Lit Freedon Nadd

Which is more like the TTT Clone Wars mess?

 

Well, that's why the sequel trilogy will likely not have much to do with the EU. Lucas wasn't going to be constrained by what TTT set down as a version of events for the Clone Wars. It's highly unlikely that the sequel trilogy will alter that stance.

I suppose another example would be the fact that Jacen/Caedus has been given at least three different motivations for becoming Caedus, with later ones contradicting ones we witnessed through his POV in an earlier novel. I guess the writer of that novel was just guessing at Caedus' motivations?

 

I was asking whether you were referring to The Silmarillion or to TOTJ?

 

I was just saying that it's an example of a text not representing events accurately. It's generally easier in these instances to chalk it up to character error, but in Pellaeon's case that's difficult to do, so the best explanation is that the text itself isn't accurately relaying what really happened in that particular instance.

Don't really know what the Silmarillion reference was about, so I just elaborated on my point with an example.

 

Oh, I see. About TOTJ, between the Veitch comics, the KJA comics, and the audio drama, I wonder what is and isn't accurate.

 

Any thoughts on this?

 

I'm also curious what (if anything) Disney will do with TOTJ.

 

If and when people want to contribute further to the thread, they will. Please do not keep responding to yourself so as to keep the thread bumped.

I appreciate that you've been enjoying the discussion, here-- I have, too! -- but give it some room to breathe, okay? Double posts are frowned upon... triple posts are unforgivable.

 

It's not that I want to keep the thread bumped but rather that I run out of time to edit my posts. I wouldn't even double post if there wasn't a time limit on editing posts.

 

Freedon Nadd is important for our understanding of the Dark Lords of the Sith in Tales of the Jedi. Tom Veitch understood that the Dark Lords and the Jedi Knights were inextricable. The Dark Lords were not a separate or alien Force tradition, they were Jedi who had taken on the power of the dark side and used it to dominate and devastate the universe around them.

Nadd’s story in Tales of the Jedi was the archetype of how the Dark Lords operated. He was a Jedi who rebelled against his masters, accepted the dark side, and enslaved others with his dark power. He’s our link to the ancient Sith and prefigures the fates of the Jedi characters in the series who eventually take on the mantle of the Dark Lords. This means that he’s also a link to the Star Wars movies and specifically to Darth Vader, whose history and design he’s based on.

Kevin J. Anderson would take Tales of the Jedi in a different direction, focusing more on the Sith people and less on the Jedi who had conquered them. While his stories are quintessential EU, I think he misses the deeper spiritual dimensions that Veitch was so keenly aware of. The dark side is something the Jedi must deal with, and for Veitch this internal struggle was the core of his Tales of the Jedi. His characters fell because of their choices, how they responded to adversity, and not because they were helpless pawns to events outside their control, much less because of some kind of infection by dark side magic.

I think Anderson and the EU after him did Freedon Nadd dirty by making him appear to be a failure at being a Sith. It’s true that he never became a Dark Lord of the Sith because he was not chosen as heir by the Dark Lord of his time. But it was through his rebellion that the Sith survived. He founded a dynasty in Onderon that would bring him back centuries later to enact the ancient prophecy of the return of the Dark Lords. In that sense, he is similar to Darth Bane. And even in death, Nadd was betrayed by his Dark Lord, who had used him to bring the Sith back through Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma. Nadd was a human and fallible character, and a much more compelling depiction of a dark sider than many characters we got after him. And he was also a fantastic depiction of dark power, both of its strength and the sad blindness that comes from its greed and ambition.

 

It’s also worth remembering that Nadd was more in line with how the Dark Lords were depicted in the earlier Tales of the Jedi. They were primarily warlords, leading nomadic warrior civilizations to pillage and devastate star systems. They were more like pirate lords or feudal kings than anything else. This is not unlike what Vader was like in the movies, a dark leader of star fleets who used might and dark power to destroy his enemies.

