Three years after the Great Sith War, we return to Tatooine for the first time since Dawn of the Jedi.
Of course, it’s now the same crummy desert it was in the movies, but
don’t worry, we’re only here for a minute. We meet three Jedi in battle
against a terentatek, a dark-side monster that feeds on the blood of
Force-sensitives. They are Duron Qel-Droma, a cousin of Ulic and Cay;
Shaela Nuur, his girlfriend; and the Twi’lek Jedi Guun Han Saresh. Over
the past two years, this trio has ventured around the galaxy
exterminating terentateks and other “Sithspawn,” monstrosities created
through Sith alchemy, such as silans and Sith wyrms.
[Continuity Note: Terentateks were introduced in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003),
where Jedi historian Deesra Luur Jada described them as a historically
recurring threat to the Jedi whose numbers swelled whenever the dark
side was ascendant. Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology
(2005), however, claimed that the terentateks were a creation of Exar
Kun, severely shortening their window of historical influence. This
factoid was later ignored by Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011),
which had Grand Moff Odile Vaiken slay a rabid terentatek on the planet
Dromund Kaas almost 1,000 years before Kun’s time.]
Duron establishes a psychic link with the terentatek, rendering it
dazed and confused, then Shaela and Guun Han stab it to death. It’s not
the most complex strategy, but it’s served them well for the duration of
the Great Hunt, the systematic purging of Sithspawn from the galaxy. So
far they’ve cleansed Onderon, Yavin 4, and Tython, the location of
which is apparently still common knowledge after 20,000-plus years but
will be forgotten sometime within the next three centuries so it can be
rediscovered in time for The Old Republic.
Victorious at last, the three Jedi companions return to Dantooine,
once the informal training grounds of Vodo-Siosk Baas, now the site of
an institutional Jedi Enclave. At this time, the Enclave is chaired by
Qual, a Selkath; Bala Nisi, a black human woman; Vrook Lamar, a
character from the KotOR games voiced by Ed Asner; and Aleco Stusea, who
is some kind of elf woman? They congratulate the Great Hunters on a job
well done, but reveal that there is still one planet left to cleanse:
Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil planet in the galaxy.
That night, as Shaela and Duron watch the Dantooine sunset, Shaela
reflects on the time she spent on Ossus as a student of Master Ood Bnar,
the Jedi who was also a tree. As a reward for constructing her first
lightsaber, Ood gave her a very rare lightsaber crystal called the
Solari. One of the most powerful focusing crystals in the order’s
possession, the Solari can be used only by a Jedi who is firmly
entrenched in the light side. If its user strays into the dark, the
crystal will cease to function, but Ood had faith in his apprentice’s
purity of heart.
The Jedi are apprehensive about the corrupting influence the Sith
homeworld could have on them, with Guun Han concerned that Duron and
Shaela will be unable to control their passion for one another.
Nevertheless, they accept the mission and arrive on a planet strangely
different than you might expect. Instead of the desolate graveyard world
it was during Exar Kun’s visit four years earlier, Korriban now boasts a
thriving spaceport called Dreshdae, populated by all sorts of scum and
villainy with no apparent connection to the Sith.
Even more bizarre, right next-door is a fully staffed and operational
Sith academy, tutoring Force-sensitive youths in the dark side. It’s
not like a secret or anything, the Jedi are fully aware of what’s going
on. But despite just fighting a devastating galactic war against the
Sith, I guess they’re cool with it
[Continuity Note: The Korriban Sith academy also first appeared in Knights of the Old Republic,
in which it is revealed that the previous headmaster, Jorak Uln, was a
follower of Exar Kun. The game gave no founding date for the academy,
however, so having it show up here, almost forty years too early, is
rather incongruous. To explain its anachronistic appearance in Shadows and Light, The New Essential Chronology
established that the academy was founded by Exar Kun to mass produce
Sith acolytes to fight in the war. That doesn’t really seem to fit with
his style of recruiting troops by tricking them into getting possessed
by ghosts, but I’ll take it, I guess.]
The three Jedi ask around Dreshdae’s cantina, The Drunk Side (lol),
but after a week they are unable to get any leads on the terentatek.
Guun Han finally bites the bullet and seduces a coed from the Sith
academy. He gets her drunk, steals a keycard from her while she’s passed
out naked in bed, and sneaks out the door with a smug grin on his face,
never to call her again. Man, how many of my relationships have ended like that?
Meanwhile, Duron is having a nervous breakdown. The lure of the dark
side on Korriban is overwhelming and the Force bond among the trio is
not protecting them from it as the Jedi Masters had hoped. Duron admits
to Shaela that when he makes contact with the terentateks’ minds, he can
sense their thoughts and intelligence, evil though it is, and he is
sick of killing them. Because this issue of Star Wars Tales was marketed for its tie-in with Knights of the Old Republic,
Duron abruptly has a vision of events from that game, including the
destruction of Taris and the torture of Bastila Shan. And boy does that
make me want to buy it!
He is knocked over by the force of this vision and Shaela rushes over
to comfort him. They kiss just as Guun Han walks into the room.
Outraged at this violation of the Jedi Code, Guun Han demands that they
renounce their love for one another, which they refuse to do. With
everyone’s tempers already running high from their time in this
dark-side miasma, Guun Han gives his friends the stolen keycard and
walks out, suggesting that they do the same.
