YMMV / Dawn of the Jedi

• Broken Base: Whether the comics or the novel have better worldbuilding and action is a bit debated.
• Complete Monster:
  • Predor Skal'nas of the Infinite Empire is a Rakata bad by even their standards. A conqueror and slaver who culls and destroys countless worlds, Skal'nas has slaves fight to the death for fun and has the losers served as his meals. Later invading the Tython system to mass death and destruction, Skal'nas murders his second, Cehl'net, when she demonstrates even minor insubordination to his will and intends to seize the Infinity Gate so he might rule the Rakata and destroy countless worlds until the galaxy submits to him.
  • Predor Tul'Kar is an exceptionally vile member of the Rakatan Infinite Empire. A genocidal monster who uses his mentally broken Force Hound Xesh to find worlds brimming with Force-sensitives so Tul'Kar can raze the worlds and cull the sensitives, Tul'Kar enslaves billions of people at a time to serve as fodder for the Infinite Empire or become living batteries. Introduced cutting down a child, torturing the boy's father to death, then murdering and cannibalizing one of his own minions, all purely on a whim, Tul'Kar later reduces Tatooine from a lush land of life to the barren wasteland it is best known for. Tul'Kar tries to use Xesh to find the Je'daii planet Tython so that Tul'Kar may utterly devastate the entire population, and when his ship comes under attack, Tul'Kar uses his final moments to aimlessly kill as many of his slaves as possible out of spite.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The Despot War and the adventures of the various people involved in it (the undercover Daegen, Ox Ryo Playing Both Sides while losing family to Hadiya and being married to a Je'daii, the Temple Masters, Hadiya and her generals, etc.) feel like they have a lot of untapped story potential.
  • What moral alignment Daegen ends up on, the exact manner in which he contributes to the Jed’aii schism, and how he feels about this are all interesting events that only take place after the main series.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A complaint against this series is that it is too similar to Republic and Legacy, but doesn't do enough good about it.
• Signature Scene: Quan-Jang and Shae Koda flying on tamed rancor dragons in their Establishing Character Moment is a pretty talked-about part of the series, even among some Legends fans who haven't actually read the comics.
• Strangled by the Red String: Many fans of Shae and Xesh feel that the romance between them slightly reduced their characters after their promising beginnings and, given how the Continuity Reboot made the series run so short, that page time could have been better spent.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The focus on the younger Je'daii and their main mentors can come at the expense of interesting older masters and rangers who get fewer appearances than fans would have liked, such as Kora Ryo (with her Dating Catwoman past with Ox and role as Tasha's mother), wise and humble Retired Badass Lha-Mi, Lady of War Rori Fenn, blacksmith Tem Madog (one of the few Masters to get along with Xesh), Miarta Sek (a light-aligned member of the Sith species who is the grandmother of a main character and worries about his balance with the Light), pyrophobic Scarily Competent Tracker Bel Zana, Hermit Guru Rajivari, and Bookworm Ters Sendon.
  • Haidya's surviving generals (Ka'lun, Shri-Lan, Bakko, and Vannar) are introduced as a colorful and menacing but probably not irredeemable group of Retired Monsters whom Daegen seeks to recruit for an Enemy Mine alliance against the Rakata. Despite this promising introduction, they are never seen or mentioned after their debut issue (about halfway through the series).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Tasha Ryo being tugged between the Je'daii Order and her father's criminal enterprise could have been a major theme and shown why future Jedi are reluctant to allow relationships between initiates and their biological families, but this only gets a couple of fairly unimportant scenes.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Ambiguously Evil Daegen Lok and Wild Card Xesh are viewed with wariness and/or contempt by many of the lightsiders in the series, but most fans can't get enough of either of them.

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