Lit An Analysis of the New Jedi Order and its Role in the Star Wars Mythos

What kind of Sith wants to make the galaxy a better place for his daughter?

What kind of a Sith gets all gooey just because his son is being electrocuted?

What kind of a Sith sits in an asteroid and manages a mining company?

Again, there is this assumption that all Sith must either be evil or all act in completely the same manner.

This is not so.

Vergere (it seems) was only ever interested in pushing Jacen Solo on his destiny, and as it turns out this destiny was to become a Sith Lord.

Those Sith had no reason to lie to Alema, and as others have pointed out, just because a Sith is what most define as evil, doesn't mean they're also big liars.

 

Any good reasons why she could not do it herself?

 

After LotF revelations about her, it seems that she went back for the YV solely to capture Jacen and make him a Sith. (What comes to Voxyn, they were also a danger for Sith.)

My personal favourite theory about Vergere's "mystery" is that she killed Anakin, the only person among people close to Jacen that according to Lumiya Vergere and herself didn't consider when they selected their candidate for the next Dark Lord of the Sith.

And what comes to Jacen, in Inferno Leia thinks that Vergere's torturing of him made him into a person who could torture Aileen Habuur, alias Vel to death. Not that they would have ever blamed Vergere for doing that to Jacen and I think that back in DW Luke even thanked Vergere for what she did to Jacen. But then, villains have always been close to his heart, like his treatment of Lumiya in LotF shows, so it's no wonder that he thanked Vergere, who helped to kill one of his nephews and tortured and corrupted another.

I don't really see why people are upset that Vergere has been changed from maverick, YV-collaborating, torturing OJO Jedi to one of the most succesful non-DLotS Siths in the history of that group. The DLotS she helped to create will be a shortlived one, yet she unquestionably won, had all her plans come through and paved way for Darth Krayt and his New Sith Order. If she wouldn't have been made in to a Sith, her treatment of Jacen would have been a huge mistake if she would have been kept as a "good" character. Now it was a great success.

 

If a mysterious alien comes to you saying that she's lived with alien invaders for the last sixty years of her life but "They have potential to learn so we shouldn't kill them all," would you listen to her? In all likeliness (and it actually happened) she was under suspicion of just being a Yuuzhan Vong plant, which is only natural for the New Republic to assume. On the other hand, if your nephew who has been tortured by that species comes back after only a few months and says "Yeah, their culture is definitely evil but the people themselves deserve a chance to change," you'd be more likely to listen.

Goodness, sarcasm is a literal art form the way you do it. It took me about halfway through the post to realize you weren't serious.

 

We're quoting posts from a thread that I linked to.

 

Oh.

 

After she had given the antidote to whatever it was that was killing Mara, information on how the vong work and their weaknesses, and shown her jedi power. Yes.

Also better that then hope that a Force trained individual fall in her lap and that s/he is strong enough to not be broken by the torture, willing to listen to her and later able to escape alive.

That he should become Mad Max, "So I exist in this wasteland, reduced to one instinct: survive."

 

I'm not sure how to take the sort of discussion my analysis breeds.

 

WHY is there an anime-style figurine of Jaina Solo out there? That seems incredibly random even by merchandizing standards

 

Not as random as a Vergere statue would be

 

Yeah, but she could've done that under orders. The Vong might've figured "Better to lose a few battles and win the war." The New Republic had no way of knowing Vergere was legit, and even when Jacen vouched for her Luke had doubts. Plus the fact that she hid herself in the Force (out of habit) would've also made the Jedi suspicious enough by itself.

You say this having never read the series. She didn't hope for any of that–she went out and got it, and made sure it happened. That's kind of the point of her character; she is active. She didn't wait for Jacen to be captured the Vong, she went out and made it happen.

 

Can you explain that one?

And that is different from what happened in NJO?

That still don't fix the "that s/he is strong enough to not be broken by the torture, willing to listen to her and later able to escape alive" problem.

 

The New Republic thought after Jacen and Vergere came back (and likely would've thought that if she'd come by herself) that it was possible she was just a Yuuzhan Vong spy, ordered to heal Mara in order to gain the Jedi's trust.