Following rumors of another terentatek, Guun Han arrives on the
Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk. He tracks the terentatek to the Shadowlands,
the dark underbelly of Kashyyyk’s planet-wide forest, and sets a trap
for it. When he attacks, however, the blade of vibrosword that he uses
in place of a lightsaber snaps off in the beast’s hide. Defenseless,
Guun Han is killed and eaten by the monster.
On Korriban, Duron and Shaela have used the keycard to access the
fabled Valley of the Dark Lords. They sense their friend’s death in the
Force and Shaela mournfully curses him for leaving. They venture into a
cave and encounter the terentatek. As Shaela moves in to attack, Duron
is horrified to realize that he is unable to make contact with the
creature’s mind, presumably because the Force bond the three Jedi shared
has been broken. He rushes in to help Shaela and the terentatek crushes
him with its claw.
As Shaela cradles his broken body, Duron has a vision of the player character in Knights of the Old Republic
looting his corpse to equip his +8 Dexterity robe and using it to
defeat the final boss (although I think everyone knows that
realistically a light side player would have equipped the Star Forge
Robes by that point). Gratified to find the future full of light, Duron
tells Shaela he loves her and dies in her arms. “. . . I love you, too .
. .” she whispers.
With a heart full of bitterness and bent on revenge, Shaela tracks
the terentatek to the tomb of Naga Sadow. Consumed with hatred over the
death of her boyfriend, Shaela ventures deep into the crypt, the yellow
blade of her lightsaber her only source of light. As she comes face to
face with two terentateks, she recalls Master Ood’s words as he gave her
the Solari crystal: “Your soul is as radiant and pure as any I have
ever known. You will accomplish great things in your life, Shaela Nuur .
. . Just remember to always stay in the light. Always.”
Her lightsaber flickers and goes out.
Meditations
I have a soft spot for this comic, as I do for all KotOR-related
stories, so I may be kinder to it than it deserves. That said, the
artwork is inarguably very good. Dustin Weaver will illustrate many
issues of the KotOR comic series, and there is something about his style
that feels like a perfect adaptation of the BioWare game’s character
modeling.
Duron Qel-Droma, Shaela Nurr, and Guun Han Saresh originated in a series of audio journals the player discovers in Knights of the Old Republic. Shadows and Light
lays out basically the same story as that described in the journals,
but for such a brief comic, it’s amazing how many continuity gaffes it
brings to the table.
Although Guun Han Saresh’s species is never explicitly identified in
the game, he is described as “a proud and boastful young man,” and the
descriptive text of the Circlet of Saresh, a wearable item, states that
the Sareshes were a rich and powerful family from Taris known for their
arrogance and cruelty. As shown in the game, however, Tarisian culture
is highly xenophobic, with the wealthy upper class consisting solely of
prejudiced humans while the alien races, including Twi’leks, are forced
to live in slums.
When Guun Han attacks the Kashyyyk terentatek, his sword breaks off
at the hilt, leaving the blade embedded in the beast’s flesh. In the
game, however, the broken sword that the player finds in the terentatek
is that of the legendary Wookiee warrior Bacca, having been lost by
Chieftain Rothrrrawr. Maybe two people just broke two different swords
fighting the same monster.
Guun Han also arrives on Kashyyyk in what appears to be a Sith fighter,
although this model of starship should not exist yet, as it was created
by the Star Forge using Rakatan technology during the Jedi Civil War,
almost 40 years hence.
When the Jedi are greasing palms on Korriban, they come across a guy
who claims to know a half-breed Massassi who can tell them where the
terentatek is. First of all, Exar Kun just killed all the Massassi (save
one) who remained in the known galaxy at the time. Secondly, that
Massassi population was isolated on Yavin 4 until four years ago; they
wouldn’t have had time to breed with some other species and grow their
half-breed offspring to adulthood. It’s like the author just picked a
seemingly appropriate species name out of a hat but didn’t finish doing
his homework.
I’ve already covered the anachronism of the Sith academy and Dreshdae
settlement, but these aren’t the only things in this comic that exist
before they should. KotOR I and II are great games, but if there’s one
thing about them I don’t care for (besides the obnoxious d20 combat
system), it’s how they, for lack of a better term, “prequelized” an era
for which Tales of the Jedi had already established a distinct look and feel.
I thought the point of the Jedi’s downfall in the prequel trilogy was
that they had become too mired in political intrigue and governmental
bureaucracy to function as intermediaries between the will of the Force
and the galactic populace. As part of the Sith’s machinations, they had
been led astray from the enlightened path they once followed: their fear
of the dark had cost them their humanity.
But then in KotOR and TOR, thousands of years in the past, the Jedi
already have a council, a centralized leadership enshrined in the
Republic capital, and codified ordinances restricting romantic
attachment and advocating emotional suppression. They use words like
“Padawan” and they all wear the same drab monk robes. This really isn’t
at all how they were portrayed in TotJ, just a few decades earlier, in
which they were more like a loosely affiliated brotherhood of
knights-errant. There was no formal Jedi Council in those stories, just
the collective wisdom of the elder Jedi Masters, whose word was less law
than generally considered to be very good advice.
