Lit Crucible by Troy Denning

njo was not a missed opportunity, i was a masterpiece. what happened after the njo was a missed opportunity.

Ben has been grossley underutlized. he should have his own trilogy or something. The other kids got theirs.

 

He's giving Luke the thumbs-up because he's proud of him for finally having the courage to stand down and admit that he was never really in charge, since Kyle has always been the backbone of the Order.

 

And apparently the Jedi Order was brought to you by Pepsi.

 

No. Pepsi was brought to you by Kyle Katarn.

 

But...Leia cut her hair!

 

It always seemed to me that the Young Jedi Knights generation was the most logical step to take the EU. But they have been treated pretty poorly by Del Rey since 2000. Honestly, Jaina is way older than her parents were in ANH now and can hardly be considered "young". And Legacy really bookends this era anyway. The YJK will always be a missed opportunity in my mind.

 

If it was such a masterpiece, why didn't the Solo kids come out of it better?

In subsequent books, Jaina became mind-thralled, Jacen a druggie in search of the ultimate high and Anakin was a corpse! It didn't help that in NJO there was this younger vs older generation battle but, if you put some kids up against their parents and those parents happen to be Han and Leia, with Luke as uncle, who's most likely to get backed? In effect doing this stamped "brat" on all 3 of the Solo kids irrevocably. It's arguable that in the fan perception, likely due to these really bad first impressions, they never moved beyond being seen as teenagers, even when the books had them at the ages of 25, 30, 35.

To me, if one of NJO's aims was to bring a new generation into the spotlight and win fans over to them, well, that was a bust! And what followed only compounded the problem.

 

See my reading of the NJO is completely different. I think that Jaina and Jacen came out of it pretty well, along with a few extra, really strong characters like Jag, Tahiri and probably Tenel Ka - who wasn't around much in person but had a suddenly more complex set up in narrative terms.

But afterwards, they didn't move on to stories starring them as the heroes with Luke et al retiring to more supportive Yoda-like roles. It was after the NJO that the failure occurred. Perhaps it occurred because Del Rey thought, as you seem to, that the next generation hadn't managed to capture people's imaginations the way they wanted and they had no choice but to keep hanging the series on the Big Three, but that certainly wasn't my experience of the NJO. I think it's more likely they just wanted to keep hold of the Big Three's name recognition.

I don't have any particular problem with Jaina's age - she really ought to be the Mace Windu of the NJO anyways, so I don't particularly need her to be twenty years old - but I do think that trying at this point to shift the series toward her and Ben is going to mean they're less willing to do things like the five year jump between the NJO and DNT, which is a shame in some ways because the galaxy is just always at war. I'm hoping that SOTJ manages to be truly epic without it being about another galactic conflict, somehow. I'm not sure how though. :/

 

Well, for me, a large part of the reason for why the next generation didn't take off is due to how DR decided to portray them, probably for the DRAMA! (tm) Sure, there were times when I liked all 3 of the kids - Anakin I found to be generally far less irritating than the twins, Jacen I found to be at his best in the likes of BP and TUF, Jaina's duel with Tsavong Lah, definitely a highlight. But I do think, overall, the kids ended up being defined more by their negative than positives trait and that shouldn't really happen.

Do you think the fan perception of the Solo kids is locked on them as that? Kids/teenagers? I'm not sure they've really been allowed to grow up, the numerous Jacen threads are perhaps testimony to that as people seem to think Jacen, now an adult and 30 should have far greater latitude.

I liked Jag quite a bit in NJO but what happened afterwards.... meh.

To me, it shouldn't have had to be either-or, that we can have the big 3 OR the next gen, just develop stories for both! Post-TUF there was a perfect opportunity for that but it got karked when the Vong got thrown under a bio-bus by DR!

 

Many bothans died to bring you this Pepsi. They were standing in Kyle's way.

 

I think that Jaina suffered from being continually characterised as a teenager far more than Jacen. I think, ultimately, through sheer attrition and all she's been through she's finally starting to "feel" more like an adult, but continually writing her as someone torn between boyz didn't help. But I think that Jacen most definitely felt like an adult; then again, I think that some of that was true at the end of the NJO, after his experiences in TRAITOR, but I definitely felt that Jacen was an adult. Even his fall to the dark side, while inelegant in places, felt like an adult, not Anakin Skywalker and his juvenile temper tantrums about not being able to stop people from dying.

