Redirecting the Flow - Jacen, the Force, and the ability to change canon...

You can blame Onderon1. I was just suggesting that the White Current illusion trick was a form of flow-walking that "diverted" one possible flow and wrapped its appearance around another... and he saw what that really meant.

The Flow is a way of perceiving the Force - another way of looking at the same thing. The exact mechanisms by which Flow-walkers travel are not clear, but what needs to be emphaised is that they are travelling in, and interacting with, the vastness of the Force - and thus, logically, with reality itself.

And if Flow-walking is reaching out through, into the Force, Jacen Solo is not dealing with mere illusions: this is no less an interaction with reality than levitation, or Force choke, or Force lightning. The difference is that it offers the potential for "distant" interaction across spacetime, for moving things in ways beyond comprehension.

It's like the Fallanassi illusion technique... only the changes it makes are (at least for the dark and unwary, those who cross the line) no illusions.

And THAT is why Akanah was so scared of Jacen Solo.

This is a VERY dangerous power indeed.

Discuss.

 

I agree it's dangerous, but it hasn't been used much. Jacen used it in DNT and for Tahiri, but not much overall. Ben won't use it, so it's kind of a wasted idea.

 

Can anyone clarify for me what exactly Flow-Walking allows for in terms of actual changes? From what I had heard/read Troy Denning say, I believe it was at the Comic Con last year but I could be mistaken, originally it allowed for actual time travel and you could change the past, thus allowing for Anakin Solo to be resurrected at the end of Legacy of the Force, correct? But then I guess they realized the ramifications of resurrecting a dead character, and now Flow-Walking doesn't actually change the past, but just the perception of the past?

I always thought that didn't really make much sense, and seemed like a hasty retcon to try to close Pandora's box after opening it when Flow-Walking was introduced in the DNT. I thought DNT made it clear that Jacen's Flow-Walking was sort of a causality nightmare in the sense that Jacen's presence when the Tachyon Flyer crashed was what gave Raynar Thul the strength to pull Lomi Plo and Welk from the wreckage, thus inadvertently leading to the mess?

That wouldn't work under the current definition of merely changing the perception of the past, because in this case, they wouldn't have survived without Jacen's presence, and Jacen wouldn't have been present unless they survived.

Am I mistaken about this?

 

The definition given is that it is impossible to change the past. I don't know what Troy Denning said at ComicCon, but it makes sense that it was a retcon to avoid a Pandora's Box situation. I would've hated it if dead characters started being resurrected all over the place.

I believe there was an example given (Jacen to Tahiri maybe?) that it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. There's a chance that you may be seen in the past by people, but as it spreads out and the ripple's subside, and everything is corrected. Therefore, it is impossible to change the past as it will always right itself. So, yes you were right in that regard. I, unfortunately, haven't read much of the DNT (my libraries don't have the first or second ones), so I don't know what ramifications this has on the Tachyon Flyer situation, if any.

 

Did you just tell me that Jacen DID change the past, and created a paralell alternate universe timeline in which Anakin Solo never died? Kinda LOST Season 6? Or was that all my mind?

So all he saw, all he visionsearched, all he flowwalked DID HAPPEN... just not in his timeline. Hmm... *evil grin* I like it

 

Treborani: actually, now you mention it, Ben can use it. That might be fun.

Barringer: it's very ambiguous; Jacen seems to believe that Flow-walking is only travelling in memory, as if the Force is a holoprojector and the flow is the holo, but my suspicion is that, as the Force is involved, then it has to be an interaction with reality ("There is no holo."); a restrained Flow-walker might be able to "experiment" with changes that have no real effect, a little like White Current illusions, but it seems inevitable that a Flow-walker with sufficient willpower (i.e. dark or determined) can change reality, for the simple reason that it's the Force he's dealing with. It gets easier, I think, if you use conventional "Force" terminology, and see it as a scarier, more dangerous power than it seems...

Ceiran: no, I'm not sure exactly what the effects have been...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I keep wondering whether this thread is the reason we never got to see a description of what flow-walking does from the horse's, erm, Aing-Tii's mouth, as it were, in Omen, i.e. because it's unclear whether Jacen was a reliable source or not, did they just deliberately dodge the question?