Shadows and Light moves the Coruscant Jedi Council’s
influence back even further, as they are the ones who give the order to
send Duron, Shaela, and Guun Han to Korriban. Guun Han turns his back on
his friends because they openly defy the Jedi rule prohibiting love,
although no such rule should exist at this time. It was bad enough that
these things came up in KotOR, but that was 30 years down the line from Tales of the Jedi: Redemption,
and you could headcanon the Great Jedi Convocation in that comic into
the beginning of the more formalized order from the prequels. In fact,
that comic actually features Nomi Sunrider mentioning the Jedi forming a
new council, but I guess the rest of the EU just forgot.
Starting with this comic, however, and later reinforced by background lore for The Old Republic,
we’re told that there already was a Jedi Council at the time of the
Great Sith War, and probably far earlier as well. Because that’s how it
was in the prequels, so that’s how it has to be forever and always,
until the end of time.
All that said, I still like this comic. It’s very attractively drawn
and fills in a cool bit of backstory from a great videogame. The
characters are not masterfully fleshed out or anything, but they’re
developed well enough for the brief portrait this story paints of them.
It’s not great at continuity, but it does have a cool little cameo
appearance by Ood Bnar, and that has to count for something. Plus, dat
nihilistic ending, yo.
Apparently there’s been a great deal of talk on the Internet this week about Delian Mors, a lesbian Imperial officer in Paul Kemp’s upcoming Star Wars spinoff novel Lords of the Sith. The story broke when Del Rey editor Shelly Shapiro allowed a reviewer with an advance reading copy to reveal Moff Mors’s sexuality online. “If there’s any message at all,” Shapiro was quoted as saying, “it’s simply that Star Wars is as diverse, or more so because they have alien species, as humanity is in real life and we don’t want to pretend it’s not.”
Thrilling as it is that Lucasfilm has bucked all convention and made the first widely publicized homosexual in Star Wars a villainous lesbian, every article I’ve read on the subject leads by stating that Moff Mors is the franchise’s first LGBTQ character. Which is patently untrue clickbait.
Just Google Mors’s name and you’ll find no shortage of editorials calling her the “the very first LGBT character to be made canon in the Star Wars universe” and “the first canon lesbian character in the franchise’s history.” “Writer Paul S. Kemp is changing Star Wars forever,” one site claims. Even CNN picked up the story. “If you feel a ripple in the Force today, it may be the news that the official Star Wars universe is getting its first gay character,” writes Michael Pearson, ill-informed journalist.
Many of these articles, after going on for several paragraphs about how Lucasfilm is breaking new ground by introducing the First Ever Gay Character In Star Wars™, slip in a mention at the very end alluding to how there have previously been gay characters in Star Wars. But you see, they point out, those characters don’t count; Moff Delian Mors is the first canon LGBT character, and that is a newsworthy distinction.
Two problems with that:
1) Those characters were 100% officially licensed canon when they were created, and only lost that status in April 2014.
2) Only nerds care about canon.
Canon is empty marketing jargon. Canon is a corporate buzzword. “Hey, guys, check out our new canon Star Wars books! Unlike those old, non-canon books (which we previously promoted as canon until it stopped being profitable to do so), this is the real, true, factual continuation of a fictional story!”
Canon is meaningless in this context; if it says Star Wars on the cover, it’s Star Wars. Or are we pretending the previous books and videogames with LGBTQQPIAA+ characters were published without the license holders’ permission and against their will?
Because that would be almost as stupid as discounting these characters just because their sexuality can’t be cynically exploited to promote a webpage or market a new product.
1. Juhani
A recruitable party member in Knights of the Old Republic (2003),
Juhani is a female cat alien who will eventually profess her love to you
if you are playing the game as a female character. “I care for you,”
she admits. “I do not know why. I do not know if anything will be
possible or if you even return what I feel, but I do know it is there. I
am sorry if this upsets you. I am so sorry if I am wrong, but I cannot
deny what it is that I feel.”
You can also encounter a female
Jedi named Belaya, who describes Juhani as “a dear companion to me for
many years” and recounts how they “spent many nights together alone
under the stars.” Should you elect to kill Juhani instead of recruit
her, Belaya will turn to the dark side and join the Sith. She returns
later to attack the player for placing “this black bitterness” in her
heart.
2. Goran Beviin and Medrit Vasur
The first
married homosexual couple in Star Wars, Goran and Medrit were
introduced in Karen Traviss’s 2006 novella Boba Fett: A Practical Man,
although Medrit’s sex was not specified until his appearance the
following year in the execrable Legacy of the Force series. A few
articles about Moff Mors made reference to the “gay Mandalorians” from
past books, but dismissed them for being too subtly homosexual.
It’s
actually completely unambiguous in the text, but that presupposes the
people who read those books actually cared enough to comprehend what
they were reading. Regardless, the accusation of subtlety has no leg to
stand on. After Medrit’s nonchalant introduction as Goran’s husband
failed to incite a whirlwind of controversy across the Internet, Karen
Traviss apparently felt the need to hammer the point home, just to be
safe; later in the series, Medrit needlessly points out that he doesn’t
know how to tell if women are attractive.
3. Luxa
An
NPC from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004), Luxa is
a female Zeltron, which means that she is basically just a human with
pink skin. She will also hit on the player character regardless of which
sex you’re playing as, and even has variable flirtation dialogue
depending on your gender. Does this make her the first bisexual in Star
Wars? Wookieepedia says there’s no way to know, but they also have a
page about space tits, so who are you going to believe?
