Lit Mara Jade - what are her best depictions, and what her worst?

Part of it is, as I was alluding to - her story was conceived as a 3 act arc. But along with the movie heroes, they were oversaturated and inconsistently written because apparently fans will buy whatever rubbish is published (to the point where they are upset that the EU was scrapped and they won't know who Han beats up on his 100th birthday).

It would have been nice had other authors been less hack-ish and expanded the galaxy as Zahn did by weaving their own stories. Sadly, apart from Stackpole/Allston in the X-Wing books this never happened so you end up with people complaining how badly written* some characters are, how inconsistent/overpowered, etc.

(* They're all badly written; these are mostly hack authors so you're not going to find a glut of talent. So it's degrees of bad)

 

Problem is - the very few award-winning authors who have contributed, tend to have a very idiosyncratic style which doesn't always mesh with the setting.

Greg Bear may be an example.

 

And please, keep it that way. Let the character stay dead. No, let it stay that the character never existed, rather than trying to reboot her. Because rebooting her would lead to the same problems. She already has a fanbase, so she'd be automatically "popular," and the authors would be, as more than one of them actually stated, "scared to harm a hair on her head, because her fans would kill us." That led to Untouchable Mara, in which even her "deadly" disease didn't dim her beauty or her badassery. Certainly not her sex drive, as she and Luke boinked like rabbits throughout.

Abadacus Oh, how I wish it were true that she was "relegated to the background" in the NJO. She just got more and more ubiquitous. Even when she wasn't on the page, the authors had to remind us of her flawless awesomeness. And the "supplemental" material piled on the unearned accolades by describing her, in the Essential Guide to Characters, as a "surrogate mother" to Jaina. Pardon? That woman wasn't ANY kind of mother, surrogate or otherwise, to Jaina. She didn't even know Jaina until Jaina was grown. And she was a lousy mentor. Jaina not only flirted with the Dark Side (isn't it curious how Leia is the only Force-sensitive member of her family to never even be tempted by the Dark Side, yet she's dismissed as some worthless weakling?), but she turned into a Mara-clone: a bratty, ungrateful, disrespectful shrew who should have been slapped across her petulant little face. A dozen times or so.

 

Leia does get tempted in the comics - which is what convinces her not to train herself:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Other_(comic)

and in The Crystal Star, she draws heavily on her anger to help her track her children down:

She breathed deeply, slowly. The exercise felt ragged, for she was still angry and distressed. The calming ritual was one of the few Jedi abilities she had began to learn, though when she had told Luke she knew how to do it, he had replied that no-one ever completely understood Jedi techniques.
"Every time you reach a new stage," he had said, "you realize that you really don't understand anything, you have to go back to the beginning, to the most basic practice, and learn what you didn't see the last time through."
"That's very encouraging," Leia had said in a dry tone that Luke chose to acknowledge.
"It is," he said. "It's wonderful, isn't it? There's always something more to learn. There's always something new."
Her pulse and her breathing slowed and steadied. For the first time since morning, she felt a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of the presence of her children. The center of her being yearned toward them.
Behind her, Artoo-Detoo entered the cockpit.
The glimmer vanished.
"I'm not speaking to you," Leia said.
With a plaintive whine, Artoo-Detoo rolled away.
She had to start all over again. In a state of calm, or in a state of frenzy, she could begin to use her untrained potential. She had more control when she was calm, more power when she drove her potential with fury. With fury came great danger.
Hyperspace glowed and writhed around her. Somewhere in its patterns she would find a trail.
She must find it.
She thought she saw it, she grasped for it, it eluded her and disappeared.
Relax, she said to herself. Relax, and maybe you can find them.
That was like ordering herself to stop worrying: it was impossible.
She abandoned her quest for detached calm. She discarded her pretense of composure.
Instead, Leia loosed her rage and terror and pain. Tears sprang to her eyes, blurred her vision, and rolled down her cheeks. Anger spiced the terror. She pounded her fists against her pilot's chair. She began to sob, to groan, to mutter the basest curses of Han's roughest smuggler friends.
Leia screamed.
Rage and terror and pain all shattered around her, and disappeared. The force of her love and grief broke through into a brilliant blue-white reality.
A vivid scarlet line streaked across the glowing blue-white domain and stabbed into the soft rainbow colours of hyperspace. She snatched the controls of Alderaan and plunged along the bloodred trail.​

 

Well also, a lot of these authors are hardly setting the world afire with their other works. So it's arguably cheaper to get hacks who work for hire instead of better authors, and save the bigger names for special events, i.e. Bob Salvatore (who's not literary giant, but makes a killing writing Drizzt) for AOTC or Vector Prime, or Terry Brooks for TPM novel.