...or was dodging the question part of the plot, and that Ben will later on in the series provide a fuller explanation of "And here's what I learnt earlier" when it comes to tying up the similarities between the mind and flow-walkers? (What with how beyond shadows basically seems to be "the flow" given the number of flowing water metaphors in Abyss.)

So I'm still hoping the lack of description in Omen (which people complained quite a bit about) was actually intentional to keep readers in the dark until later on, and not just because Golden wasn't sure how to go about it and steered clear. But who knows. I kept hoping during Abyss for Ben to come out with: "Er, dad, I already know how to do this."

 

about the Force illusion trick again... so to speak one wraps oneself in another paralell reality where one is NOT in this very place and thus the place looks empty? I wonder if one then appears in the paralell reality without realizing it lol

The "Making oneself small" technique of dissapearing might be another use of that.

And I also have to think about the grand Falanassi illusions we've seen like hiding the J't'plan temple in a ruin illusion or the space dragons that attacked. Did those have physical effects? or just scare the poor Imperials? And the temple ruin illusion.. if you walk through it it is gone, right? How about birds or other stuff passing through the area?

and last but not least... Sith Alchemy of Aleema... she uses Sith Alchemy induced Force illusions to make swordblades come alive as snakes strangling the victim, people be eaten by their own floor and other stuff. Same technique Darth Zannah learned and mastered. Thus: Is it all illusion or is there a physical effect to the illusion? like can the illusion push you around? the death seems to scientifically be brain caused in most of those cases, though wouldn't a swordblade turned snake fast loose credibility if it bites with no effect when you wave your arm through it in panic? how sophesticated are those illusions to make sense and work, letting people feel pain, not only see them, let them feel, smell, touch them etc. as if it all were real.

So.. the point.. is this still illusion or the point where illusion turns into summoning some fantasy into reality for a given time.. or summoning it from... elsewhere (Otherspace? Lol)

food for thought

 

Zor: well, it's unclear whether they were being unclear, and they've dodged the question of whether they were just dodging the question - and if that's not deliberate, it's certainly appropriate!

And, yes, lots of water metaphors, which also reflect the White Current...

Ceiran: my personal view is that what Flow-walking allows is simply mobility in space and time - if Jacen wants to watch UnuThul crawl away from the Crash, he can do that, but the only effects he can have once there are those of his existing physical attributes and Force skills; the Fallanassi illusion effects work in reverse, bringing an image from somewhere, either "reflecting" across space (e.g. the duplicate ships at N'zoth), or from something like an alternative timeline (e.g. the prisoners aboard the Yevethan ships)...

Fallanassi illusions are clearly interactive (none of the people Han talked to aboard the Intimidator were real except Enara, and he only smoked her because he's a better liar than she is, and similarly the Peace Brigade spent days hammering Yavin 4 with sensors and couldn't see the Jedi Academy)...

The question here is whether a "dark Fallanassi" would have the ability to simply substitute the reality of one timeline over another (which is the same as a flow-walker changing events, only with the instigator remaining in the present) - how "real" can the illusion become?

As it's ultimately about the Force, I suspect that it's disturbingly easy for a very-strong-willed character (e.g. Ves)... but nonetheless a very dangerous and disturbing ability...

This IS different than most Sith "illusions", which either involve mind-trick hallucinations, or else the animation of matter...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

That's a lot of un-clarity right there.

 

Flow walking (backwards) appears to only alter memories, and in such a way that they "ping" into people's heads at the point in time from which the flow walking occured, which allows people to detect when flow walking has occured.

Raynar is probably confused about what's real and what's not because he has a million and one voices in his head already. Tekli, on the other hand (if we are to believe Jacen's internal monologue), would have - in 40 ABY - suddenly had this intrusive new memory of seeing Jacen and Tahiri back in Whatever ABY that he was very aware he didn't have previously.

It's all a bit of a mess thanks to Inferno, really. It worked perfectly well in DNT when it was portrayed as 'actual' time travel that adhered to the predestination paradox. Nevermind.

Of course, maybe a particularly adept practitioner could circumvent the "pinging" issue. If that were possible, flow walking would become a very, very effective means by which to fake one's own death... or to fake the death of someone you wanted alive but out of the picture.

