Lit Jacens Fall felt forced.

IMO, Jacen had become one of the most interesting characters and forced us to re-examine, what we considered right/wrong and good/evil beyond just the polarizing view of Jedi or Sith. To me his story was about questions we all ask ourselves, "why am I here?" and "Does my life has purpose?" While all SW characters deal with the questions at some point, to me, the uneasy answers and the conflict to find them defined who Jacen was.

For me, his fall to the Dark Side not only felt forced, but extremely poorly done. To me, LOTF ended up portraying him as just an imitation of his grandfather and left me with a feeling of been there, done that. I don't have a problem with Jacen falling to the Dark Side or even being killed off, but how it was done was a waste of such a dynamic character, IMO.

 

IMO, Jacen had become one of the most interesting characters and forced us to re-examine, what we considered right/wrong and good/evil beyond just the polarizing view of Jedi or Sith. To me his story was about questions we all ask ourselves, "why am I here?" and "Does my life has purpose?" While all SW characters deal with the questions at some point, to me, the uneasy answers and the conflict to find them defined who Jacen was.

yeah i agree with this. that is what the njo brought us that no other star wars work did. and i loved it. but i still don't think it was forced. Just sad in how it ended. Although i do think there was a dramatic shift in Jacen from say the last 1/4 of the njo series and who he was in Dark Nest. But to me that disconnect made sense in what he experienced in TUF and what he sought in the 5 year journey to replicate that feeling. Instead of feeling humbled for the force to work through him so powerfully against Omni, he sought after that power to be "mine" This was the sin that lead to everything else. He masqueraded that with selflessly wanting a peaceful universe. But Vergere's teaching that the universe was his garden to cull, ruined him in the end.

 

Well of course there was a dramatic shift; we fans did not want a vague sense of 'light' vs 'dark', we want absolutes and Denning gave us that. Luke has done some retarded things, but we chalk it up to 'bad writing'. Jacen does dumb things and we all think, 'well, that is the way it was supposed to go, he was a jerk anyway.'

Really? The most empathetic person of the Order goes on a voyage of self-discovery and comes back as a selfish twit? I have a hard time believing that anyone would have changed that much. An earlier poster is right: 'Be careful what you ask for.' Many fans didn't like Vergere, they didn't like Jacen; what better way to nullify their beliefs than to turn them into the 'baddie du jour': a Sith.

 

Shows how little he understood the notion of gardening then! Cut too much and the garden dies!

 

Except that theory ignores the reception TUF got - it was pretty much universally applauded. Luceno managed to end the NJO well and had won people over to Jacen! The "fix" such as it was that DN/LOTF decided to apply arguably wasn't required!

Then again, DN pretty much threw away the entire post-NJO galaxy with abandon - such a baffling waste! If you're going to spend 20 books trying to tell a 5-yearepic, why then remove all sense of consequence from it? I'm no fan of NJO but I really liked how Legacy at least tried to deal with the consequences of the invasion. If so much resource is going to be put into a big story then at least have the balls to stick with it, especially at the point where a lot of people had been won over to a fair degree. Plus, seeing the galaxy recover from the devastation would have been encouraging too.

 

On this I totally agree. It would have been great to see the Jedi and everyone try to get their lives back together. How do you put a galaxy back together? Hundreds of worlds were laid to waste, billions of cities, trilliions of people, and it all get swept under the rug. It took Europe and Japan the better part of a decade to get put back together, and we are led to believe that an ENTIRE galaxy can be repaired in five?

Betrayal had such promise, how does the Alliance deal with a world that wants to secede? There is a fantastically convoluted political thriller in that storyline, one that would have taken about 9 books to properly solve without having a stupid war to go with it. Denning et al thought big and executed small.

Jacen was meant to find the 'third way', I believe, at the end of TUF; proof that it is possible to be a Jedi and still question what you believe. It didn't have to be Jacen v. Luke; the Force is big enough to allow both streams of thought.