Later works in the EU made the Dark Lords increasingly more powerful and esoteric, until we got to the logical and perhaps absurd endpoint where they were almost like dark gods. But that’s power creep, pure and simple, common enough across many franchises. You can argue that Veitch did this with Palpatine, in Dark Empire, though in all fairness, he was mostly a blank slate, and what we did know about him was that he was the Emperor of the universe and the master of the dark side, someone a level above Vader and perhaps even the other Jedi. Regardless, Veitch treated Palpatine as something different from the Dark Lords, even having him outright reject their call to join them in Korriban.

 

The Piracy analogue for Sith since Lucas initial ideas is intriguing. On one hand, it is obvious, people fall out of society and believe in the rule of the strongest/fittest, so they take and pillage because they can, not interested in establishing order but profiting from anarchy. But there is another side to it, even they get tired of backstabbing and looking over their shoulder. They crave order, want to impose it and fail at that. Want to become invincible by strength or immortality and godhood and fail at that, too. It is a spiral and natural evolution if thought to the bitter end.

The thing is, the Dark Lords, the fallen Jedi, they all are trapped in their surroundings. If loosing their connections, support and power, on their own, they are forced to take what they can, survive, get stronger. And then they make that a habit. They can never impose a new order successfully so long they think they do not have to abide by its rules themselves, too. The world follows their example, if they kill they will be killed, if they take they will be taken from, if they defy order and rules, theirs won't be obeyed.

That is why the core message of ROTJ is so important. Lay down your weapon, do not fight. You may be killed or not. But nobody can fight you if you refuse to fight, nobody can measure himself against you, nobody can take what you are not willing to give. And even Sith know that killing the unarmed is not strength but weakness. They do it, but they rather crave to be fought to proof themselves against their enemy. They take superiority from their ability to defeat them, and if denied that, if forced to either let them live or slay them unarmed, they are weakened and shown their flaws and errors.

ROTJ was important in showing Luke laying down his weapon and Vader sparing his life. What I think though is interesting in that regard is Ulic and Cay Quel Droma's duel and Cay's death. It shows that there are many ways to redeem someone, and not always will a life be spared. But it had an effect on Ulic and worked to bring him back ultimately at great cost. In contrast, look at Jaina and Jacen Solo's last duel... a Jedi hellbent on killing if she has to, assassination, which is the Dark Side used for a percieved greater good but ultimately a personal fall, and a Sith who believes his actions and sacrtifices are for the greater good, while trying to safe lives. Their duel is the opposite of the Ulic and Cay one, both ending in death, but this time, a Jedi went overboard with stopping her enemy and almost paid a dark price for it, had the shock of loosing her twin not brought her back from the brink she was on as Jedi assassin.

So in a way LOTF rhymes with the ancient Jedi and Sith Tales... you got Vitiate's True Sith behind the scenes like the One Sith in LOTF with Krayt, you got Lumiya manipulating Darth Caedus akin to Ragnos etc. crowning Exar Kun and Ulic Quel Droma. Freedon Nadd kinda would be Darth Vader in this paralell, the beginning of a lineage (like the Onderonian one) that had repercussions and laid the groundwork for later generations aka his grandchildrens struggle and fight. And like his grandfather, Caedus was also like Freedon Nadd in many ways and betrayed by his masters, both Jedi and Sith Masters actually.

 

There's a very incongruous entry for Nadd in the Complete Encyclopedia that not only has a "young" Dark Lord that corresponds to no known Dark Lord (it can't be Sadow, Vitiate, Ghost Ragnos, etc), but suggests that the lineage did in fact continue during the Centuries between the Hyperspace War and Nadd himself. It also expands upon the backstory of Tales of the Jedi, revealing that the Jedi had previously confronted Nadd long before Ulic, etc were sent to Onderon. It also has some minor details, such as Nadd himself ruling for over a Century (and thus knowing the secrets of Dark Side longevity!), and that his spirit later possessed his own descendants, something not fully stated elsewhere.



...it also has the neat little detail of having his Tomb seem to change over time, warping due to Dark Side malignancy. It's a nice attempt to reconcile the different appearances of it in various sources.