Chaos. Someone even could go from being one of the most well known, famous and living heroes in the galaxy to having been "dead" for twenty years.

 

Karking flow walking...

It seems that flow walking is still a mess.

 

I see flow-walking as a river of sorts. Time is river that the flow-walker can swim along, either swim back or swim ahead, visit the past, or swim ahead to the future. However, the river's path is not always determined, and if you swim ahead, you may find yourself seeing a future that will not happen, and that the river has gone along a different path than what you see.

As for the changes, I accept what was said in Invincible, that a single Force-user can try to alter the flow, try to change the past, but their effort is a mere pebble in a great river. A single Force-user, no matter how talented, cannot truly change the past. But, I do believe that while a pebble cannot change the direction of the flow, a great boulder can. Perhaps by combining the powers of thousands of Force-sensitives, the past can be changed, you can alter one event in the past, and thus change the timeline. However to do so would be very dangerous, and could risk doing sever damage to the time-space continuum.

As for the future, it's like what Luke said in Omen. A skilled Force-sensitive can peer ahead into the future, see what may occur, and then initiate actions in the present that can either ensure that future or prevent it from coming about. But the future is always in motion, the future you see may be the one that will occur, or it may just be one of many pathways. As we see in TJK, Jacen is able to fix Leia's destiny, he reaches out across time, into the future,he speaks to Leia.

In his present, he reaches into the future, when Leia will be at the Tachyon Flier, and speaks to her. Thus, he has fixed the future, now Leia is destined to visit the Flier, so that Jacen can speak to her, as he has already done so, in the past. As for any changes a flow-walker may try to make in the past, it's like a Word file, you can do whatever you want to it, but when you close it, no changes are saved.

So you can go back to the past, and say, kill Anakin when he's about to kill Mace in Palpatine's office. This causes the timeline to change, but it's all in your head, even as you're changing the past, killing Anakin, in your present, nothing has changed, it's like an interactive hologram, you can see what would happen if a past event had ocurred differently, but you can't make that alternate timeline a reality. Confused ?, yeah, I was too for a while, but I think that this explanation sort of makes sense. Any thoughts?

Oh by the way, Palpatine had an incredible talent for seeing the future, is it possible that at some point he learned flow-walking from the Aing-Tii.

 

So...basically it's impossible to change the past and all this does is allow the authors to tie together events and give characters knowledge of things that they normally couldn't. (See Jacen learning about Anakin by Flow-walking in the Temple)

 

Except we saw flow walking being used to change the actual course of events in the Joiner King.

 

Well, that's what I thought. It was a causal loop, similar to the plot to The Terminator. I suppose Invincible tried to retcon it away, simply because Denning already opened Pandora's Box, and suddenly we're presented with the possibility of restoring Anakin Solo to life and we need a plausible reason why this wasn't done.

Personally, I think it would have been better just to explain it as both Jacen realizing that erasing history like he would be doing by saving Anakin is unpredictable and dangerous, and then when he becomes Darth Caedus, he no longer cares to restore his dead brother to life, and doing so would possibly strip him of his status as a Sith Lord. As it stands, I guess if you chose to, you could believe that Jacen was lying to Tahiri, because if he did restore Anakin to life, he would probably lose her cooperation as she would be more loyal to Anakin than to him. But I suppose that wouldn't explain Ben's inability to save Jacen with it.

 

Maybe changing the future is different than changing in past. The past is fixed, but the future isn't. You can't change the past with flow walking but you can alter the future.

 

Does that mean that someone in the KOTOR era could change the events of The Empire Strikes Back, then?

 

LOST SEASON 5 + 6 if you know what I mean

 

nice thoughts but I heavily disagree here.

1. If talking the predictability of the future, you walk into your own trap here. Because only because a future is more likely to occur does not mean it will occure. You cannot say that certain things make one future more likely than any other. Statistic as a science does disagree here. It might seem like that in retrospective but it is not like that. All chances have the same value and same possbility of coming true.

2. You are mixing destiny and free will here in that you talk about future converging yet still say the future is not predestined. Decide please because you mix arguments here where it suits you and logically that does not work.