4. Sarn Shild
Possibly
the first Star Wars character implied to be anything other than
heterosexual, Sarn Shild, governor of the Baxel sector in the Outer Rim
Territories, was created by the late A. C. Crispin way back in 1997 for
her novel The Hutt Gambit. Shild, a thin man with oiled hair and a pearl
stud in one earlobe, is described as having tastes that do not extend
to human women, and hires one to pose as his mistress to avoid the
suspicion of his Imperial colleagues.
This reads like coded
language for gay to me, especially considering the Star Wars
license-holders’ more conservative restrictions at the time (Daniel Keys
Moran once recounted how he was forbidden to use the words “hell,”
“damn,” and “whore” in his stories, despite the first two appearing in
the films themselves). Of course, some fans will argue that Shild was
just into alien women. Don’t ask them why the text couldn’t just say
that instead of portraying him as a closeted gay man, though. I mean,
Corran Horn banged an otter that one time and no one seemed to care.
5. Mr. Sulu
6. C-3PO and R2-D2
Come on now, who are we kidding?
7. The planet Makeb
Oh, we’ve forgotten about this already, have we? In 2013, BioWare released
Rise of the Hutt Cartel, the first expansion pack to their Star Wars
MMORPG The Old Republic. Among the features this expansion added to the
game was the ability for the player to engage in same-sex romances, but
only on the planet Makeb. Like Tatooine was a desert planet, Hoth an ice
planet, and Mustafar a lava planet, Makeb is apparently a gay planet.
This
seeming ghettoization of the galaxy’s homosexual population was
unpopular, to say the least, and game’s implementation of same-gender
relationships probably should have been handled a bit more deftly. But
despite the controversy, only a scant few NPCs on the planet are
actually romanceable. In terms of press coverage, apparently Delian Mors
is just lucky her name rolls off the tongue a little more easily than
Lord Cytharat’s.
Ultimately, that widespread press coverage is
what’s so baffling about this non-story. Of course we should celebrate
and encourage increased diversity in Star Wars, but Moff Mors is just
the most recent step in that direction, not the first or the most
notable (except in terms of the publicity she’s gotten). The fact that
she’s currently the only “canon” LGBT character doesn’t make her any
more special or important than the characters who broke that ground
before her.
Not to bad-mouth Lords of the Sith, since only the
handful of people with advance copies have read it, but it’s just one in
a long line of media tie-in Star Wars spinoff fiction. I’m pretty sure
that a lot more people played the Knights of the Old Republic games than
will read Lords of the Sith, and a lot more people than that will be
lining up to see The Force Awakens. Wake me up when J. J. Abrams has two
dudes make out on-screen; that’ll be a story worth tweeting about.
Well not really I guess. It’s been six months since Ulic Qel-Droma
and Exar Kun joined forces to bring about a new Sith golden age, and it
doesn’t look like too much has happened in that time. The Krath’s war
against the Republic has continued much the same as it was before, and
no one seems to know that Ulic Qel-Droma now commands their military.
Meanwhile, Exar Kun is about to hatch a scheme that involves walking up
to people in the street and asking them to join him, which seems like
something he easily could have started doing six months ago. What have
they been doing all this time?
But before we get into any of that, we get the first appearance of
the Mandalorians. The Mandalorians have a long and convoluted history,
both within the Star Wars galaxy and in the context of
real-world creative decisions, but they are essentially a marauding
tribe of space barbarians. For honor and glory, they blow up some mining
station in the Empress Teta system belonging to the Krath, the yuppie
space cult founded by Ulic’s current squeeze, causing it to crash on the
planet below and pissing off Ulic Qel-Droma.
Ulic contacts the Mandalorian leader, Mandalore the Indomitable, and
demands his surrender, but Mandalore challenges him to a duel. If
Mandalore wins, he gets the Empress Teta system, but if Ulic wins, the
Mandalorians will pledge fealty to him. Mandalore’s conditions for the
duel include fighting on a Mandalorian world, forcing Ulic to fight
while balanced on a network of chains suspended in the air, and being
able to use his giant flying Basilisk war droid against Ulic’s
lightsaber.
[Continuity Note: Basilisk war droids are large,
intelligent, animal-like robots that have giant claws and shoot lasers
out of their face and are ridden into battle by Mandalorians like some
kind of awesome space horse. “The History of the Mandalorians,” a
reference article in Star Wars Insider #80 (2005), revealed
that the Mandalorians acquired these droids by conquering the
Basiliskans (of the planet Basilisk). The Basiliskans, which were
basically just dragons, poisoned their own planet to defeat the
Mandalorians, but they still ended up enslaved and used as war mounts in
future conflicts. Over millennia their intelligence disappeared and
they devolved into primitive beasts known as Lagartoz War Dragons.
Because that’s what you’d expect to happen to an enslaved people, right?
[Anyway, that’s the story of how the Basilisk war droids got their
name! Except not quite, because author Karen Traviss, equally renowned
for her disdain of most Mandalorian lore not written by herself as for
her unwillingness to read any Star Wars works not written by herself, introduced the Mandalorian word bes’uliik,
literally translated as “iron beast.” According to the inclusivity of
the EU canon policy, both origins of the term are equally valid, so
apparently it was just some crazy cosmic coincidence or something.]
YEEAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Despite Mandalore blatantly throwing the odds in his own favor in the
name of “honor,” Ulic still thrashes his ass, taking out his war droid
and forcing him to land on one of the chains. Mandalore whines that Ulic
is being unfair and insists he trade in his lightsaber for a
Mandalorian ax carved from mythosaur bone. Ulic does so and still beats
him. Mandalore admits that his life is forfeit but Ulic allows him to
live and makes him his second-in-command, thus securing the loyalty of
the Mandalorian Crusaders.
