Fanclub Jacen Solo Fan Club: Forever in the Light

I tend to really like the ambiguity and nuance of Jacen's last actions in LOTF a lot actually, because they're not so much redemptive as the kind of neutral but human reaction that fits the character's good and evil personas - which was a bit rare as the character got written a bit more schizophrenically when LOTF's author's started kind of bumping up against each other.

I mean, on the one hand, Caedus warning Tenel Ka to protect Allana and seeming to deliberately refrain from a mutual kill with Jaina is somewhat selfless on a micro-level - it's putting their lives above petty revenge and vindictiveness on his part - but it's still somewhat selfish and self-serving on the macro-level - it's really only their personal connection to him that's making him treat them differently than anyone else.

Considering the idea was to do something different than Vader's redemption, it was a nice change-up that was genuinely a little heart-breaking.

Going full mystical in FOTJ and saying he was in Force hell was a bit much... but I kind of regarded the entirety of the mystical stuff in FOTJ a bit much.

To me, the only real kind of active survival he could have had would have been in permanent exile and isolation... similarly to what I thought Ben Solo could go through in a story where he wasn't the only new Skywalker character.

The Ulic Qel-Droma idea of a physical purgatory in the mundane universe always struck me as the best balanced punishment for a former dark sider.

 

Yes, actually, but I don’t know how that turned out.


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I think I'd say a similarity between Cyclops and Jacen is the commitment the creators had to making them the bad guys and getting punished, but the difference being that Jacen's fall and "damnation" had a bit more thought in justifying his fate, but less thought into motivating his fall, while Cyclops had more thought into his fall... but less thought into him earning his "damnation."

With Jacen, the way others end up treating him is more justified (though not necessarily enough), especially since you can kind of tell that one of the few areas of real coordination in LOTF was in making Caedus genuinely evil enough to earn the "combined Vader and Palpatine" idea they had which also made his death make more sense, but his initial decision to be evil is shaky and shifts from author to author. With Cyclops, his fateful decision to do a bad thing made sense... but the character is treated too unforgivingly.

A more interesting comparison to me is Caedus vs Kylo: Jacen is more sympathetic than Ben, his reaosns for falling are equally shaky or better than Ben's, and the commitment they had to following through on doing the only real subversion they could with Caedus made his death more acceptable, if still bitter, while the wishy-washy coddling Kylo got made his redemption feel completely unearned and made his death feel like a necessity to make sure the favoritism he experienced ended as well.

Like, Jacen is clearly a better character than Ben, so much it's kind of an insulting comparison to make, but Caedus is also a better villain than Kylo, yet gets treated more harshly, even though Kylo's arguably a bit worse as a person than Caedus: at least Caedus only pursued killing a relative for a specific, tangible goal, had to be engaged in battle to kill Mara, and still had a definitive soft-spot for his daughter he acted on, while Kylo's some idiot cold-bloodedly murdering his loving father for no reason other than being a fanatical nut-job and who reacts to his hesitation to kill his mother by trying to get someone else to do it.

 

My gut is that Caedus only cares about owning Tahiri, not about her well-being.

Comparing Darth Caedus to Kylo Ren is quite difficult for me because we’ve known Jacen for so much longer. Ben’s motivations seem a lot shallower than Jacen’s but Ben now has the since I was young Vader and Snoke have been barraging me with voices and torment and manipulating me.

Ben’s a broken child, teen and man, who was waiting for a single moment from Luke to validate everything Snoke ever told him. Like does that, and Ben’s transformation is complete.

I can’t decide what’s tragic; the man who falls because he has no choice, or the man who falls by choice. Ben vs Jacen.

 

Ben thought he had no choice.

It's what he said to Rey - that she couldn't go back now, just like him.

He thought Luke and all the Jedi were dead by his hand; how could he go to his mother and tell her he'd killed his uncle? Her brother?

 

Well they offered to deprogram Jacen, I recall.

Han and Leia made abundantly clear they disapproved of Jacen's actions in Bloodline. Han and Leia gave to his aid in Exile, even though he had tried to kill them recently... then Leia attempted to redeem him, even if it was a stalling tactic, in Fury.

 

I don't generally consider that to be a realistic response though.

Vader atones for twenty-four years of tyranny, murder and destruction by saving his son and killing the Emperor, giving his life in the process.

Ben atones for seven years of dark side behaviour, culminating in the greatest atrocity in the galaxy since Alderaan, and a year of chaos, devastation and horror as the Supreme Leader by... saving Rey from death. The killing of the Knights of Ren is almost incidental to his actions, because Rey didn't need saving from Palpatine like Luke did by Vader.

The heroes granting Ben unconditional forgiveness doesn't solve the problem of his behaviour, nor Vader's.

I don't see why it would work for Jacen either, and his decisions were more personally targeted at the cast, and in less than half a year he personally leads or causes the devastation of several worlds.