 

I was always bummed that we never got a prequel to "Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon" with a novel or comic delving into Nadd's turn to the dark side and eventual takeover of the Onderon royalty at 4400 BBY. Looking at all of the story-crumbs seeded in the original comics and the Tales of the Jedi Companion shows that there was more than enough to stretch into at least one novel-length story if not a multi-part comic series.

 

Why did Freedon Nadd want to rule Onderon for what purpose?

 

Nadd was impatient and didn’t want to wait for the Dark Lord who trained him to die before he could have power. That’s the reason given in the comic book itself, and it makes enough sense. At the time there was no notion that the Dark Lords governed more than a system at once, let alone that they had an Empire. So for Nadd to rule over another world was fairly comparable. Later retcons and story directions made this make less sense, but his reasons were the same: he wanted power and he didn’t want to wait for it.

 

Funnily enough the only widespread attempt to piece together all the lore information about Nadd's life into something of a narrative focused on him comes from a fan video i found years ago on youtube:

Rather good, i'd say, but makes me long for a proper comic or book about the Onderonian Dark Lord...

And given Veitch is gone, well, we will probably never see Nadd to his full potential as a character.

 

Yeah, I agree that only Veitch could have given him the proper expansion.

Speaking of which, I feel like Veitch shined more with his Old Republic era stories. He more or less had free reign to delve into whatever characters and themes he wanted to, whereas the Dark Empire Trilogy sits somewhat awkwardly close to Zahn's very different Thrawn Trilogy. It's well known to old school EU fans that they had kind of butted heads during the writing of each of their stories in 1990-91 and after Zahn made no concession to change his outline, Veitch had to modify his story to allow for Jacen and Jaina to be "offscreen" (at least until Dark Empire II, where they're little more than window-dressing.)

I think that they're tonally opposite, as well, and another thing I always wish we had gotten in Legends was a bridge novel from The Last Command to Dark Empire. (Isard's Revenge doesn't count, as that almost entirely focuses on Rogue Squadron and what they were up to.)

 

Why not try to rule the entire Galaxy why just Onderon?

 

There are a few factors.

First, much of the galaxy was uncharted at the time. The Republic didn’t find Onderon until four centuries after Nadd did. According to Dark Lords of the Sith, Nadd searched across many uncharted systems until he found one he could dominate. He left the Sith because he could not become Dark Lord until his master died. He was impatient and opted to become king some other way.

Another factor was the Republic itself. In these stories, the Republic was a formidable force. Sith civilization survived by remaining hidden. Prior to finding Korriban to hide in, the Sith had been hunted from system to system. So if the Dark Lords could not take on the Republic directly, neither could Nadd. So he was forced to find an uncharted system where he could rule safely. Ruling the galaxy was not within the Sith’s power at the time, not the Dark Lords and not Naddz

One final factor is murkier, and that’s Sith prophecy. Nadd and the Dark Lords were aware that Sith civilization would end. Yet they knew that they would be able to rise again centuries later. That is what the spirits of Nadd and the Dark Lords are working toward in the comics, the return and revenge of the Sith. So it is suggested they knew that they were not fated to rule the galaxy, that only the Jedi in their future would be able to do that.

At least, this is the reasoning based on the first three TOTJ comic stories, the ones written by Veitch. Some of this logic falls apart with changes introduced by KJA and other writers and creators later on. But then again, it wouldn’t be the first story/franchise that KJA changed dramatically after taking over.

 

Guess Nadd learned from the Hutts and successfully subverted a culture and knew the longterm success lies in that, not in shortlived domination that only leads to rebellion and a Sith being taken down. Like the Hutts he was contempt to slowly win, city by city, one planet for now, and create a culture that would survive but that would be Sith-like. More planets he may target after this, though, why go to the trouble if one worked perfectly already? He saw many others fail at such to be the wiser here.

 

The slow blade penetrates the shield.

 

And the slowest battledroid kills the most gungans walking through their shields. TPM had it all! Technically you could kick a Gungan through his personal shield but not shoot it.



Gesendet von meinem FP3 mit Tapatalk