Fanclub Jacen Solo Fan Club: Forever in the Light

To be fair that whole trickster goddess was only really in one book and against one particularly stiupid character. Its never an aspect of Jaina that comes up again later. I think at the time the authors or maybe just one author thought it was a cool idea. But it doesn´t really fit Jaina at all. She is as direct as it can get.

 

Interestingly the whole twin duel business does come up in Invincible. Despite not really being mentioned or significant in earlier LOTF or DNT, or even the last bit of the NJO. But ultimately and ironically the Vong did get a duel between Jaina and Jacen. I don't think it resulted in Jaina ascending to greatness though.

I doubt the writers had any sense of continuity between LOTF and the NJO with regards to these ideas, they just so happened to be in alignment.

 

Well the Vong value sacrifce and takeing pain. So I guess, in a way Jacen was the one coming out of his honored. Like Yun-Yuuzhan before him.

 

Viari Skywalker has an incredible 'essay' about Traitor and shadowmoths in the fanfiction section of the Boards, and I wanted to share her work here. They are, IMO, the best thoughts about Traitor since the prologue to Adahn's Only Right. Also, in a shameless bit of promotion for her work, I also urge all of you to read her stories...you'll be impressed. I've removed the 'quote' from the below for legibility, but all of the below are Vi's thoughts and are posted here with permission.



Okay, so... let me tell you all about shadowmoths and why I love them and think they're an amazing and versatile metaphor and think that Matthew Stover is an unexpected (or not so unexpected?) genius for creating them. And also why I keep stealing them for my own purposes. (Omigosh, I did not intend to hijack your comment in order to write a dang thesis, but apparently I had some thoughts. Feel free to skip past this enormous essay that you definitely did not ask for, and please forgive me for using this reply to indulge in some meta... )


First of all, the ringed moon shadowmoth is indeed part of the Legends canon, first appearing in Stover's Traitor. They live as larvae for years, storing up energy for their metamorphosis. Then they enter their cocoons, and when they finally emerge as fully grown shadowmoths, they have these wing flutes that allow them to “sing” to the moons. Shadowmoths’ lives are very short; they only live for one summer, and then it’s all over. But while they’re alive, they’re beautiful, gentle creatures whose only purpose is to sing to the night sky.

Now, in the beginning of Traitor, Jacen is a prisoner of the Yuuzhan Vong, and he's being held in their Embrace of Pain – a living torture organism, basically – and it's freaking horrific. (Stover is an amazing writer, but omigosh the paaaaaain.) Anyway, Vergere is there, and though she doesn't seem to be facilitating the torture, exactly, she's also not doing anything to prevent it. (One could argue that she couldn't stop it even if she tried, because they’re surrounded by the fanatical Vong, but like so many things about Vergere, it's ambiguous.) So one day, after Jacen has been hanging in the Embrace of Pain for a while and feeling totally hopeless and frustrated, Vergere tells him that she’s actually helping him by freeing him from the hope of being rescued. Jacen is, understandably, not impressed with Vergere’s idea of help, and he tells her as much. Vergere agrees that their problem is one of linguistics, so she tries another tack – she tells him the shadowmoth story. And it goes like this:

Once upon a time, when Vergere was young, she found a shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, fighting to get free of its cocoon. She could sense the desperate creature through the Force, and she also felt that the shadowmoth sensed her and was crying out to her for help. So she decided to use a utility knife to slice into the cocoon and allow the creature to go free.

At this point in the story, Jacen becomes very sad, because he’s already familiar with shadowmoths (having raised one of his own), and he already knows how this story ends. Because the shadowmoth needs to fight its way out of its cocoon; that’s the only way to fully develop its wings and wing flutes. If you “help” the shadowmoth by freeing it prematurely from its cocoon, you will cripple it, and it won’t be able to fly or sing. Jacen knew all of this, which was why – when he was caring for his own shadowmoth – he didn’t interfere with the process, and his shadowmoth eventually emerged as the beautiful creature it was always meant to be.