3. What value and thus possibility of coming true we apply to certain future paths depends on our point of view. Do we have hope? do we despair and see things worse than they are? like your death star example, anything goes, yet you think it'll always happen that it will be completed etc. only because it did in retrospective does not mean it'll always. The trap here is we look at the past and analyse it and use the results for future prediction. while a nice try it does not really work like that, not in most cases (maybe in some).

here my example : how many TFNers try to predict what del rey does next with our characters and were wrong more often than right?

 

Yes, that was my point.

Uli: Tekli's a girl.

This. Have a Golden Ewok?!

I do, however, disagree (in detail). A well-placed pebble can start a rockfall, and "size matters not". Ben shouldn't teach Ves Khai how to flow-walk, because her Celestial-class Sith willpower might be able to do a lot to rearrange stuff...

On the question of what happened in The Joiner King, it's deliberately unclear in the novel, since UnuThul doesn't actually appear until after Jacen travels back. Whether there's a causal loop, or whether Jacen is defining (or changing) things that haven't been "fixed" on the characters' own paths yet, really isn't clear...

However....

In outline, flow-walking is something the Jedi do every time they deflect a blaster-bolt with a well-placed lightsaber. It's merely an application of sensitivity (or will) to position one thing to stop another...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Sinre

You're right, it does make more sense for Jacen to have reached ahead and seen a possible future, in which Leia visits the Flier. Since he sees her and assumes that she too will want to find Jaina, he tells her where to go. But he is speaking to a fragment of the future, Leia might not end up going to the Flier, but if she does, then she will be spoken to by Jacen. COnfusing, but it does make more sense than fixing the future to the point where Leia is destined to visit the Flier and encounter Jacen in a vision because it has already happened. Fixing the future would mean that she would be destined to go to that spot and it is completely inevitable, which is hard to believe.

McEwok

A Golden Ewok, you're too kind. And yes, I do agree with you, I think that it would take a monumental exertion in the Force to alter a monumental event. Like the example I gave before, to stop Anakin from killing Mace, it would take hundreds, if not thousands of Force-users working together. But, to alter a small event is not beyond the power of a single, powerful Force-user.

 

I thought that, too, about Lightsaberfight precognition good catch

now to throw a hydrospanner into the wheels: Can we be sure how often Jacen Solo flowwalked really? Offscreen, I mean.

Timeline 1: Jacen gets no warning about Dark Man, Dark Man happens, Jacen flowwalks to warn himself in a vision
Timeline 2: Jacen gets warning about Dark Man, does not join Sith, Dark Man happens, people die, etc. Jacen flowwalks
Timeline 3: Jacen gets warning about Dark Man, does join Sith, becomes Dark Man, survives Invincible and flowwalks to ensure nobody can prevent his rise through flowwalking (like the Aing Ti might try) and appears to Lumiya.
Timeline 4: Jacen gets warning about Dark Man, does join the Sith thx to Lumiya this time, does see his error when it is too late and he has gotten Luke and family killed. Jacen returns to light or grey and flowwalks back to prevent this from happening. He flowwalks to a time where he became the Dark Man to prevent others from becoming him and then alters his memory to think flowwalking does not work.
Timeline 5: Jacen gets warning, turns Sith, forgets about flowwalking works and falls in Invincible. The END

add countless other possible versions and the Luke dies visions and you got it.




and another hydrospanner: he flowwalked in Dark Nest. What if THIS was the cause of the chain started above?
the cause to the chainreaction through various timelines might have been that he originally tried to revive Anakin Solo during his sojourn and all went bad and because of this somehow the Vong War ended different, or didn't end, or was lost, or Anakin turned dark, or Jaina etc. yadayada. thus he flowwalked to correct it and prevented Anakins revival. the other Jacen then believed it is impossible and went on turning sad. and with the dark man warning in place in case somehow the darkness does happen/come nevertheless... Jacen set himself on the highway to hell.

Aside from that, what if Jacen's flowwalking changes in Dark Nest are the reason the later events happened?

In a way he created UnuThul... and prevented the Swarm War turning as bad as the Vong War. Maybe in creating UnuThul he made sure the Swarm War could be ended and without him it would have been worse? Yet maybe it was destiney that the Swarm War happens and a happily ever after generations later after it? And Jacen ended the war... only to