Lit Does Darth Caedus suck as a villain?

Even though the Noghri were collateral damage from a turbolaser strike, Han and Leia are in mortal danger every other time the Falcon take off, Mara was holding the Idiot Ball and only died through a punk trick, Kyle was hampered with the other Jedi around him and also trying to plant a tracker on him instead of killing him, and Isolder was an unarmed prisoner and not a threat. Jaina I'll give you, but that was also the final boss fight of the series and for him to put up as much fight as he did in every other encounter through the series would have the fight over in about ten seconds as Jaina decapitates him, and IIRC he never had a chance to kill her until she had already hit him with the killing blow.

To answer your question, no one else has a track record like that because no other character was so forcibly thrust upon the universe that they became an anemic self-parody who needed to have redshirts (and Mara) throw themselves upon his lightsaber to try to prove how dangerous and evil he actually was. No other villain needed the image boost that badly. The closest I can think of is the Yuuzhan Vong, who were a singular race of beings intended to usher in a new age of the EU and had to prove that the galaxy wasn't safe anymore and who had 19 books to do it. Caedus was a character with the same name as the hero of the previous series who got played like a saloon piano by a Sith acolyte, grabbed the Villain Ball with both hands and refused to let it go.

 

I like when Luke and Leia outwit Jacen in Exile into letting the Errant Venture into the Corellia system using reverse psychology by telling him not to.

Because he's 12.

 

I enjoyed him in Traviss' books, at least.

 

This last bit. Caedus was a threat in the same way as Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3; when the plot calls for it he takes out Jedi who should be able to curbstomp him and then in the next scene he's as easily outwitted as a boozed-up Kowakian monkey-lizard.

 

C'baoth nearly kills Luke, Leia, Han and Mara all at the same time, and he had Thrawn in a sweet Force choke.

Exar Kun took out Luke, beat the piss out of Corran, killed Vodo, beat Sylvar and Crado, destroyed Freedon Nadd, plus corrupted like an entire generation of Jedi.

Waru almost swallowed Luke, Leia and Han at the same time.

Hethrir threatened to cut off Lusa's horns, which I found very threatening. I mean, it's Lusa!

Nil Spaar played Leia like a fiddle and gave Han a beating, pretty sure he wiped out Han's fleet, too.

Kruller, the most threatening doughnut of all time, bombed the Senate and nearly killed Leia and made people think Han did it, and made Luke quit on life. He also had like a million droids ready to explode.

I think if you count the Vong as one enemy, they're pretty damn impressive, maybe more impressive than the Empire.

Btw, this is not a response, I didn't mean anything by this, there's absolutely no point, I'm just compiling a list.

I don't think a casualty list always equals threat if you don't feel threatened while you're reading, if it's not backed up with a compelling story/character, it's largely subjective. I think the above list kinda shows that.

ITT people don't think Caedus was threatening.

 

Close but no cigar is not a very good track record........

 

I guess what really bothers me is...shouldn't Star Wars villains be grandiose?

Jacen Solo the petulant teenager is not what I want from a Star Wars villains.

I want evil armies, fanatical followers, and empire-building evil geniuses.

 

The Petulant Teenager. Hmm, I like that, because that's exactly what he is. He's not a master swordsman or a learned scholar. He doesn't have any skill in politics, at manipulating an entire galaxy. He's barely able to find himself an Apprentice, much less form a Sith Order. He's a man acting like a teenager, throwing a temper tantrum. He's written as a person who wants to be special, who thinks he's special, and from there finds various reasons to prove it to himself and others. There's absolutely nothing mythical or grandiose about him, and that kills the entire character. The deep, philosophical sense of thought is gone, and has been replaced with manic, obsessive justifications. If I didn't know any better i'd say the character's either taken extremely bad drugs, or was suffering from some kind of breakdown, which I suppose we could chalk up to continued use and exposure to the Dark Side of the Force, except for a villain who was once a hero, who has as much experience with the Force as Caedus apparently does, i'd expect more. At no point during Legacy of the Force does Darth Caedus pose even half the threat of his grandfather, or Count Dooku, or even Lumiya back in the day.

I don't need my villain to be a genius, but the problem with Darth Caedus is that Jacen Solo was shown to be a very thoughtful, intellectual person numerous times throughout the years. So Caedus by association has to be portrayed in the same way. I don't need him to have legions of fanatical followers, but Jacen was noted in NJO to have an untapped skill in leadership that impressed Grand Admiral Pellaeon. The leadership Caedus shows is forced and unbelievable. A good chunk of the Galactic Alliance Military splits to join him and i'm left wondering why, because he never did anything to make such an event feasible. His rise to power, as co-ruler of the GA, seems to come from nothing more than the stupidity (Plot Induced to be clear) of other characters. Darth Caedus was a terrible villain, and he won't be missed.

 

YES, HE DESERVES TO DIE, AND I HOPE HE BURNS IN... wait, wrong movie.

 

I hate myself for even quibbling about this, but... do you think he's really any different (any worse) than Anakin Skywalker's whiny-petulance-with-superpowers act in the prequels?