I think another part of why this happened to Jaina, aside from the annoying focus on romance for so long, was the way she was written as second-fiddle to Jacen in both DNT and, far more criminally, LOTF. It adds to the sense that she hasn't achieved anything since the end of the NJO (and really, killing Jacen was her first big story point since...well, the whole Yun Harla thing and defeating Tsavong Lah; she was backgrounded to Jacen even during TUF. So like...12 books ago), which creates the sense she hasn't changed. Also I suppose there's the fact that my perception of her character, at least, is that she's a plugger and more practical than dramatic by nature (even if she has a hot temper), which again makes it easy for her positive, adult characteristics to fade into the background, but in itself that also begs the question as to whether that's characterisation that developed from an absence rather than an intention.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing the Big Three in their own adventure again.

 

I don't think I agree. I mean, you've responded negatively, but I don't think that's telling of the overall way they were defined. Jacen, at the beginning of the series, could sometimes be annoyingly indecisive or youthfully pompous in his approach to philosophy, but by the end of the series, he was very deliberately positioned as someone who had grown up and pushed past that and was now a wise, serious Jedi leader. He was defined by positive traits. And Jaina was briefly annoyed with her mom and fell to the dark side for a book, but she cleaned up quick after that, and was very definitely not defined by those characteristics even to the extent that Jacen was -- she was defined as a warrior Jedi and a fighter pilot leading NR/GA squadrons into battle. Jaina's portrayal was enormously positive. Now, there was a segment that fixated on bitching about Jaina and/or Jacen, but those were generally the people who didn't like the NJO as a whole, and there were plenty of people who responded positively to the twins. I don't think the blame for their failure to take the stage can fairly be put on the NJO, which primed them both to take the stage as mature young adults with strong, clear roles and positive characteristics.

The blame has to be put on the way they were written after that, which eliminated a major part of Jacen's positive definition as a mature, wise leader to cast him as a confused, malicious villain, and stripped Jaina of agency, eliminated a significant aspect of her identity (ignoring her position as a military squadron commander), regressed her romantic life, and sidelined her from the plot. None of that was logical carry-on from where the NJO left them. The problem is not where the NJO left them; it's where Denning moved them.

 

In subsequent books, Jaina became mind-thralled, Jacen a druggie in search of the ultimate high and Anakin was a corpse

you partly made my argument for me. It is the post NJO that messed everything up. Yes Anakin was a tragedy, but it made it more real, more dark. It made the triumph of the Unifying Force that much more powerful

 

Still don't care for Anakin's dying, but yeah Jacen did improve quite a bit over the series, which is why I disliked greatly his relapse in FH3. I didn't buy the notion that DN advocated of Jacen looking to regain that moment of clarity either, I thought that, after all this, he'd at least be smart enough to not do exactly what followed!

Still, it's getting on for a decade since TUF came out, probably need to add the NJO books I've got to the reread list - they may well read very differently to how they did a decade+ ago!

 

they are still great to me, except for dark journey. i also was no super crazy about the book where Han is a mess after Chewie's death

 

No one likes Dark Journey!

Damn shame really, the first post-SBS book, perfect opportunity and what happened? We got.... that.

 

I like Dark Journey...

 

In addition to this, Luke had been put into a position where he was described as permanently influenced, for lack of a better term crippled, by the Vong venom that hit him in the final battle. Leia wasn't set for her second life as a proper regular Jedi, so Han and her seemed to be ready to park the Falcon at their skyhouse. The biggest reason why the young ones weren't allowed to grab the torch was that LFL/DR/whoever still saw some mileage in the movie characters, unsurprisingly not thinking about the "artistic choices" made for the structure and finale of the NJO.

