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

Oh, for the love of.... Clarify then!

Details, clear intent, caveats - all of these will help guide the thread away from blind tangents, but don't try and stop it evolving either, you created it sure but threads go beyond their maker's intent more often than not.

 

It seemed implicit to me that Revansfan was referring to discussion in this thread.

 

Oh come on, you know better than that - this is teh net!

 

I'm lazy and haven't read or written anything to advance this discussion, so enjoy this instead

 

not true. i do too. But that does not mean that i see what you see.

 

Eventually, even stars burn out.

Edit: BTW, at this point I think I've reached like 99.999% apathy so if people want more they should just make this a Q&A or something or otherwise serve as a catalyst for me to write something. Revanfan1

 

Don't give up! I loved your posts.

Edit: if you go to Vector Prime and try to tie that in; I even try to contribute.

 

Though not 100% applying to the topic at hand, I'd love to see some of your musings on Shatterpoint. I don't know if I've really seen you touch upon the themes brought in by Stover for that work. How would you compare Jacen's Hero's Journey in Traitor to Windu's story of disillusionment in war, of what it means to be a "peacekeeper" in the role of soldier?

 

I think Shadows of Mindor is a better comparison to Traitor than Shatterpoint in terms of character growth, since Luke and Jacen both come to the same realization and react to it differently, though in Shadows of Mindor Stover's hands were tied because he had to pass the ball to Dark Empire to continue the idea.

I mean, Mace Windu sort of deals with self-doubt at the start of the novel with regard to Dooku being the shatterpoint in the arena and his choice to save a few to the detriment of many -- same choice that Yoda makes in his duel with Dooku, really -- which is contrary to what Yoda and Obi-Wan say to each other in Stover's Episode III novel, that they'd sacrifice each other to end the war one day sooner. Well, Mace and Yoda failed at that on Geonosis. But Mace decides at the end of the novel that if Anakin is the Chosen One then by saving him he probably saved even more lives than if he dealt with Dooku and sacrificed Anakin in order to do so.

Stover does have Mace more or less repeat what Vergere says about the Force in Traitor but in a much more accessible manner:

A Jedi's connection to the Force amplifies everything about us: it invests our smallest actions with the greatest conceivable weight. It makes us more of whatever we already are. If we are calm, it gives us serenity. If we are angry, it fills us with the rage of a god. Anger is a trap. You might think of it as a narcotic, not unlike glitterstim. Even the slightest taste can leave you with an appetite that never fades.​

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This is why we Jedi must strive always to build peace within ourselves: what is within will be reflected by what is without. The Force is One. We are part of the Force; it will always be, at least partially, whatever we are.​

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This really explains everything about Vergere's take on the Force in two paragraphs, and it really explains her line:

"The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart."​

And it speaks to one of the themes of Traitor and the Star Wars saga as a whole, which is why this thread was created: this idea of interconnectedness, of everything being bound together by the Force. The Force is one. Everything influences everything else because everything is connected through the Force -- Traitor takes this and elaborates on it with the concept of interdependent origination:

In his most secret center, that gap in his being that once fed him pain, he offers an embrace. Into the hollow in his center, he pours compassion. Absolute empathy. Perfect understanding.​

He accepts the pain he caused the dhuryam with his betrayal; he shares with the dhuryam the pain that betrayal had caused him.​

He shares with the dhuryam all his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss... and the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber's blade.​

He shares how much he loves it all: for all these things are all one thing: pain and joy, loss and reunion, life and death. To love any is to love all, for none can exist without every other.​

The Universe.​

The Force.​

All is one.​

The Yuuzhan Vong and the species of the New Republic.​

Jacen and the World Brain.​

When I betrayed you, I betrayed myself. When I killed your siblings, I killed pieces of myself. You may kill me, but I will live on in you. ​

We are One.​

And Jacen cannot tell if those words come from him to the World Brain, or from the World Brain to him, for Jacen and the World Brain are only different faces of the same thing. Call it the Universe, or the Force, or Existence: those are only words.​

They are half truths. Less.​

They are lies.​

The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.​

​

Even the Yuuzhan Vong, who to the Jedi appear to be outside the Force, are inextricably linked to the Jedi, the galaxy, and the Force.

Speaking of Jacen's hero's journey, or rather his katabasis as Traitor is, and its comparison to Shadows of Mindor, you might also reasonably compare it to Anakin's development in Stover's Revenge of the Sith. Just superficially, there seems to be something rather similar between the shadow worm and the dead star dragon...

 

I'd been hoping this thread would eventually reach this point (back when it was still on its rails), since I was interested in this particular comparison and how it leads/ties into DE.