If not, that doesn't exonerate him as a crappy villain, BTW. One of the reasons I hated LOTF so much was that it felt like a lazy retread of the prequel trilogy.

 

Wasn't that Dark Empire?

Except Leia doesn't throw Luke into a vat of dirty syringes and chop off an arm before killing him?

LoTF was a partly editorially mandated cross-over where the main idea seemed to be making Jacen a villain so that in the end he could flow-walk and exchange places with Anakin. The other authors basically built their own, non-connected stories around the idea, an idea that DR/LFL shot down, and no one ended up really knowing what to do with the series. Instead of having a solid beginning, middle, and end, it has a series of checkpoints to hit and no clear consensus on what the story was even about. No single author depicted Jacen in this the same way. Some even turned him into a bit of a bumbling fool...whether that was commentary on the story or just trying to inject some levity...I don't know.

The rushed finale lead to there not being a decision made on who the chief of state was, leading to someone who was just supposed to be an unpredictable lunatic returning to keep the heroes on their toes being made head of the galaxy. The lack of an editorial hand on the tiller is obvious, sadly.

 

Are you serious?

 

That was Denning's intent, yes.

 

Ackbar's Fishsticks There's a reason so many people call Caedus, Darth Vader 2.0.

A lazily done version of his grandfather is exactly what he reads like. What's funny is that I always got the sense that the writers wanted the readers to sympathize more with Jacen than we did with Anakin, but Jacen's turn is so bad and on the nose, forgoing years of buildup and ignoring years of prior characterization, just to make it happen. Lumiya/Caedus is just a poorly done version of Sidious/Vader in my book. Again, i've always felt the writers meant for this to happen, which is why Jacen spends a good deal of the second novel thinking about his grandfather, but in the end dismisses Anakin as the petulant one, and himself as superior, all the while being completely blind to their many similarities, which only increase over the course of the series, which goes back to one of my complaints. The entire web of events that he finds himself entangled in during LOTF seem like something Jacen Solo, as written prior to the series, would be too smart to fall into. Replace Lumiya with Sidious and maybe it'd be different, because during the entire first half of the series at no point did I feel that Lumiya was a credible source of information, and that she wasn't manipulating and lying to Jacen.

I think what further damns Darth Caedus in the eyes of fans is the numerous things that had to be changed or outright ignored for it to happen, whereas Anakin of course was heading down the Sith path from the start, and was therefore always written to fit that character mold.

 

...Holy Waru.

I'm starting to seriously wonder now whether Denning was blackmailing someone at Del Rey or something, because I'm really, really struggling to understand how he was able to keep writing so many Important Books.

 

It certainly doesn't help the cause arguing that the EU isn't glorified fanfic when some authors treat it as such.

I think Denning had a problem with Jacen being Luke's successor, and Shapiro is on record stating she is. And that is where the NJO left us.

It explains the decision making that followed. I think all of Dark Nest and LOTF was Denning setting up Anakin Solo's resurrection, and fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective someone at LucasFilm rejected it when he submitted his outline for Invincible.

 

And weren't there rumors that the ST is supposed to be a condensed LOTF? ST is rip-off of LOTF which is a rip-off of the PT. What? Boo!
Jacen didn't learn from history and repeated his grandfather's mistakes. Ugh.

 

No, he's about as bad except at least Anakin GROWS into Vader.

 

Maybe he was doing a..... Daala?

 

In my mind, No; but the way he was written I can't argue against those who might say yes. It's not the character's fault, it's the writer's fault, Caedus should have been more like Darth Sidious (as he was initially chalked up to be) than Darth Vader. That is to say lead from behind in the shadows (like a true Sith Master) while nurturing his popular (now faux) Jacen Solo persona and not trying to be the face of the show letting everyone know he's the bad guy. There really was potential with the character as Jacen Solo if he had stayed good and as Darth Caedus if TPTB had done it right. His unique vongsense and relationship with the world brain could have been used to do some amazing things as a Sith Master. It's a moot point now with the new Order of the Star Wars universe, but we can still dream/write "legacy" fan-fiction.

 

Nah the dark side corruption made Jacen make poor life choices like bombarding Fondor after it surrendered to lose the loyalty of some of his men, just like all the times the dark side corruption made Palpatine make bad decisions.

 

It's almost as if they didn't care about the quality of the books, and only wanted to make a quick buck on a property that sells on name alone. But nah, that can't be right.

 

Well, dark side corruption did make Palpatine mess up in ROTJ. Maybe that's the problem; LOTF had several places where Caedus could have been taken down early because he made the sorts of mistakes that a villain usually only reserves for the third act, and wound up having to be rescued by contrivance. Failed pacing, maybe? Or they just didn't consider story structure well enough.

 

I thought it was his overconfidence

 

Sheer body count does not a threatening villain make. Perhaps in the most naked plot sense but from the perspective of the reader? From that pit in your stomach that truly makes you worry for the heroes when the bad guy is near? No.

If all it took was just a formula of Threat = number of people killed to the power of how many of those people were established characters, we wouldn't even need to ask the question.