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Fridge / Legacy of the Force

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Fridge Brilliance:

  • Why does Jacen become so out of character compared to his past self? Because the Light Side is associated with reason, control, and compassion to channel the Force. The Dark Side is associated with emotion and release of control. As Jacen leans towards the Dark Side, he thinks less clearly and becomes more impulsive due to the resulting lack of self-restraint.
    • This is shown in both subtle and overt ways. He muses that he prefers the company of droids because they lack independent motivation, and dislikes aliens because he finds it hard to to read their facial expressions. Also, like most Dark Siders, he becomes very self-absorbed and loses the ability to examine the universe from other people's points of view. This culminates in a Vader-like breakdown where he kills a loyal officer who failed him on the bridge of his ship in front of other crew members.
  • Jacen notes that his use of flow-walking, intense degree of precognition, and other time-distorting abilities are said to be grey or dark, which he dismisses because the user does not harm others. However, as we see from Jacen somewhat and Tahiri even more so, they are a way the users of such powers may harm themselves, and they distort and warp one's personality and perception of reality.
    • They might also be labeled as grey/dark because these techniques can easily lead to either unhealthy attachments to the past, like with Tahiri, or people trying to alter the future out of fear of a negative potential outcome, just like Jacen and Anakin (Skywalker).
  • Luke considered his childhood on Tatooine to be incredibly boring, while Mara was raised from an early age to be an assassin and espionage agent. Thus Mara probably figured that Ben's "internship" with Jacen in the Galactic Alliance Guard was pretty normal and Luke just figured his son was getting a more interesting childhood than he himself had. Hence the amount of time it took them to figure out that the whole thing might not have been the best idea.
    • One might expect the rest of their family to say something as well. However, Han spent his teenage years as a vagabond running errands for Shrike, and Leia was involved in her family's political actions from a very young age (she was already a Senator at just a few years older than Ben). Meanwhile, Jaina, as the Young Jedi Knights and New Jedi Order series show, was getting into just as much trouble from an even younger age! As the authors themselves admit, the whole Solo-Skywalker family is pretty messed up when it comes to child-rearing.
  • The Jedi, the Alliance government and the military might have thought that Daala would be an ideal "peacetime president" since, despite what Invincible would lead readers to believe, she has historically been a General Failure and most of her military campaigns have ended in crushing defeat for her side. Thus they imagined she had little potential to successfully start any serious wars that would not flame out pretty quickly. Additionally, as head of a democratic institution, the military would not be under her sole leadership, and Bwua'tu could (and did) help curb some of her excesses.
    • There's also the fact that, to the greater galaxy, it has been decades since the last time that Daala threatened the galaxy. Since then, there's been the Yuuzhan Vong invasion steamrolling the New Republic, the crisis with the Killiks and the Chiss, and a civil war that landed a Sith Lord in the office of the Chief of State. Daala's activities against the New Republic happened long enough ago as far as the general public is concerned (especially given that her attacks were very localized, more against singular planets, Mon Calamari, Khomn, and Yavin 4, than the New Republic as a whole), that she is the lesser of various evils after a whole host of really crappy options leading up to her election.
    • However, this does serve as foreshadowing that the Alliance is headed in a negative direction. After Jacen seized power, Leia argued with him that this was unconstitutional because the Alliance's basic law stipulates that the Chief of State must be elected. Of course, Jacen blows this off, arguing that what he (and Palpatine) did was technically legal Loophole Abuse. After Jacen's death, Daala is basically installed as Chief of State by the military, not via election. Thus warning that the Alliance now prioritizes order over democracy, just like the Empire did. Luke even notes that most senior Alliance figures are now ex-Imperials.
  • In this series, we learn of Darth Vectivus, who apparently was a pretty nice guy despite being a Sith. How is this possible? Well, the fact is that a lot of what we know about him, we get from Lumiya, who is trying to get Jacen to believe that Sith don't necessarily have to be evil. Even the phantom of him may have been a trick by Lumiya.
    • In addition, we learn that he was still economically predatory, abused his powers to harm and profit over rivals, and general win at business. He was not causing harm to those close to him, but still harnessing the dark side to hurt others, just as Darth Sidious acted kindly to Anakin while still setting up a massive galactic civil war.
    • Unlike other Sith we see and even Jedi who have had brushes with the dark side, Darth Vectivus treated the Force entirely as a tool, not with reverence or infused with passion, using it for purely abstract (political and social) gain rather than in his interpersonal relationships. A bit like Dooku, he inadvertently learned how to use the dark side without putting his passion or attachment into it, which is what let him control it rather than being controlled by it.
  • People like to bash the Old Jedi Order for its view on attachments and families. However, it's all but outright stated in both the Dark Nest Trilogy and this series that Luke and Mara's attachment to Jacen was what blinded them to his faults and his slow fall to the Dark Side, and Luke's attachment to Mara is what caused him to go into a Heroic BSoD (especially after he killed Lumiya in anger), leaving the Jedi Grand Master not operating at his best in the middle of a galaxy-wide crisis, and make him unable to kill Jacen without falling to the Dark Side himself. Not to mention that Jacen, like his grandfather, fell to the Dark Side and kicked off a Galactic Civil War in large part because of his attachment, in this case to his daughter. A subtle but poignant reminder that there really was a reason why the old Order forbade these kinds of attachments in the first place.
    • And don't forget that Tahiri's whole Heel–Face Turn was due to Jacen/Caedus preying on her attachment to Anakin.
    • This was also what Jacen's sacrifice was; not simply sacrificing his aunt Mara's life, but sacrificing all of his attachments and connections; sacrificing his connection to his family by killing the person who had most experienced coming back from the dark side and who was working hardest to reconcile him with everyone else.

Fridge Horror:

  • For a good chunk of the mid-New Jedi Order Warmaster Tsavong Lah was trying to arrange for Jacen and Jaina to fight to the death as part of the Yuuzhan Vong's ritually mandated Twin Sacrifice. In LOTF, the Vong ritual doesn't happen, but the twin duel to the death sure does. At the end of Invincible, Jaina wonders if Jacen didn't really win after all, but in at least one sense the real villain who won LOTF from beyond the grave was Tsavong Lah.
  • Back in Courtship of Princess Leia, Rell asked Luke about his "kids." Combined with the fact that it's revealed in the next series that Jacen changed the course of the future, the implication is clear: Luke and Mara were meant to have had more children, which now will never happen thanks to Jacen changing the timeline and murdering Mara.

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