 

As I previously mentioned, Traitor is Jacen's katabasis on his hero's journey: his descent into the underworld to acquire something he will need to complete his quest. In this case, Jacen's prize is self-knowledge, "who is Jacen Solo?" His literal answer at the end is student, and teacher, for the two are the same, because one can't exist without the other. They're interdependent, just like everything else. But on a more abstract level, I'd say the answer we got as readers is given in the above quoted passage: Jacen is defined by his "compassion. Absolute empathy. Perfect understanding." And it's these traits that allow him to successfully conclude the Yuuzhan Vong War and integrate the Yuuzhan Vong into the Star Wars galaxy in a peaceful, rather than violent, manner at the conclusion of his hero's journey, both through his influence on Sekot as a teacher (and student) and at his moment of apotheosis in which he's able to completely and utterly surrender will.

With the films I think the hero's journey is more muddled and it sort of intrudes through visual metaphors, but for Luke the most narratively driven example is when he descends into the evil cave on Dagobah and faces his doppelganger. I've already spoken about how Vader (and thus, Anakin) and Luke are doppelgangers, two sides of the same coin -- Luke's evil potential is to become Vader, should he give into his darkness, and Vader represents a force for him to project his own inner darkness outward while neglecting it in himself. That's what the scene means when he beheads Vader to reveal his own face, in addition to the more mundane symbolism of his parentage. But I'd say the knowledge he acquires in this case is that of his parentage, and the two sequences from The Empire Strikes Back tie together with Luke finally realizing that he has become his father, or could become him, when he cuts off his hand and sees that it's robotic just like his.

I'd say that Anakin's katabasis is the Mortis trilogy, but I won't get into that for now...

The parallels between Revenge of the Sith (particularly Stover's adaptation), Dark Empire, and Traitor are that in each story, three successive generations face their darker halves, and we see how they respond to it. I don't think Luke really faces his darker half in Shadows of Mindor so much as realizes the core nastiness that is reality -- as exemplified in The Dark video above. Although even Shadows of Mindor says that this change occurred in The Empire Strikes Back, so really Shadows of Mindor is a stepping stone from The Empire Strikes Back to Dark Empire:

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We just got beat, he thought. They outplanned us. Suckered us in. And we went for it headfirst because we thought we were invincible. We thought the good guys always win.​

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Of all of them, Luke was the only one who had never suffered under that delusion. Well: not never. Han had told him once that something in Luke had changed after Bespin. Somehow Luke understood -- in a way that Lando never had, that Han and Leia and Chewbacca had simply never grasped -- just how dark a place the universe really was.​

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Lando guessed that was where Luke got his humility. His kindness. His gentle faith that people could change for the better. That must have been why he rarely smiled, and almost never made jokes. Because that goodness was all he really had. It was his lifeline. The rope to which he clung, dangling above the abyss.​

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I don't feel like quoting a huge passage, but there's a scene when he's trying to rescue Leia when he ponders on the Dark and the dark side, the non-existence of a "light side," and thinks that the Force's light doesn't shine on him, but through him. Although curious that Luke comes to the same realization about the dark side here in Shadows of Mindor, what, six months after Endor, that he later comes to in Crucible:

Everything in the universe is born of dying stars. Every element is created in the fusion furnace of stellar cores. Every atom that exists was once part of some long-vanished star -- and that star was part of others before it, an unbroken chain of ancestry back to the single cosmic fireball that had been the birth of the universe.​

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It was the death of stars that gives the universe life.​

Derp.

More importantly:

Here we are, in the Dark, he thought. And it's not empty. It's not meaningless. Not with us all here. ​

It's beautiful.​

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In Dark Empire, Luke is succumbing to his arrogance and self-importance -- only he can save the galaxy, and so he has to feign apprenticeship to Palpatine in order to sabotage the Imperial war effort -- the New Republic is on the ropes and practically speaking the Rebel Alliance again -- as well as find a practical way to kill Palpatine while precluding his resurrection, and more abstractly find some sort of solution to the dark side as an ontological problem through learning about it from Palpatine. He also has a personal motive of wishing to understand why his father chose the dark side, and I think he realizes that it's not so much a choice as something that you slip into with ostensibly good intentions, which is pretty much what is happening to Luke here. And he almost becomes his father by taking this burden on himself and shutting out Leia when she's trying to help him, and when he fails in his effort to destroy all the Emperor's clones and is defeated in combat by the young and reinvigorated Palpatine, his last defense against the Dark, this existential argument against the Dark, that rope above the abyss, is cast aside as he gives into despair because he was the last hope for the galaxy. Except he wasn't.