 

Comparatively, yes, Jacen did far less, but he did more to the cast directly, and the personal touch to atrocities at Kashyyyk and Fondor sees him particularly vilified.

Kylo Ren is still second fiddle to Snoke with the Hosnian Cataclysm, while he personally commands the devastation between the Battles of Crait and skirmishes on Kijimi.

Vader is entirely second fiddle to Sidious, but it's for a much longer time period than either grandson of his.

Similarly though, Luke commands the Dark Empire at the Battle of Mon Calamari... and Kyp with Carida...

It's more a question of how forgiving the galaxy and Skywalker-Solo clan can be...

... and after the Yuuzhan Vong War, that positive essence to the galaxy has been cut at quite hard. It's been replaced with fear, I would say, which drives most of the conflict in the Second Galactic Civil War.

 

When TFA came out, I actually really liked what I thought separated Jacen/Ben and Caedus/Kylo conceptually, and I thought that LFL had hit on an idea for an evil Skywalker grandson that could just work much better than Caedus had - I actually liked most of LOTF, but a lot of that was easily fixable, and still underwhelming and depressing as a Jacen fan.

So I figured the point of Kylo’s conflict and madness in the films would be to not try and make Ben like Jacen - either in being a lead protagonist or a fallen hero. The best way forward for Ben would be a pitiable wretch who was so damaged that he couldn’t support a trilogy as a protagonist yet - to make his fall be about Snoke denying him agency and brainwashing him so much that you could justify letting the guy who’d violated Rey’s mind, murdered Han, and maimed Finn survive after his redemption. Jacen, as a fallen hero archetype who they’d at least tried to make choose his own damnation, could be a villain protagonist, but had to bear responsibility for that choice, which meant that I didn’t think he could really have had much of a story after LOTF - even the “prisoner for life after being returning to the light side” fate that was a decent suggestion opposed to dying evil or pulling a Vader had a cap on it.

The flip side benefit was you could make Kylo a mass of brainwashed attack dog archetypes on a scale neither Caedus nor Vader had ever reached. Caedus, as part of being a fallen hero, worked best with the introspection and more esoteric pondering of his fall... but, as observed in LOTF, that required some nuance in how dangerous he could be towards his family, and made his fall feel like it kind of had to be permanent. If Kylo were treated as lacking his own will thanks to Snoke’s brainwashing, you could walk that line where he can be an absolutely loathsome and terrifying villain as an unstable maniac, on a different type of level than Caedus or Vader... but still have that pity button to smash and get him redeemed.

Caedus and Vader, even at their most erratic, tended to just be recklessly impulsive, but still rational and focused. Kylo, ranting, raving, toying with his prey in a purely sadistic manner and making self-destructive choices on Starkiller Base, offered a different kind of villainous threat to go with that could create different reactions int he audience.

Unfortunately, the other two Sequel Trilogy films happened.

Allston, Traviss, and Denning didn’t really gel as well as they should have in a lot of ways... but they had a pretty consistent grasp of Jacen/Caedus’s personality, all things considered, and how other character should react to him getting worse and worse. Where they struggles was in more in how the plot unfolded action-wise - Allston trying more sinister and straighter-forward type of Vader-feel, Denning a more Gordy and grungy way, and Traviss in a kind of automated politics and hijacked-by-her-own-characters way. But at least they knew what “voice” Caedus should have when all was said and done, and how he should be treated by others from book to book.

Abrams/Kasdan and Johnson, on the other hand, couldn’t agree on anything - neither the way the action should go, and especially not in the way Kylo/Ben’s personality should be shown or what role he should play, and unfortunately, LFL got in on that action. Ben Solo could not be the male lead, the attempt to use romance to tie Kylo to Rey was complete trash that didn’t benefit anyone, and all the potential of Kylo as a villain got dropped by those decisions as they tried to humanize the monster-side fo the character and praise him so Rey could fall for him.

Like, Anakin in the PT wound up becoming like a 7.5 - 8 out of 10 villain and protagonist, because when he did evil things, he was genuinely scary and functioned as a very effective villain but still interesting protagonist; I’d only argue that the heroic part of Anakin didn’t get realized at maximum until TCW.

But Kylo wound up as a 3.5 - 4 out of 10 villain, and a worst protagonist, like -1.5 out 10, because he wound up being a liability to his story because he was too inadequate to work as a protagonist and they wound up demoting or derailing everyone to else to try and make it worse, and traded out a decent Darth Vader Cheery Design for the Ren-Faire-by-way-of-Hot-Topic design while trying to make the the Star Wars equivalent of Nero a romantic lead.

Jacen/Caedus, for all his faults, was still a functional villain, about 6 -7 out of 10 as a villain, and about 7 out of 10 as a protagonist. Plenty of room for improvement in one area, but less so in another area.