Well, yeah. Because the Vong basically never said "Forget this, we'll just lose this battle because the overall war is more important." They fought, down to the last man sometimes, until they absolutely knew they couldn't win, because to them losing is far more dishonorable than dying.

Maybe she sensed it in the Force?

 

I don't even know what this thread is about anymore.

Like, shouldn't this Vergere discussion be in the Ignorance is not an Obstacle thread?

 

That's why I added things like "information on how the vong work and their weaknesses" in this hypothetical scenario.

Okej, I can accept that explanation, even if I personally find it a bit to much to chance that just the right one would fall in her lap.

I have already given it a 2/10, I would have given it higher if it was not for the destruction of the Republic for a in-joke

 

all sith ARE evil. I agree Evil(Palpatine) looks different than evil (Jacen) but in the end Jacen was consumed by Caedus and truly was lost in the darkside and was unredeemable. If anyone could have become a good sith it was jacen, and in the end he failed too.

 

Scrutinizing Vergere's actions has become so banal I'm not even going to get into it except to say that the intentional ambiguity of her character, given the circumstances, doesn't exceed the same ambiguity surrounding Obi-Wan and Yoda as Luke's mentors on his journey, given that they lied to Luke "for his own good" and directed Luke to kill Vader, when the true way was to redeem him. And I know we've gotten the retcon that they wanted or needed Luke to figure it out on his own, but I think the insinuation that was what Kasdan intended in 1982 is very suspect. They're also guilty of inaction for twenty years, the same thing which people get on Jacen's case about, when Jacen was an active participant through the YVW.

Anyway, I'm planning on taking this thread in a new direction rather than chapter by chapter analysis, starting tonight with a compare and contrast between Vergere and Mace Windu in Traitor and Shatterpoint, respectively, with a little Ganner thrown in for good measure. Basically, this is an idea I had to bump my ancient thread about how the Jedi are boring now, but I figured it actually is better for this thread.

And if I don't post it tonight everyone should assume I was hit by a car or am dying in a ditch or something.

 

Alright, so yesterday I thought about resurrecting my "Have the Jedi become boring?" thread but didn't do so out of apathy. But to continue with the idea I had there and focus it on Ganner as an interesting Jedi character, and specifically why he's interesting.

So jumping ahead in Traitor all the way toward the end, specifically chapter 14, PATH OF DESTINY. Ganner is mid-rampage,



and we're treated to a quote from Luke during Ganner's training:

"A Jedi doesn't show off, Ganner. Fighting is not a game. For the Jedi, combat is failure. It is a tragedy. When blood must be shed, a Jedi does so quickly, surgically, with solemn reverence. With grief."

This is not what Ganner is doing. We're told that "Ganner tried for so long, tried so hard to be what everyone told him he was supposed to be, tried to control his flair for the dramatic, for the elegant, the graceful, the artistic, tried to be a good son, a good friend, a humble man, a good Jedi... But in the archway, he finds the end of trying."

Who is Ganner Rhysode?

Illumination burst within his brain.
In that instant, everything finally made sense. He understood what Jacen had been talking about. There was nothing to fear.
He understood the power of being who he was.
He didn't even really have to know who he was. He could decide.
He could choose, and act.
Suddenly, his life made sense. His life had been a story of pretending to be a hero. Well, he thought. Okay, then.

Ganner stopped trying to be a Jedi and became who he was. Do, or do not. There is no try. And in so doing, he became one of the greatest Jedi.

Ganner squeezed the blade to life, and stared at its sizzling purple shaft. Here was the weapon of a hero. A real hero. Not a playactor. Not a pretend-hero, like Ganner had always been.

But this weapon was now in Ganner's hand.

I don't have to be a real hero, he thought. A dazzling, old-Ganner, forget-the-consequences-and-have-some-fun smile dawned on his face. He shook himself and years fell from his shoulders; his eyes lit up, sparking like arc gaps in the red-lit gloom. He felt shiny as a war droid and twice as tough.

I don't have to be a hero, he thought in silent wonder. All I have to do is pretend.

"Like I said, I'm just the sidekick here," he said carelessly. "My job is to make sure the real hero lives long enough to do his. That whole `needing to be a hero' thing has always been my greatest weakness."