 

It was years later but I've really liked how Trek has handled the fallout from Destiny, the story has moved on a few years but there's a whole arc of devastation and recovery that makes for a satisfying read. You can't stay too long on the doom-and-gloom because readers will tire of it and Trek nearly did do just that. Then last year there was a killer unofficial trilogy that really put things back on track. But Destiny was done 2009, this trilogy I'm talking of 2011-12, that's 6-9 years after NJO! SW had the chance to be first, to blaze a trail but decided to be timid instead.

 

If anything I'd say Luceno took a damn good stab at resolving that "conflict", such as it was - to me, it wasn't much of one.

 

I think we all had such high hopes after Luceno; he set a totally achievable framework to work from in regards to philosophy. Maybe that is why Jacen's fall feels so forced. We all had great hopes for the future of the series and were let down; not only wasn't DN at all what we were expecting, it wasn't even good writing. Everything after might have better writing, but it wasn't coherent and hasn't GONE anywhere. We are back to hanging chad endings and villain du jour, except now it is even less believable than it was in the 'bad ol' days'.

 

Well, you'd know better than I in that respect - I bailed at Betrayal!

 

I should have. Up until Exile, I kept thinking, 'Man, this is really turning into a mess, I wonder how Denning is going to fix this.' Boy, was I naive--I hung with it until Invincible. I like Jaina, so I will probably read the Sword series, but I can't read FotJ or Crucible.

 

Okay, have to add a qualifier here. Universally applauded by people who managed to get to it in the first place.

You have to remember the NJO was so long, and so polarizing, that a huge number of fans were lost very early in the series, often at Vector Prime. The NJO does indeed get better as it goes along, in part by correcting the Yuuzhan Vong to something still ridiculous but not quite so obvious about it. You can't seperate out TUF from the NJO as a whole, it's one gigantic super-block story.

 

I seriously don't understand how Sinrebirth can justify this osik.

 

I loved LotF. Except the parts about Jaina.

 

No the concept was fine, but, as I've said, it was just too big. All of these political arguments for allowing Corellia to secede vs trying to keep them in the Alliance were a great starting point. All you have to do is look to the American Civil War and find a great, complex, story line where both sides are partially right. No, the problem as in the execution. They present us with an unwinnable scenario and then expect someone to win. Was Omas keeping the peace? The Corellians were led by a bunch of tugs, yet we start to sympathize with them? So MANY plotlines get dropped in this to make us all wonder: who the hell was coordinating this?

They bit off more than they could chew and left with us with an incomplete, unfulfilling, mess of a series.

 

That was just a general statement that coincidentally followed your post. I can't wrap my head around anything they made happen, it seems so artificial and depressing. Where is the happy ending, because all I see is misery?

 

Del Rey also chose to implement that strange, round-robin style authorship pattern begining with LotF, which was pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster even before you add in Karen Traviss engaging in what was effectively plotline hijacking by the later books (say what you want about FotJ, but at least Golden tried to keep on point).

I think that contributes to Jacen's fall feeling forced, to get somewhat back to the original topic: that it was implemented through the perspective of three different author's through three very different moral visions: Traviss believes Jedi are evil, Allston believes in just killing moral theory (which there is a long-winded explanation above about why it doesn't work for Jedi), and Denning's principle mode is to put characters through the ringer and see what squeezes out.

Jacen's actions are much more consistent and believable in DNT, when only Denning is doing the writing. If you read DNT and immediately follow it up with LotF (which is what I did) then the Jacen of Swarm War pulls into Betrayal, and that really helps, because you're bringing the Denning version of fallen Jacen - which is the truest conception of the character, along with you. Otherwise he doesn't show up until Tempest, at which point he's well into the dark side.

I mean, even if you want to excuse Neilani Din somehow, Jacen outright murders Ailyn Vel in Bloodlines, with witnesses, through torture, that ship has sailed halfway aroudn the globe by that point.

 

Well, this area is always going to be speculation: How many fans were lost versus how many fans were gained etc. The one point to remember is NJO had an odd design where it was assumed the hardbacks would sell more than the paperbacks, which were focused on side aspects of greater interest to the fanbase while the hardbacks grabbed casual fans. The idea was you could either read all 20 books or just the 5 hardbacks. I can't say I was entirely convinced but, given how TUF starts, you can see an easing in for any new readers of what's gone on since DW.