 

Except she DOES get trained, and it's declared complete. Until the NJO, that is, when she is suddenly "half-trained and uncertain in the Force." Mara, meanwhile, who barely trained at all, sleeps her way to is granted the title of Jedi, then Jedi master, in about twenty seconds. This despite the fact that she'd sniped at Luke for declaring himself a Jedi master "after only ten years."

The rules are always different for Mara. Why? Because she's Mara.

 

Luke says that to Leia in Ambush At Corellia, after Mon Mothma has basically given him a ticking off for being so critical of Leia's devotion to her diplomatic skills over her Force skills - basically he's concluded that you don't need to be as trained in the Force as the rest of his students, if your other skills are good enough.

Denning, however, decided to ignore this when he wrote the Dark Nest Trilogy.

 

That explains why Mara magically became a Jedi, then a Jedi master, except the, um, skillset Luke felt she was "superior" in wasn't exactly useful to the Jedi.

Leia's diplomatic training, on the other hand, was useful. As some critter named Yoda said, "Wars not make one great," and "Jedi use the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack." This was completely ignored in the NJO, of course, and the more violence you committed, the more glorified you were. Of course, that was also where Big Bird, aka Vergere, declared there was no Dark Side, because what did that foolish novice Yoda know?

Not gonna complain too much, since all of the other retcons benefited Mara and/or degraded Leia.

 

Mara's promotion to Jedi Knight came in Vision of the Future - she already had the Force training (from Palpatine and Luke) and her commitment to service was what "unlocked" the Knight degree of ability. Which is why she gains the ability to hear the Qom Qae and Qom Jha on the planet, like Luke can.

It's not Zahn's fault other authors pushed her up the hierarchy to Master so fast.

The point I'm making is that it was Denning that decided Leia was a mere Padawan in ability, and had to train with his own pet character, Saba, before becoming a Knight.

 

Palpatine was a Sith, not a Jedi. Her training from him wouldn't be considered Jedi training. Unless you're Luke and you want to get into her chonies.

Really? It's something that needs to be "unlocked" rather than something you earn? That's a new one.

Yep...just add water, and POOF! Instant Jedi!

Didn't say that particular unearned honor was his fault. However, it was his fault that she was pushed into the rank of major characters -- some even said she became the Big Fourth, which is the written equivalent of syrup of ipecac for me -- without having earned it. And it was his fault that her past was whitewashed and she became a blameless innocent who didn't need to make up for her misdeeds because she was "really doing the work of a Jedi," (for a Sith?) or somesuch tripe.

Well, at least he didn't add insult to injury and have Mara train her. That would have been an absolute atrocity -- having the poor-man's Leia train Leia. And I don't doubt they actually would have gone there, had the backlash against Mara not started midway through the NJO.

 

Disney may want to reboot her, because thay can do things with her that they couldn't do qith the Black Widow.
Plus they're accountants, and layers can see how much her Hasbro figure, and merchandise sells.

 

It's still "training in using the Force" - telekinesis, lightsaber skill, and the like.

The scene from Vision of the Future in which Luke tells her that it takes a "Jedi" (implication - Jedi Knight) to hear them:

"You know, I used to be able to hear Palpatine's thoughts from anywhere in the Empire. I mean anywhere—Core Worlds, Mid-Rim, even a jaunt I took once to the edge of the Outer Rim."
"And yet you can't hear the Qom Jha or Qom Qae from across the room," Luke said. "Must be annoying."
" 'Annoying' isn't exactly the word I was hunting for," Mara said acidly. "How come you can hear them and I can't? If it's not some professional Jedi secret."
His emotions remained unruffled. "Actually, that's exactly what it is," he said. "Not a secret, really, but the fact that you're not a Jedi."
"What, because I haven't been through your academy?" Mara scoffed.
"Not at all," Luke said. "There are ways to become a Jedi without going through an academy."