Meanwhile, Exar Kun has traveled to the Jedi library world of Ossus
to recruit volunteers for his new Sith Brotherhood. A crowd of young
Jedi, including Cay Qel-Droma, Oss Wilum, and Crado, gathers around to
hear him talk about how the Jedi Masters have been withholding knowledge
from them. As evidence, he presents the Sith amulet he recovered from
Yavin 4, calling it a “Jedi amulet” and explaining how it allowed him to
defeat the ghost of Freedon Nadd. One of the Jedi, a female Vultan named Zona Luka, reflects on how Arca Jeth had been outfoxed by Nadd and failed his mission on Onderon miserably as a result.
Nearby, Nomi Sunrider expresses concern to Odan-Urr, our old friend from way back
when we first started this series, over countering Sith illusions like
those employed by Ulic’s evil girlfriend, Aleema, in the previous book.
Odan-Urr offers to teach her the ultimate light-side technique, the
“wall of light,” which a Jedi can use to permanently sever an
individual’s connection to the Force. He reveals that he learned this
power “when we fought the last of the Dark Lords . . . when the Jedi and
the Republic drove the Sith to extinction.” Really wish we could have seen that instead of whatever boring shit happened in The Fall of the Sith Empire, KJA.
Nomi thanks Odan-Urr for teaching her this new technique, although
all he did was talk about it for fifteen seconds, and leaves. Odan-Urr
sits back and ponders the Sith holocron he recovered from a derelict
warship at the end of the Great Hyperspace War. Suddenly the holocron
begins to glow and levitates out of his hand. Exar Kun strides into the
room and claims the holocron for his own. Sensing the great darkness
inside this man, Odan-Urr casts him back with the Force and attempts to
use the wall of light technique he was just talking about, but all Exar
Kun has to do is stretch out his arm and Odan-Urr collapses.
“I . . . am old . . . ,” he moans as he lies dying. “Evil is loose
. . . in the galaxy . . . and I cannot stop it . . .” His body vanishes
into the Force, leaving behind only his robes, which Exar Kun kicks
aside as he leaves. Had we read this series in the order it was
published, this scene would have little impact, as Odan-Urr would just
be some dude we knew nothing about. Having gone in chronological order,
however, we’ve already seen him in his prime back during the Great
Hyperspace War and watched him help save the galaxy from evil once
before. His failure to do so now, at the end of his life, thus becomes
somewhat emotionally affecting.
But really not too much.
Exar Kun’s Jedi groupies, except Cay Qel-Droma who I guess just
wandered off somewhere, suddenly come in and ask what happened to
Odan-Urr. Kun explains that he just now died of old age, but before he
went he named Kun as Jedi Master and bequeathed him this special
holocron. For some reason, the Jedi believe this very suspicious story
and pledge themselves to Exar Kun’s tutelage.
Kun takes them to his stronghold on Yavin 4 aboard his ship, Starstorm One.
He shows off the massive temples he’s had constructed but ass-kisser
Crado, as always, is the only one who seems impressed. The Massassi come
wandering out to say hello and for some reason Oss Wilum thinks they’re
attacking and he starts fighting them with his lightsaber. The other
Jedi join in but Exar Kun is able to calm everyone down, explaining that
the Massassi are his servants and just trying to protect him.
Oss Wilum has seen enough and goes to leave but Kun has one last
thing to show his acolytes. He admits that the supposed Jedi holocron he
got from Odan-Urr is actually a Sith holocron, but he is going to
destroy it and wants the Jedi’s help in purifying Yavin 4 for the light
side. Oss Wilum, Zona Luka, Crado, and the 17 other converts decide to
stay and watch, and Kun smashes the holocron with his fist, releasing
the Sith spirits that were, for some reason, trapped inside it.
Broken pieces of the holocron fly out and strike all the Jedi except
Crado, magically absorbing into their bodies and infecting them with the
dark side. Now Oss Wilum and the others are all evil, because that’s
how the dark side works.
This is the dumbest shit.
Meanwhile, Ulic and Mandalore lead their forces against the Republic
shipyard at Foerost, while Aleema masks their fleet within the illusion
of a single, suspiciously enormous ship. They capture the shipyard and
all the Republic warships docked there with ease, and Ulic immediately
begins making plans to move against Coruscant.
He hits up Exar Kun on his cell and tells him about his brilliant
plan, and Exar Kun’s like “No, you idiot! We’re each supposed to build
our forces independently and then attack together. Do you understand
anything about strategy? How did you even get put in charge of our army?
Oh, god, what was I thinking?” Ulic and Mandalore are confident in
their plan, however, so Exar Kun is like “Fine, just do whatever you
want, while you’re getting your asses kicked I’ll be over here
resurrecting the Sith.”
Ulic ignores him and goes ahead with the invasion. Feinting at the
Republic space station Kemplex IX, Ulic lures away the bulk of
Coruscant’s defense fleet, then strikes at the capital world with his
combined Krath and Mandalorian forces. Caught completely off-guard,
Coruscant is devastated by the assault, and Ulic personally leads his
ground troops into the Republic war room, overrunning all the opposition
they encounter.