Vergere continues her story, telling Jacen how her shadowmoth was indeed crippled, and how she could feel its bitter envy throughout that summer as it listened to the other shadowmoths singing to the moons. And then, of course, the summer ended, and the shadowmoth died – a tragic creature robbed of its destiny because she helped it.

So then Jacen gets a little indignant, because that’s obviously not what help means either. Vergere says she saw a creature in pain and tried to ease that pain and fear – isn’t that what Jacen means by help? And he explains that she didn’t understand what was happening, to which Vergere replies:

“Neither did the shadowmoth. But tell me this, Jacen Solo: if I had understood what was happening—if I had known what the larva was, and what it must do, and what it must suffer, to become the glorious creature that it could become—what should I have done that you would call, in your Basic, help?”

Jacen’s answer to this question is virtually identical to the answer he gives in Metamorphosis: you could watch over the larva and protect it from predators and leave it alone to fight its own battle. And Vergere adds that you might also stop by from time to time to keep the suffering creature company and let it know it’s not alone and that someone cares… and that “its pain is in the service of its destiny.”

Well, at this point, Jacen realizes there’s more to this story than just a breakdown of linguistic differences. He’s pretty smart, after all. He’s begun to understand that Vergere isn’t talking about shadowmoth larvae at all – she’s talking about him. About the two of them, Jacen and Vergere. At this, Vergere tries to peace out, saying that it’s time for some more torture, but Jacen isn’t going to let it go. (He also realizes that shadowmoths are indigenous to Coruscant, so if Vergere came across one in her youth, that means she must have lived on Coruscant at one time, and omigosh what does that meeeean? Short answer? It means she was once a Jedi, but he doesn’t find that out until later. See how Stover made his shadowmoth story do double, even triple duty? It taught a lesson about pain and struggle, hinted at Vergere’s true intentions with Jacen, and clued Jacen and the reader into the fact Vergere might have once been a Jedi. Genius, I tell you.) Anyway, Vergere’s only answer to all of Jacen’s startling realizations is this: “Everything I tell you is a lie.”

All right, so that’s the shadowmoth story. But I said I was going to tell you why I think it’s an amazing and versatile metaphor, so I will try to do that now.

The first metaphor is obviously about transformation achieved through pain. Not all pain is torture. Athletes train until their muscles are sore, mothers endure the rigors of labor to bring forth new life, and how many people learn to ride a bike without getting a few scrapes and bruises? As Jacen realizes in the aftermath of Vergere’s storytime, “sometimes pain is the only bridge to where you want to go.” Pain isn’t pleasant, but sometimes it’s necessary and unavoidable on the way to achieving one’s goals.

The second metaphor concerns the relationship between two people: someone in pain, and someone else in a position to ease that pain. You might also say it’s about the relationship between a student and their teacher. One of the frustrating things about being a student is that you can’t always see the path ahead, and you don’t know why your teacher makes you learn or practice certain things. Sometimes it seems like you’re going in circles, not accomplishing anything at all. Sometimes doing the work is painful. Teachers, on the other hand, have usually already walked the path. They understand how all the lessons will add up to a greater whole, a greater truth; but they can’t always come out and explain that to their students, because doing so often deprives them of the lessons they’re trying to teach in the first place.

Now, there’s a whole lot of other stuff that happens in Traitor, but ultimately, Jacen achieves victory not by winning a fight or killing some people or doing crazy awesome Force stuff (although he does do those things throughout the story), but by making a friend (the World Brain) and accepting that all things (including the Yuuzhan Vong) are part of the Force and the universe whether the Jedi can sense them or not. And by the time you get to the end of the NJO as a whole, Jacen has become an enlightened hero who defeats the evil Vong overlord by reaching a brief but incredible state of perfect oneness with the Force. Despite everything he has suffered, Jacen comes out better on the other side. He becomes something beautiful and glorious.