Jacen stared at him, into him, through him, as though he knew him to his very core, and he nodded. "But you should know that it can also be your greatest strength. Give yourself permission to use that strength, Ganner. You'll need it."

This is what Vergere is trying to teach Jacen. To be who he is. Not to try to be what he thinks that a Jedi is, or what he thinks that a Jedi should be. This is why he's not a Jedi anymore. When Ganner becomes who he is, he achieves a union with the Force unlike any we've ever seen in Star Wars until Jacen matches his feat.

The Force thunders through him, and he thunders through the Force. Letting slip the bonds of control, leaving aside conscious thought, answering only the surge of his passion and his joy, he finds power undreamed of. He has become the battle.

But this raises the question: since Vergere is ostensibly teaching Jacen not to be a Jedi, does it therefore follow that her teachings to Jacen are antithetical to the Jedi way? This is where Mace Windu comes in, from his journal:

At the Temple, we teach that the only true mistake a Jedi ever makes is to fail to trust the Force. Jedi do not "figure things out" or "come up with a plan." Such actions are the opposite of what being a Jedi means. We let the Force flow through us, and ride its currents to peace and justice. Most of Jedi training involves learning to trust our instincts, our feelings, as opposed to our intellects. A Jedi must learn to "unthink" a situation, to "unact": to become an empty vessel for the Force to fill with wisdom and action. We feel the truth when we stop analyzing it. The Force acts through us when we surrender all effort. A Jedi does not decide. A Jedi trusts.

This recalls Qui-Gon Jinn's advice to Anakin in Episode I: "Feel. Don't think. Trust your instincts." Or Obi-Wan Kenobi's advice to Luke in Episode IV: "let go your conscious self and act on instinct."

When you break it down, this is essentially Daoism, every single quote, wei wu wei, effortless action. Acting from your own nature requires no effort; when you try to be what you're not, you're trying and putting effort into it, whereas when you be who you are, it comes natural, instinctive, you simply do. The New Jedi Order "canonized" Luke's training from Yoda, but Luke's training from Yoda was meant for Luke, and only Luke. Every Jedi was trying to be Jedi knight Luke Skywalker, and not themselves. Jacen was trying to be what he thought a Jedi should be. Ganner was trying to be what Luke taught him to be. They needed to be themselves to achieve their great destiny as Jedi.

And this is why the Jedi became boring as characters, because this archetypal Jedi took hold in the minds of the writers. Obi-Wan Kenobi is generally viewed as the ideal Jedi Knight (I'd personally argue that Qui-Gon Jinn is). The consequence is you get characters like this guy


paraphrasing Obi-Wan and uttering Jedi platitudes and that passes for what a Jedi is. Everything is a simulacrum with no thought into what's going on under the hood. What makes this particularly sad is that the New Jedi Order is completely faithful to the themes and ideas of the Star Wars trilogy as well as the then nascent prequel trilogy, and takes them and applies them in new and interesting ways. But since they're not simply parroting the same ideas with stock characters, and challenging erroneous conclusions about the films that had taken root, the series is viewed as being unfaithful. I'd take the New Jedi Order over pretty much anything else we got over the past thirty years.

 

i agree, that i would like to see more interesting jedi.

 

DigitalMessiah, good post! I do agree that Ganner is one of the best Jedi characters, basically for the reasons you stated. Basically any other Jedi we've gotten since has been "Do or do not," "Your destiny is on a different path," "Feel the Force around you," etc. And I mean, Qui-Gon did some of them too, but his were different (like you said, his "Feel, don't think" was one of them, along with "Don't center on your anxieties, keep your concentration on the here and now...not at the expense of the moment" etc.) but what's interesting about Qui-Gon's is that they're so often different from what the Jedi believe–the previous quote mentioned "not at the expense of the moment" is said in response to Obi-Wan's "Master Yoda said to be mindful of the future"–so Qui-Gon's basically contradicting Yoda.