The scene where Luke tells Mara that she could be a Jedi - if she committed to serving others (Mara is not yet ready to do so)

"There are techniques Jedi can use to pull out buried memories," he said. "And you could be a Jedi, Mara. You could be a powerful Jedi."
"Right," Mara bit out. "All I have to do is declare I'm ready to serve the galaxy, right?" Luke's forehead creased, and she caught the flicker of puzzlement from him. "What is it about that that scares you?" he asked. "You've served and worked with people all your life—Palpatine, Karrde, Leia and Han and me. And once you've offered your loyalty, it's for keeps. You can do this—I know you can."
Mara squeezed her hand into a fist, half minded to close the subject again and this time make sure she sat on the lid. But deep inside she knew he deserved an answer on this one. "I can't just offer that kind of blank-line invitation," she said. "Sure I can be loyal; but only to the people I choose to be loyal to. I'm not ready to open myself up to anyone who walks in off the street." She grimaced. "Besides, I keep remembering stories about how the last step to becoming a Jedi is usually making some supreme and rather ugly personal sacrifice. I'm not crazy about that one, either."
"It's not always as bad as it seems," Luke said, and Mara could sense his discomfort as unpleasant memories of his own floated back to the surface. "Just before he died, Master Yoda told me that before I would truly be a Jedi I needed to face Vader again. I jumped to the conclusion that that meant I had to either kill him or let him kill me. As it turned out, it didn't happen either way."
"But you had to be willing to make that sacrifice if necessary," Mara pointed out. "Thanks, but I'm not interested."

Later, Mara does become willing to serve the people of the galaxy as a whole - and there's the "ship-sacrifice scene"

The scene where Mara can now hear the Qom Qae:

Ahead and below now, barely visible in the faint starlight, she could see their borrowed ship, just beyond one last narrow fissure in the rock. Gathering herself, she leaped across the gap to a flat-topped boulder—
And abruptly halted, flailing for balance on the rock as shock froze her muscles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a strange thought or sound had flashed into her mind.
Jedi Sky Walker? Are you there?
She lost the fight for balance and dropped rather awkwardly off onto the ground, barely able to keep her feet under her as she landed. But she hardly noticed. There at the ship, perched atop the TIE fighter-style panels, were a dozen nervously fluttering shadows. Even as Luke landed on the ground beside her, one of the shadows detached itself from the ship and flew to a landing on the rock they'd just vacated. It is you, indeed, the thought echoed through her mind, the words framed by excitement and relief. I saw the great fire, and feared you and Mara Jade had perished. It was Child Of Winds.
And she could hear him.
She looked at Luke, saw her own surprise reflected in his face and mind. "You do go in for the dramatic changes, don't you?" she managed, nodding toward the young Qom Qae. "Nice touch. Really."
Luke lifted his hands, palms outward. "Hey, don't look at me," he protested. "I had nothing to do with this."

 

Unfortunately, that's likely but I can hope they have the sense NOT to.

 

Saba is the worst character in the entire EU.

Yes, I include Ken Palpatine and Waru on that same list.

 

Fair enough. If maychild thinks Mara is a Sue - they haven't seen what Denning did with Saba. Next to her, Mara, even as written by Zahn, does not look nearly as Sue-ish.

 

I wouldn't bet she hasn't guys.

 

Does she need to have that inflicted on her?

 

I kinda doubt that. But even if it's true, it doesn't diminish my loathing of Mara.

And no, training with Palpatine is not Jedi training. Luke was thinking with something other than his brain when he decided it was. Which is another reason why I can't stand EU Luke, particularly once he starts schmooping over Mara.

Your quotes just prove how SW and everything it stands for was twisted beyond recognition to accommodate Mara and to justify her instant promotions.

And crashing her ship was not a sacrifice.

 

Stackpole was the one who (in I, Jedi) had Mara be already pretty trained in "Force-use" - what she learned at the academy was "How to use the light side of the Force."

 

Maybe I'm judging by different standards. But I find Zahn's Mara and Stackpole's Corran much less severe cases, than many other Star Wars characters.

 

But...but I thought Mara was never dark and served the Emperor selflessly, which is the essence of being a Jedi!

Can't these EU authors make up their minds? Mara trained with Palps. But she kept her heart pure, so she was really training to be a Jedi. But she had to learn how to use the Light Side. But wait, her intermittent training makes her worthy of Jedihood, even though she was already practically a Jedi. But now she's a Jedi master, entitled to teach high-risk students, like the granddaughter of Anakin Skywalker! But she was never of the Dark Side, even though she was as important to Palps as Vader and Vader feared and envied her power.

 

Asjoka started growing on me a lot by season 3

 

Wait till you see what Filoni does with Mara next season.