 

Thank you, SiouxFan, that's some serious praise right there, though I'm inclined to think Adahn did it far better than I have. (Full disclosure: I have not yet read anything much beyond the foreward and prologue of Only Right - which I came across about a year ago - but I deeply related to what was written there, and I fully intend to read the whole story once I've finished with my own man-eating epic.)

I do feel compelled to provide some context for anyone who hasn't read my full essay, and who might be surprised to click on one of my fics and find that I'm writing a Jacen who is definitely dark:

The above essay was written as part of my response to a comment on my story, Metamorphosis, which takes place in an alternate universe that spun off very early on in LotF. I ignore most of what came after Tempest (and sometimes a good deal of what came before Tempest, if I'm being honest), and since I pretty much noped out of the EU after Revelation, I completely ignore that fact that FotJ (or any of the new characters introduced in it) exists. The AU world I've created is very much a product of where I was in 2007 when I first started imagining it, and also a reaction to the events that unfolded in the novels from 2006-2008, most of which I very much disagreed with. But while the world I'm writing in is an old one for me, most of the stories I've been telling in it are new, and are in some ways a direct result of my more recent attempts to figure out who I actually thought Jacen Solo was, independent of what the post-NJO books or the fans or any discussion threads or fanfics told me he was or should be.

Imagine my surprise when, after reading through Traitor about a year-and-a-half ago (for the first time since 2005) I realized that I related to and cared deeply about Jacen - a character I had never particularly connected to before - and I felt incredibly heartsick over the injustice done to him in the profic, even more than I had felt a decade ago.

The stories I'm writing are set in a 'verse where Jacen falls, and falls hard. I've tried to merge the story I began over ten years ago with the one I want to tell now. Sometimes I feel that I've succeeded, and sometimes I am frustrated, thinking of how much better it would be if I could start from the ground up, unmired by DN and LotF. But ultimately, I love my dark and twisty little universe, and I love the Jacen who exists in that universe, dark and deluded and broken as he is. I have tried to write him with the depth he deserves, and as the competent fallen hero I believe he could have been, had the pros approached his fall with more nuance.

I won't bog down this thread any more, but I did want to explain myself a little. That's really why I wrote the essay in the first place, to explain the significance of shadowmoths to someone who was unfamiliar with them, and to try to explain their significance in my own stories. Jacen is not the central character in most of my fics; in fact, most of them have ended up focusing on Allana and a couple of original Sith characters. But similar to the way that Anakin Skywalker underlies so much of my understanding and writing of the OT and sometimes even the NJO characters, so too does my understanding of Jacen continue to drive much of how I write his daughter and these other characters who were impacted by him.

Thank you for allowing me to share some of my own thoughts here, and if you do happen to pop in to one of my story threads, please don't hesitate to say hi! As you can see, I love discussing characters and storytelling, and despite what I've done to him in my own work, I do love Jacen Solo.

 

I have read the foreward and prologue more times than I can count...I went there often when I was re-reading LotF and posting my thoughts on the series here. LotF would just beat me down, and I needed to read the thoughts of someone else who believed as I do....that Jacen deserved much better. Your 'essay' of shadowmoths re-states, in a most eloquent fashion, the reason that all of us on this thread still (perhaps pathetically) cling to a fictional character who has been for dead over a decade.

I really do believe that age impacts whether or not you like Stover's books in general, and Traitor in particular. As we age, we learn that there are very few concrete answers in life....most of it is ambiguous at best and contradictory at worst. I am actually glad that I was in my early 30s when this book came out...I never had to 'grow' into it.

 

I have always known about Jacen Solo, being a Mara Jade fan. I only recently began to read about Jacen/ Caedus, and it has developed into fandom.

Does anyone know what books he travels the galaxy and eventually gets the vision in Astra, which has profound effect on him?

 

Much to our chagrin(as Jacen fans) these visions and events that are so important in LOTF and FOTJ occur off screen.

Only Right is a blessing. I don't say that lightly. It is the best SW fanfic, probably the best fanfic period I have ever read.