When confronted with the same nastiness to the world as Luke, Jacen becomes despondent and embraces his dark side:

All he wanted was a quiet place to die. Was that too much to ask? Hadn't he earned that? Why did everything have to be so hideous, so gruesome, so just plain rotten all the time? Couldn't he even die in peace?​

Did the whole universe hate him?​

There's only one answer when the universe hates you, whispered the shadow worm from the base of his skull.​

Hate it back.​

So he did.​

It was easy.​

He hated the universe. Hated everything about it: all the pointless suffering and empty death and all the stupid mindless mechanical useless laws and all the squirming blood-smeared ignorant life, hated the stony flesh under his feet and the air that he breathed, hated himself, hated even the hate he felt and suddenly he wasn't tired anymore, he wasn't confused anymore, everything was simple, everything was easy, everything made sense because hate was everything and everything was hate, and he didn't want to die anymore.​

All he wanted was to hurt someone.​

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This is followed up with the sequence in which he confesses to "anakin" his crime -- rather than killing the people taking shelter in the beast, he convinced the beast to expel them all, and refuse to take them into its stomach again.

your dark side ain't all that dark, big brother.​

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And then,

Jacen was surprised by life.​

The teeth of the World Brain had not closed upon him. Its tentacles had not ripped the flesh from his bones. He had not drowned in the slime pool, asphyxiating on phosphorescent goo. No Yuuzhan Vong warriors swarmed around him to drag him from the slime and carve the life from him with amphistaffs.​

Instead, a bubble of air had formed around him, and tentacles had cradled him like a sleeping child, and lips had closed over sword-edged teeth to touch him with a kiss.​

Because he was the World Brain, and the World Brain was him, and each was everything else, and Jacen had learned that one can meet the Universe and all its irrational pain -- which means meeting oneself -- with fear, or with hatred, or with despair.​

Or one can choose to meet it with love.​

Jacen had chosen.​

But still, he was astonished to discover that the Universe could love him back.​

​

Jacen had chosen.

 

It's...so beautiful.

/cryingingoodway

 

Schweeeeet.

Thanks for typing all that up. Much appreciation.

(I'm glad to see that my comprehension of DE wasn't as far off the mark as I thought. I guess the only lingering confusion I have is how Luke managed to nosedive from humility to stupidity arrogance in just over half a decade. I got too complacent from his Fabulous Character Development. )

 

I think that initially, Luke's humility and goodness is somewhat of an affectation: they're not inherent qualities in him -- absent entirely before Return of the Jedi. They're what he strives to be, and eventually becomes. Luke's EU characterization is pretty post hoc and choppy (I think his arc works pretty well between TESB, ROTJ, SOM, and DE though), but if we "buy into" the notion of continuity of character, I'd say that even by Black Fleet he still struggles with it which is why he has this crisis where he thinks maybe he needs to become an anchorite.

 

Right, I've heard that assessment before, re: the development of his later traits that are not intrinsic to him. So they basically slip away, leading to all sorts of problems. Gotcha (I hope). And amen on the unhelpful inconsistency of EU characterization.

 

Another answer for you is that Luke has a major weakness of being protective, becoming a Jedi can be seen as part of that, for their role is focused, to a large degree, around that too. So in response to the return of Sidious and the World Devastators, he decides to do that inside job on the dark side - an inside job that can do naught but fail because it always does. I think its notable the films show Sidious spending so much time and effort to isolate Anakin, because without that the dark side allure collapses. In DE, Sidious still pursues the isolation angle despite knowing Luke isn't all that caught by lures of power, it's all about destroying the devastators and protecting the galaxy, even at the cost of Luke's self and soul.

 

Beautiful write-ups, DM. You truly have a gift in taking complicated, sometimes ambiguous themes within Star Wars and distilling them in a manner that anyone and everyone can understand them. And these distillations are, more often than not, quite eloquent on their own.

 

It's not like Denning: doesn't agree with Stover about some things.

In the Inferno round-robin interview:

"I've always felt that when Yoda taught Luke about the light and dark sides, he was talking about the light and dark sides without ourselves, not in the Force itself."

 

Thanks for adding that. Reminds me of that passage from The Test of Wills about Luke's motivation to study and conquer the Dark Side being righteousness rather than power, greed, etc.

 

Um, in the proper context of that quote, Denning is saying that is what he "thought" but he "discovered" he was wrong while writing LOTF, just like he ""realized" that Vergere was a Sith. Of course, when you factor in his Crucible blog, it is pretty apparent that he was being completely disingenuous here.

The larger problem is that Luke apparently forgot something he realized over forty years prior, but I suppose that's par for the course since Jacen "forgot" his core trait of empathy and Luke "forgot" the boon of his hero's journey, redemption, in LOTF.

 

beautiful job, DM, and i appreciate what you said about Luke too

 

I couldn't see anything in that section that suggested he was saying, "Now, of course, I know I'm wrong."

 

It is implicit in the question he is answering:

"How has your understanding of the light and dark sides of the Force changed in the course of writing these books?"

He "felt," past tense. After writing LOTF, he knows better! And like I said, he inadvertently admits to being disingenuous here in his Crucible blog.

 

What exactly did he say in his Crucible blog?

 

"Still, I don’t buy much of what is implied about the Force in Traitor. I believe that the Force is more of a mythic element than a psychological one, that its relevance is more collective than personal. Apparently, two Star Wars authors have different views of the Force. Imagine that."