I'd never thought about how all the NJO Jedi up to that point had been trying to be Luke Juniors. It's a good point, though. When you've got Corran Horn not knowing what to do at first when he can't lift a rock, or every one of the young Jedi doing blindfolded remote deflecting exercises (I mean, we saw that in the PT too, but whatever), you basically realize that for the Bantam era and NJO, all the authors had to go on were the training scenes from ANH and ESB. They had to write these new Jedi students in training scenes, but they didn't know how. So they all learned the exact same stuff Luke did.

And as bad as post-NJO stuff was, at least it showed some new training styles. LOTF shows that Jacen has been teaching Ben in an "on-the-job" method, taking him out to bust criminals even when he's fourteen years old. In LOTF: Tempest, Ben is shown training with Luke, and they're in this big training room with lots of woodsy props and Luke tells Ben to get him to activate his lightsaber. It's actually just a test of Ben's skills because Luke doesn't think Jacen has been training Ben properly, but it's still completely different from what we're used to. I don't know if it's so good or not, but at least it's different.

 

I think to some degree the prequel Jedi are supposed to be boring insofar as that they're a monastic order that doesn't really allow for nonconformity, so for Qui-Gon and Anakin to disobey really stands out. The problem from an OOU writing perspective is that the writers don't understand that. The setup for the order isn't conducive for differentiation of characterization since they're all raised identically from a young age with identical training and skill sets. The EU quickly set out to give different Jedi different abilities or personality traits but that didn't really bear out in the storytelling. Saessee Tiin is the Jedi ace but he's not even really a character.

I think the old order's rule about training age, along with midi-chlorian count, are all rules adopted out of expedience (keep in mind this is an EU centric interpretation as this thread is rooted in the EU). We see people like Car'das can learn Force techniques despite not being nominally "Force sensitive," thus showing that it's possible. Ostensibly the age requirement is to prevent what happened with Anakin: to preclude relationships that could become attachments. That itself is expedient insofar as that it's simply avoiding dealing with coping with relationships to prevent them from becoming attachments, by forbidding them altogether.

But in addition, by bringing in the Jedi as infants, it's makes training them en masse easier, because then they're all blank slates with standardized training, rather than training uniquely suited to the student.

All these rules and regulations, the Jedi dogma, were shortcuts to make the Jedi very similar to the clone army, instead of making each Jedi his or her individual person with their own training uniquely suited to them. I think this is intentional from a narrative perspective, but subsequently it was taken as gospel and infected the NJO. But the writers of the eponymous series realized these problems and overcoming them in the ways that they had already cropped up in the NJO was a part of the series.

And this is why Jacen's "discovery" was a "rediscovery," and why it was initially lost (granted, one might suppose Ganner rediscovered it first).

 

Agreed. I think part of the problem for both the prequels and the writers in the EU was that they were too afraid or were unable to step beyond the boundaries set by the original movies. There had to be references to the originals to make people happy, and it stinted the growth of the Jedi Order as a whole.

Another problem I had with the old Jedi Order were the Trials of Knighthood. Measuring something like the Force with tests and stepping blocks to Knighthood seems counter-productive to me. Not all the lessons mean the same thing to each person, and if the Jedi order has this standardized training, how will the lessons be learned properly? Obi-Wan argued Anakin endured a Trial of the Flesh when he lost his hand to Count Dooku, but how much did he really learn about pain and loss? He got a new hand, no problems. Yet it still met the requirements of the test, and he passed.

 

I've never really seen it that way. What he's doing is reminding Obi-Wan that Yoda saying "be mindful of the future" is not the same thing as "ignore the moment".

"Focus on what we're doing, dude."
"Yoda says I should be mindful of the future!"
"Yeah but that doesn't mean forgetting where you are and what you're doing. Git gud scrub."

 

I would love to hear Liam Neeson actually say that.

 

Yeah I kind of glossed over the quotes since my point there is that paraphrasing those platitudes passes for characterization for the experienced Jedi knight.

I always thought the whole "zomg qui-gon is a living force dude and the Jedi council are unifying force dudes" was one of the dumbest and most reductive things to come out of the EU. They're reducing newly introduced aspects of the Force to what are ostensibly competing philosophies but are really just labels to justify why qui-gon is at odds with the council in the film.

But I suppose it shouldn't surprise me given that the sides of the Force are similarly aspects and yet seemingly everyone conflates those with the Jedi and the Sith.