Ulic tries to coerce some dude into transmitting coordinates to the
Republic fleet that will cause all their ships to collide with one
another, but before he can carry out this masterstroke, he is betrayed
by Aleema. While the Mandalorians pillage the Republic’s armory, Aleema
tells Mandalore the Indomitable that Ulic has been killed and their
forces are pulling out. Fresh from the battle outside, Cay Qel-Droma,
Nomi Sunrider, the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta, Dace Diath, Shoaneb Culu,
Qrrrl Toq, Sylvar, and Vodo-Siosk Baas, accompanied by Supreme
Chancellor Sidrona, a gray squid-man, burst into the command center and
take Ulic prisoner. Master Vodo and Nomi lead the other Jedi in casting a
temporary wall of light around Ulic, and the Supreme Chancellor
announces that he will be put on trial and sentenced to death.
We cut to Master Vodo on his training planet of Dantooine, where he
gazes up at the stars and reflects on how he failed his greatest
student, Exar Kun, as he repairs the wooden staff Kun severed in the
previous book. Although Ulic has been arrested as the perpetrator behind
the attack on Coruscant, Vodo knows that he is just a pawn, another
victim of Exar Kun’s hunger for power. Resolving to settle things with
his wayward pupil once and for all, Vodo sets out for Coruscant, to
attend the trial of Ulic Qel-Droma. Considering that he was just there,
one wonders why he bothered leaving in the first place. Cool scene,
though.
Elsewhere, Mandalore analyzes the battle to figure out how they were
defeated and realizes that Aleema has been lying to him. Determined to
rescue Ulic, he sets off to Yavin 4 and reveals to Exar Kun everything
that has happened. Kun doesn’t seem too concerned, agreeing to help
Mandalore free his master almost on a whim. But he decides that maybe
Ulic will have learned a valuable lesson from this experience, and that
it’s time to show the Republic what they’re truly up against.
On Coruscant, Ulic is brought before the Senate in chains, his chest
still seeping blood from the stupid magical wound he got in the previous
volume. Addressing the assembled senators, he declares, “I don’t plead
with fools. You are puppets of tradition pretending to be important. The
coming golden age has no place for you. Your Republic is an empty,
self-indulgent diversion . . . signifying nothing. The lost glory of the Sith will turn all of your supposed accomplishments to dust!”
His brother, Cay, attempts to intercede on his behalf, reminding the
Senate of all the good Ulic has done for the Republic and of how he’s
under the influence of the Krath. “Cay, you don’t understand what’s
going on here. You don’t understand anything,” Ulic snarls, his shackles abruptly falling open.
The doors to the Senate Hall spring open with an echoing crash and
the Dark Lord of the Sith cheerfully strides into the center of the
galactic capital, flanked by Mandalore the Indomitable and an honor
guard of Massassi warriors. “Excuse me, might I join the discussion?”
asks Exar Kun, smiling broadly. “I’ve got something I’m sure you’ll find
interesting.”
Using the Force, Kun freezes the entire Senate in their seats,
rendering them unable to speak or move but forced to watching the
proceedings. While Ulic and the Massassi hold back Cay, Nomi, and
Sylvar, Exar Kun seizes Supreme Chancellor Sidrona and, manipulating him
like a ventriloquist’s dummy, forces him to announce to the paralyzed
Senate that they are all irrelevant puppets. He kills the Chancellor and
turns to leave, only to find Master Vodo-Siosk Baas standing in his
way.
Kun invites his old mentor to join the Sith Brotherhood, but Vodo
reluctantly declines. He asks Kun to reconsider his actions and realize
how far he has strayed from the Jedi way, but Kun has already learned
everything Vodo tried to teach him and found his knowledge lacking. Exar
Kun reveals the modifications he has made to his lightsaber, igniting a
second blade from the bottom of the hilt, and he duels against Master
Vodo’s enchanted staff before the horrified Jedi and immobilized Senate.
[Continuity Note: This is the first appearance of the double-bladed lightsaber anywhere in Star Wars canon, almost four years before Darth Maul’s in The Phantom Menace. Chronologically, The Sith War
also remains the earliest appearance of this weapon. For some reason,
however, the EU decided that Exar Kun couldn’t actually have invented it
by himself. Instead, he just followed the instructions in a Sith
holocron, possibly or possibly not the same one he stole from Odan-Urr
and later destroyed. I don’t know why they couldn’t let Kun keep this
small achievement for himself, but I’m not surprised, honestly.]
Master Vodo is unable to withstand the vicious onslaught of Exar
Kun’s twin blades. “This is not the end, Exar Kun,” he says as his
defenses are battered aside. “You and I will fight again . . . perhaps
not for a long time, but I will defeat you.” Exar Kun meets his master’s
eyes for the last time, then, with a single stroke, cuts through Vodo’s
wooden staff a second time, striking down the Jedi Master on the floor
of the Senate Hall.
“Words,” Kun says dismissively. “Go on to your higher plane, teacher. The galaxy is mine now.”
The Sith depart, leaving Nomi, Cay, and Sylvar weeping in a huddle.
Exar Kun seems dissatisfied with this victory, however, and the words
Master Vodo once spoke to him bubble up in the back of his brain: “I
sense something missing in you—an empty place hidden even from
yourself . . . a place that remains unseen because no light escapes from
that region of your heart.”
Exar Kun assigns his 20 followers with murdering their Jedi Masters.
