Lit Does Darth Caedus suck as a villain?

I think you nail it. I just watched the OT - and it's full of stupidity and plot holes and obvisous crap - but I don't care, 'cos the movies go on like this wasn't the case.

Then again.... what does it take from a story or a writer to do the trick? My innosence is gone long time ago and it won't come back. Even the OT I watch through the indulging glasses of nostalgia...

 

If Dark Empire had never happened, let Luke fall to the Dark Side after fighting evil for so long, get defeated and redeemed by the new generation would have been very epic, also it would have been the perfect way to let him pass the torch to the next generation.

 

Nah he shouldn't be redeemed. Only Luke makes sense as Darth Vader II, except to subvert expectations he doesn't get redeemed like his father.

 

I don't think it's a good idea to let him fall deeper than his father, but Mara is different, she was raised by evil, taught by evil, served as the hand of evil, I don't see let her fall into darkness makes no sense.

 

I just finished re-reading LOTF and I have to say that Darth Caedus waffled between extremely dangerous and ridiculously incompetent. He seems pretty dangerous in Inferno, which was probably his peak. It's all downhill from there, until he gets stabbed to death by Jaina in a furnace room. Talk about anti-climatic.

Caedus was a really pathetic villain, in fact the only way that you can salvage him is if you believe that Lumiya never intended for Jacen to rule the galaxy. She knew that the One Sith would eventually emerge from hiding and crush the Jedi and revive the Empire. By creating Darth Caedus, Lumiya ensured that Luke's nephew would turn to the Dark Side and that he would be forced to destroy him, and that Luke's wife would die as well.

At the end of LOTF, Lumiya is probably laughing in Chaos, as Luke lost his wife and nephew, thanks to her machinations. In the end, the only thing Darth Caedus achieved was making sure that Lumiya had her revenge on Luke Skywalker.

 

This. Jacen is a bloody idiot to believe Lumiya. I knew it the moment I read that.

 

I've always wondered if Caedus' incompetence was on purpose by the authors.

 

Do you mean they waffled between talking about how dangerous he was and showing how incompetent he was? Its been a while since I read LOTF, but I don't recall any instances of him taking any actions that were remotely successful. I DO remember that Inferno was the one where Luke basically paralyzes him with the force, and Caedus is powerless to resist. Also the one where Luke has him beat in the arena (for lack of a better term) that Caedus has set up give himself a huge advantage over Luke, and only fails to finish him off because he is afraid that killing Caedus will make Ben fall to the dark side.

 

That's such a great dramatic obstacle.

 

I liked him in Fury when Allston wrote him, if only because I'm almost 100% sure he was parodying him at that point:

"His cloak should have swirling around him. Why wasn't it? Oh yes. He'd given it away. It had betrayed him."

"Neville stared at him with...what? Fear? Anger? Caedus couldn't tell. The fishy folk were so hard to read, Quarren and Mon Calmari alike. He didn't like them anymore."

 

I'd forgotten about that. Oh, way to troll, Allston. I love it.

 

And that is why he is a great author. Pity the other two were off the rails though Traviss probably was closer to his style.

 

Were the Allston LOTF/FOTJ novels generally liked more than the other two others of each series?

 

Yes.

 

Yes yes yes. I love the parts of Exile where they're all on the Errant Venture. All the movie characters plus Allston's teamed up together... It's great. That should have been the whole series. Betrayal was decent, with some good humor here and there. I liked the battle at the end of Fury. Lots of great stuff in his books. After he passed away, I read through all his stuff in chronological order, and I enjoyed his LOTF books quite a bit. They don't touch his X-wing books, or even his two NJO books, but they're still good reads.
In comparison, I literally remeber next to nothing about the other six books. Mara died, Jacen fell, and Boba hogged the spotlight. That's about it.

 

Darth Caedus's characterization (putting aside the awful "oh something happened to him after NJO" handwaving) is the only part I really liked about LOTF. His motivations seemed realistic in a way that no Sith really has been before -- Vader included.

 

His motivations weren't the problem. Everything else was. But apparently Denning had the opposite opinion because he's changed the motivations like three times but everything else has remained exactly the same–muddled and awful–as it always has been. Caedus' motivations as given in Allston's books–to make the galaxy a better place for innocents, particularly his daughter, and preventing the rise of the Dark Man–were fine. But then Denning went and changed those motivations, to include making sure that the Dark Man never rose because he saw the Dark Man sitting next to Allana...and he apparently saw this vision before Allana was ever born.

The kark?

 

Caedus' motivations were terrible. He wasn't a villain constructed out of the flaws the character of Jacen Solo had, because the character of Jacen Solo wasn't designed to fall to the dark side.

My favorite though is the causality violating motivation where Jacen had the vision shortly after the NJO of Allana with the Dark Man despite the fact that she wouldn't be born for like six more years. I dunno Jacen, use birth control? Nah, I guess it's easier to just become an evil guy yourself. Jesus it's so bad. I mean, just thinking logically, if you have a vision of someone as a Sith Lord or whatever with Krayt, and I guess somehow he knew it was his unborn daughter, would you really be so attached to this unborn child as a twenty year old that you would dramatically change as a person trying to prevent this unborn child from turning to the dark side? god why am I even putting more thought into this than Denning? I guarantee you he forgot that Allana wasn't born yet when Jacen was at Sinkhole Station

 

Tenel Ka just slowed down Allana's gestation period a lot more than we thought.

 

That little revelation in Apocalypse really epitomizes how much thought was put into the post-NJO.

 

Was it really that much less thought than was put into the pre-NJO, though?

 

no but they started killing off characters

at least zahn just had his pet character badmouth other authors instead of kill their characters

 

I almost quit the EU when they killed Crix Madine, it was like KJA was literally slapping George Lucas in the face.