 

Shows how little he understood the notion of gardening then! Cut too much and the garden dies!

amen​

 

I hadn't read a Star Wars book in years before I picked up Vector Prime... and what a gut punch to come back to SW! However, I almost immediately set out to buy up every NJO title that was out at the time... and then I followed the story as things were published. I can't remember where it was at that point... but there was a lot of material out.

 

But if you jump from TUF to DNT, then that argument falls flat. Jacen goes from level-headed, next leader of the Jedi (potentially) to arrogant jerk. We don't see the 'put-together' Jacen ever again, and I have a really hard time believing that someone in their 20's changes that much in 5 years. A person's behavior is pretty much set by the time their 12, and Denning's version of the kid counters all that comes before it.

I've always had a tougher time with his killing of Nelani than with Vel. Vel was a bounty hunter, had done many unsavory things, including trying to kill Jacen personally earlier, and he lost his temper with her vague, condescending answers; he had no intention of killing her when he walked into her cell. How many other people have been killed by someone who has lost their cool? Lots. For THIS to be the line in the sand just strikes me as...odd.

JB: What I've always had trouble with is the fact that LFL seems to be more interested in future fans than they are in the one's they have. I get the need to attract new fans, otherwise the franchise flames out, but not at the expense of the fans you already have. How many of us had spent a LOT of money buying pretty much every book they put out? I know that I am NOT alone in that. To me, NJO to an extent, and certainly everything afterwards, was a slap in the face to all of us.

I saw a post here somewhere that stated, "Not EVERYONE has read YJK. Get over it." (I'm paraphrasing a bit) My thought was, "True, but a lot of us have, and they're ignoring ALL of the money we spent on them." I've come to understand why so many die-hard Marvel fans were mad at the X-Men movies.

 

Anecdotal evidence about loving or hating the NJO is of little use regarding the backlash against it. Without access to actual sales data we can never know that. What we do know, however, is how isolated the NJO is. It is the least referenced and most isolated portion of the EU, with the smallest amount of cross-media influence. It exists only in the novels and one small, and now seemingly canceled, Star Wars: Invasion comic series. In the decade since TUF was published that portion of the timeline has been left fallow by comparison to every other major era. It is highly unlikely that such emphasis was random - we were not given more NJO because people were not percieved to want more.

Funny, I don't have any problem with the idea that someone who spends five years trying to find the truth and themself comes back massively changed. Many people can, and do, go through massive life changing experiences in their early to mid twenties, especially when it involves travel to exotic new places and exposure to new cultures.

In Jacen's case, it should be noted, this includes the particularly mind-altering experience of being exposed to Killik Joiner pheremones - his sister and several of his closest friends went through that experience and basically completely lost their identities. Jacen resisted, but the idea that there wasn't some sort of long-term influence on his outlook is esily present. The Killiks therefore can excuse any changes and inconsistencies between Jacen's personality between TUF and Joiner King.

The entire purpose of Dark Nest was to lay the groundwork for Jacen's fall. However ineffective it may have been due to the failings of that series, the developmental pathway was obvious. Anyone who read through DNT and was told at the end - 'Jacen becomes a Sith in the next series' would respond with 'well, duh.'

My statement about the writing styles was that placing Allston and Traviss in front of Denning disrupted that flow. The three authors have different viewpoints on Star Wars ethics, and that colors how someone in the process of falling to the dark side acts, and indeed how those events were portrayed. Allston's utilitarian approach couches the Neilani situation within Jacen's own seemingly rational justification; Traviss glosses over Ailyn's murder like it's no big deal - even though it represents killing in cold-blood. Stylistically they portray those two critical acts, and Jacen's descent to darkness in a much more subdued fashion than I can ever imagine Denning doing.

So, if there had been only Denning, Jacen's fall would still feel forced, but only from TUF to DNT, not from TUF to DNT and from DNT to LotF as it presently does.