the Force is being used as a way to work the characterization more directly into the story: it is in a sense removing subtlety from the storytelling by projecting these characters and their choices onto a larger backdrop of destiny, putting these Jungian and Freudian ideas -- human psychology itself -- into the fabric of the universe itself. The dark side is Jung's shadow, Freud's id. And that's part of why Star Wars is Campbellian, because Campbell's work is about how these stories are shaped by human psychology which is why these mythologies share so many similarities.

 

I think the nuance is there, done badly, but there because otherwise the likes of LOTF would have nothing to rail against! Why did someone have to go dark in LOTF and stay there and be killed? Because the perception had become that going dark side for a spell was no biggie and everyone was coming back - the perception of it, at least in the minds of those writing LOTF, seemed to be that the light/dark line was akin to the superhero revolving door of life and death! I'm not convinced of that, even in those cases where the dark side was rejected, a good amount of damage was done beforehand, it was never without cost. Of course, the same mentality says it doesn't matter if billions of unseen beings die, to really hit the readers you got to kill the dog. (Chewie.)

If you use the ideas of the totalitarian regime, of state machinery designed to break down the individual then the way the pre-1999 dark side works bcomes a bit more explicable, as it tends revolve around coercion. If you use the terms good and evil, what do you mean by them? SW tends to construct those terms around ideas of freedom and agency and the denial and compromising of.

I'm sceptical though that SW is really set up for any kind of moral depth as it wasn't really built for that. Its heritage is 1930s Flash Gordon, which is straight-forward adventure, that's it.

 

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that Star Wars is about moral depth. It's about characterization through the hero's journey. The original trilogy is about Luke's development as a character, from a farm boy that has some terrible stuff happen to him, to a rebel seeking to avenge his father's murder, to a Jedi seeking his father's redemption. It's about acknowledging your darker half and in doing so overcoming it. We see this in the cave with Luke, and we see Yoda undergoing the same test in "Destiny" and succeeding where Luke failed. Luke undergoes the same test on the DS2, and in mirroring his father's actions on Bespin with the same rage motivating him, finally comes to acknowledge the darkness in himself that is also in his father, the lesson he was intended to learn in the cave.

I wouldn't suggest that this is about morality at all, which is why it's curious that Traitor was recast as being all about morality, or amorality, by the Dark Nest trilogy, when it was a character study of Jacen Solo, and his journey to find his true self, much like "Destiny" served that purpose for Yoda, and the original trilogy did for Luke.

To mirror the cave video above:


I'd suggest the scene in which Jacen is in his dining room, having gained Vongsense, re-established his connection to the Force, and been handed Anakin's lightsaber, regaining everything after having been stripped of everything and reduced to himself, is when he's similarly given a choice, much like Luke on the DS2. He considers that he could take the lightsaber, and kill them all. But that's not who he is.

 

I think that's a better ground to place it on - should make for a more productive discussion too.

 

I decide to rewatch the Yoda story arc from TCW, and starting with "Voices," I noted that Yoda remarks that Dagobah is strong in the Force, and Qui-Gon replies "It is one of the purest places in the galaxy." When Qui-Gon directs Yoda to the tree/cave, no mention is made of it being strong in the dark side, just that if Yoda gives power to that which he fears, it will reveal itself to him.

Hmm...

"You see ..." she whispered, "... but you do not see. Jacen ... why would the Jedi Council ... build its Temple upon ... a nexus of the dark side?"
"Vergere, I--" He shook his head helplessly. "I have to go. I have to go before -- before I ..." hurt you again, he finished silently. He couldn't say it out loud. Not here. "I don't have time for guessing games."
"No guessing ..." she said. "The answer is ... simple. They wouldn't."
He went very, very still. "What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me--"
"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side."

 

You just noticed that now? I thought it was one of the main reasons all along for why you've been talking about how the Yoda arc is confirmation of Traitor being in keeping with Lucas's views on the saga.

 

Well, if I did before, I forgot. I mostly focused on Destiny and Yoda's fight with his shadow self, and Qui-Gon talking about the Cosmic Force.

 

I just watched the Yoda arc because the clip above intrigued me; I've been trying to get through the seasons in order and I haven't made it to the Lost Missions yet. Yoda's dark side manifestation looks like a cross between a Gremlin and one of those imps from Runescape.

 

But in all seriousness DigitalMessiah, this thread has really been eye-opening. I had only seen the movies and parts of The Clone Wars TV show up until a few months ago, and my first impression of the "dark side" from my childhood viewings of the movies was something dementor-like, a living entity of evil that sucked goodness out of Luke in that cave and played on his biggest fears, and I never really moved beyond that childhood interpretation for the longest time. Now that I've gotten into the expanded universe and explored the more philosophical approach to Star Wars, I've been able to really look beyond that view, and I can say I'm enjoying the mythos and discussions on here. Thank you!

 

That's gotta make you feel good, DM.

 

in my efforts to find a celebratory gif, I found this:


but yeah I kind of assume like maybe 5 people read this thread regularly

 

To be honest, I'm always excited when I get home from work and see there's a new post on this thread.

 

At this point, I feel like my posts on TCW Yoda story arc compared with the cave sequence in TESB and Luke's arcs in TESB-ROTJ and Dark Empire are actually my best in this thread.

To an extent, I feel as though Traitor is very straightforward in a "what the teacher teaches, or what the student learns" sense. Every question Vergere asks, or point she makes, is later called back by either Jacen or Ganner and put into proper context, thus explaining at the very least what Jacen interpreted Vergere to mean, or Ganner through Jacen interpreted it to mean. When Vergere tells Jacen that passion that's guided, not walled away, is the path to greatness, Ganner is literally demonstrating that in Part III. When Vergere lectures Jacen on pain, at the end of the chapter he has a long internal monologue about pain and how it's not an intrinsically bad thing, thus explaining what Vergere meant, or at least Jacen's interpretation of it. When she says everything she tells Jacen is a lie, Jacen literally explains this to Ganner, and the narration explains it again.

This is why I tend to run out of steam in my chapter-by-chapter commentary, and they tend to be huge blocks of quotes from the text, because it really does explain itself quite well to those that try to understand what it means, instead of superficially locking onto ambiguous statements. Ironically, those that argue that Traitor, or even the NJO as a whole, contradicts the films tend to be the people that don't understand the films. And The Unifying Force is even more straightforward in this regard, which is why I haven't really made an effort to analyze that.

That's why I frequently ask people what I should focus on. I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I'm mostly repeating myself. I did write a little bit about Mortis, and I'm interested in it as Anakin's version of facing his shadow, but I'm not entirely sure that's what it is. I think the Son could serve as Anakin's shadow, and his subservience to it in "Ghosts of Mortis" reflects his failure to overcome it. The hard part is what Daughter represents, unless her passivity and inaction in general is indicative of Anakin's weak will in his efforts to follow the Jedi way. The episodes are also layered allegorically, and the more obvious interpretations are less focused on Anakin individually, and more focused on whole "balance of the Force" in the galaxy.

 

Yeah, I've got a whole new level of respect for these scenes, especially the cave in ESB


TO
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