Across the galaxy, Jedi die at their own apprentices’ hands. Well, eight
Jedi die at their hands, anyway. I guess Kun’s 12 other minions just
fail miserably. Oss Wilum and Crado certainly do when they try to
assassinate Master Thon on Ambria. They sic a couple of dark side
dragons from Lake Natth on Thon, Nomi Sunrider, and Crado’s felinoid
mate, Sylvar, but this plan just ends with Oss Wilum captured and Crado
escaping in shame, his face now bearing the claw marks of his former
lover.
[Continuity Note: The Sith War shows Kun
recruit only 20 followers, all of whom besides Crado serve him only
because they are possessed by Sith spirits. Later works depict a much
larger number of Jedi converts who apparently joined the Sith of their
own free will, such as the wife of Jolee Bindo from Knights of the Old Republic
and RPG sourcebook character Larad Noon. These characters and others
imply a far larger scale of conversion than that shown in the comics, to
the extent that while we’re wasting our time with Exar Kun’s
ghost-brainwashing scheme, there are apparently several full-scale
battles between Jedi and Sith forces taking place just off-page.
[Flashbacks in the Knights of the Old Republic spinoff comic show a hint of these, while the Clone Wars novel Shatterpoint introduces a Republic warship full of Jedi that was shot down during the war. Knights of the Old Republic
itself, the videogame, contains many references to Exar, Ulic, and the
Great Sith War, treating it as a much more devastating and
transformational conflict than one might suspect just from reading the
comic alone.
[The 2002 videogame Star Wars: The Clone Wars for GameCube,
PS2, and Xbox introduces a completely new campaign from the early days
of the war involving a Sith superweapon called the Dark Reaper. A giant
disk-shaped machine capable of draining the Force from large populations
at a time, the Dark Reaper was used by Ulic to spread “genocidal-scale
death” among the Republic, until I guess he felt bad about that and told
the Jedi how to turn it off. So that explains what the Sith were up to
during those missing six months at the beginning of the war?
[Almost 4,000 years later, Ulic’s Force ghost appears to Anakin
Skywalker during the Clone Wars to give him some protips on destroying
the Dark Reaper, which has been reassembled by Count Dooku. For some
reason his spiritual form bears a large diagonal Sith tattoo across its
face, despite never having such a mark there in life.]
As Crado confesses his failure to Exar Kun, Mandalore informs Ulic of
Aleema’s betrayal. “She has always manipulated me . . . ,” Ulic admits.
“First through torture, then poison . . . then love.” Aleema runs up and embraces him, but his thoughts are troubled by memories of Nomi.
The Sith prepare a double feint, striking at Kemplex IX for real this
time. Exar and Ulic put Aleema and Crado in charge of the mission,
entrusting them with Naga Sadow’s warship and its Force-crystal
superweapon.
Meanwhile, all the main Jedi characters have gathered on Ossus to
discuss what to do about this rash of assassinations when they get word
that Kemplex IX is under attack. Dace Diath, Shoaneb Culu, and Qrrrl
Toq, the Three Musketeers of Pointlessness, volunteer to go repel this
threat while the others defend Ossus.
Kemplex IX is located in the Cron Cluster, a closely packed group of ten stars apparently arranged by the (ancient precursor)
Celestials because they had nothing better to do. Dace, Shoaneb, and
Qrrrl arrive and hail the Sith ship, to which Aleema responds by using
Naga Sadow’s ship to amplify her Force powers and yank the core out of
one of the nearby stars and hurl it at the Jedi.
The radiation completely sterilizes all life aboard their ships,
killing the trio instantly, but Aleema and Crado did not foresee the
rest of Exar Kun’s plan. The collapsing star goes supernova, destroying
Sadow’s ship and setting off a chain reaction that causes the other nine
stars to explode as well. As Aleema is vaporized, she realizes that
Ulic has discovered her treachery, but Crado is too stupid to understand
that he was killed simply for being an annoying sycophant.
Back on Ossus, the Jedi scramble to collect all the ancient knowledge
in their library, because the combined supernovae will reach them in a
few years and they need to evacuate. Oh wait I guess it’ll just be there
in like fifteen minutes, never mind. Present for the chaos are Master
Thon, Cay Qel-Droma, the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta, and Nomi Sunrider
and her daughter, Vima. Cay insists that there must be something more
they can do to save the Jedi texts, but Thon says, “We have greater
concerns than your precious scrolls!”
Suddenly, Cay and Nomi sense Ulic’s presence aboard a ship entering
the planet’s atmosphere. They are overjoyed, thinking that Ulic has
decided to come back to them, and Cay rushes to his own ship to meet up
with his brother. They don’t realize that Ulic and Exar Kun have come to
plunder the Jedi archives while Mandalore and his men attack Onderon.
Jesus, again with the Onderon. Why does anyone even care about that
shitty backwater planet?
Exar Kun leads a group of Massassi warriors into the Jedi archives,
where Master Ood Bnar, whom you may remember as the Jedi who is a tree,
is busy burying a stash of antique lightsabers in the hope that this
will save them from a supernova. For some reason, Exar Kun decides that
he must have these crappy old weapons, and demands that Ood hand them
over. The Jedi Master refuses, to which Kun cheerily responds, “Looks
like I’ll be chopping wood today!”