This discussion actually makes me think of another dimension to the whole thing: Could it be that Luke and Leia suffer a bit from being seen as "Anakin and Padmé's kids" now that the prequel era has taken over so much? There's still the main novel line and Invasion, of course, but there's also a lot of "farmboy Luke" stuff coming out that I think we wouldn't have seen that much off a few years back (plus things like young Leia in TFU). It would make sense since regular SW fans these days wouldn't necessarily know about Luke's further adventures, about his way to Jedi masterhood and his own academy. But they'd know about Anakin's son who's been there to help redeem his father. Maybe I'm concentrating too hard on this part of the franchise, but I can't help but wonder if Luke and Leia share Jacen and Jaina's fate to a certain degree.

Also, nice to see you again, Becca!

 

This is an area where I'm hoping the new OT era novels fill the need for "young big three" stories, allowing the Legacy stories like Crucible to be the adventures of "old big three" (if nothing else, the cover art suggests they're acknowledging their proper age for once, rather than showing ageless characters).

 

I wandered back in from the wastes.

I kinda liked DARK JOURNEY too, actually. It was...not written as well as it could have been in some places. Okay, a fair few. Mainly, I think, because it tried to be ~darker~ than it was or needed to be. Its strength is in the fact Jaina never really does succumb to darkness, she's just really angry and testing boundaries, and eventually...she cries herself out and sorts herself out. Hidden under the hamfisted "I must learn to atone from Kyp!" stuff and the Jag romance that would have been better kept for "X-Wing" novels, you have a kid responding to enormous loss by experimenting with realpolitik as a world view and anger as a motivating force. What she achieves is actually truly extraordinary. Most of her trajectory for the rest of the series is laid out in DJ - the whole trickster pilot gig, the wacky anti-Vong improvisations, etc.

Honestly, DJ also reconciles the two fairly consistent character traits Jaina has - her temper and her rock solid, understated determination. She's furious, so what does she do? Practical, useful things. She's so furious she's flirting with the dark side, but what does she eventually do? Realise she doesn't want to do things this way.

Honestly, if DJ had just stopped trying to be ~the book where Jaina goes dark~ and instead presented itself as ~the book where Jaina is really upset~, it would have been much better.

Like TRAITOR, DJ is the novel where Jaina discovers she doesn't need to be afraid of the dark, because she is more than capable of stopping herself before irreversibly crossing that line, even when she's angry. I'm aware of the irony of saying this, but at the time, TRAITOR was not the book where Jacen almost went dark. It was about self-discovery - what are you capable of, and what kind of person will you be?

DJ actually does this for Jaina but (a) it's unavoidably compared with TRAITOR, which is just unfortunate for any book, (b) it really does throw its focus the wrong way in a number of places and (c) it's probably not entirely Cunningham's fault that the takeaway message from most fans was "lol, Jaina almost married her friend's dad," not "wow, Jaina's the best anti-Vong engineer the good guys have..."

The idea of DARK JOURNEY is fine, it's just the execution that was a little off-key.

 

I'll stick up for Dark Journey, too. It's not perfect, but I think a lot of what's laid on it is more about the fans complaining. Jaina's a terrible character because she's imperfect, it's a stupid dark side "fall" because it's not epic and galactic and is really more of an angry pushing at boundaries, we don't want smaller-scale storytelling and Hapan political intrigue after Star by Star. I think Dark Journey, aside from the other flaws with it, might have actually been better off had its release been interwoven with Enemy Lines. Follow up SBS not with Dark Journey, but with the bigger clash of Rebel Dream, and keep both Jaina and Jacen's fates mysterious and worrisome to the audience as well as their family while the story concentrates on the fallout from Coruscant. Then give us the novel showing what Jaina's been up to, once we've been allowed to come down from Coruscant, and allow her to reintegrate herself in Rebel Stand. Then finally resolve the Jacen mystery with Traitor, and allow him to reintegrate himself in Destiny's Way. Probably the worst thing for the novel's reception was putting it right after SBS.

 

Yup, that progression probably would have worked better.

 

Whew. Was afraid of more gifs and scorn

 

Also, the last third of the book is practically missing since NJO was always written on deadline, and I daresay Cunningham writes slower than that. With that in mind, I think a 450-500 page Dark Journey would have been really entertaining. As it stands now, I still find it entertaining. It's a bit slow in the beginning for the end to be that fast.