Knowing that he can’t outfight the Dark Lord of the Sith, Ood draws
Force energy from Ossus and initiates his species’ metamorphosis,
growing even larger and more treelike and sinking his roots into the
ground directly over the lightsaber cache. Foiled, Kun leaves, saying
that it would have been better for Ood if he’d just handed over the
lightsabers. It sounds like bitter grapes, but he’s actually right. Ood
is now anchored to the doomed planet, essentially sacrificing his life
to protect some garbage.
Fortunately for Exar Kun, his Massassi have collected a great wealth
of Jedi scrolls and tomes for him, and he is getting ready to leave when
Sylvar confronts him, blaming him for corrupting Crado and killing
Master Vodo. Then a Massassi just clocks her and they all get in their
ship and take off, leaving Ulic to fend for himself.
Annoyed at being chased by his brother, Ulic swings his ship in
behind him and shoots him down. Cay extricates himself from the crash
and finds Ulic waiting for him, lightsaber in hand. Reluctantly, Cay
takes up arms against his brother, and they duel in the streets as Cay
tries to assuage Ulic’s guilt over the death of Master Arca. This
succeeds only in enraging Ulic further, however, and Cay gets his arm
cut off.
Again.
“Ulic, I love you!” Cay cries. “That’s why I’m doing this!”
“Then you should have just . . . left me . . . ALONE!” Ulic says, and kills him.
Nomi and the Twi’lek Jedi Tott
Doneeta run up to where Ulic, immediately struck by grief and regret, is
cradling his brother’s body. Cursing Ulic for what he’s done, Nomi goes all
Jean Grey and loses control of herself. The Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta begs her
to stop, claiming there has already been enough suffering today, but Nomi
ignores him. “Ulic—I loved you, but
this . . . this!” she cries. “I imprison you in a wall of light. A fortress to
block you from the Force . . . blind you to your Jedi powers!”
Ulic collapses, completely weak
and powerless. The Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta demands to know what Nomi has done
to their friend, and Nomi, seeming to regret her impromptu judgment already,
admits that she had no idea the technique would be so powerful, and that she
has no idea how to undo it.
“Hear me, X-Men! No longer am I the woman you knew!”
“First my Master Thon,” weeps
Ulic, apparently forgetting that Master Thon is standing right there and his
dead master’s name was Arca Jeth, “then my brother Cay, now my own powers . . .
Nothing is left!”
Then Oss Wilum is randomly there
all of a sudden and I guess he’s gotten over that bad case of demonic
possession, because he tells Ulic that he too understands the guilt of having
done evil, but what’s important now is that they stop Exar Kun. Ulic agrees to
lead them to Yavin 4, thoughtlessly selling out the guy who broke him out of
jail as if he had anything to do with Ulic killing his brother.
As the Jedi make their final
preparations to evacuate Ossus, Thon stops to pay a last visit to his old
friend Ood Bnar. The dumb dinosaur Jedi tells the dumb tree Jedi how sad he is
to lose him and it’s adorable. Then Thon leaves and the shockwave hits the
planet, scorching it to a cinder but somehow only causing Ood Bnar to fall over
slightly.
The Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta has
sent a Facebook invite to all the Jedi—literally every Jedi in the galaxy—and,
even more improbably, they’ve all clicked accept and all several thousand of
them are en route to Yavin 4 right now. “We must create a wall of light . . .
,” says Nomi, because that worked out so well for her the last time, “. . .
either to cleanse . . . or to destroy.”
Hey wasn’t the point of this technique supposed to be to resolve conflicts
nonviolently? Pretty sure you just said that a couple pages ago after
metaphysically castrating your ex.
Meanwhile, in a completely
irrelevant plotline, the Mandalorian Crusaders are busy attacking the walled
city of Iziz on Onderon, but Oron Kira and Queen Galia, great and memorable
characters that they are, are able to beat them back with their Beast Riders
and giant laser cannons. Republic reinforcements arrive and Mandalore the
Indomitable retreats with his men to the evil monster-populated moon of Dxun,
but his Basilisk war droid is shot down in the process. He crashes in the
jungle and is immediately devoured by ravenous beasts.
With that subplot out of the way,
the Jedi fleet assembles in orbit around Yavin 4, and Ulic sends a message to
Exar Kun telling him that all of the Jedi have united to stop him. Master Thon,
wearing a tiny radio headset on his massive Triceratops
skull, adds, “Exar Kun, nggrrssh, your dream of a Sith golden age is but a
nightmare . . . from which we must now awaken.”
Outraged at Ulic’s betrayal, Kun
nevertheless admits to himself that even he can’t stand against the combined
power of all the Jedi, so he makes preparations to win in another way. He
gathers every Massassi on the moon together in the Temple of Fire—save for the
largest one, whom he sends into the isolation chambers beneath the temple to be
his last line of defense. We’ll be seeing this guy again in a few thousand
years, believe it or not.
Shackling himself to an obelisk in
the center of the temple, Exar Kun drains the combined life force from all of
his willing Massassi followers, a sacrificial Sith ritual designed “to unleash
his powerful spirit . . . to shed the chains of his mortal body and run rampant
throughout the cosmos!”
Famous Last Words: “My spirit will live forever!FOREVER!” – Exar
Kun
At the same time, the wall of
light generated by all the Jedi in the galaxy simultaneously sweeps across
Yavin 4, cleansing it of the dark side by causing the jungle moon to burst into
flames. Confused over how they managed to inadvertently firebomb an entire
ecosphere, the Jedi depart, leaving the moon to be consumed by flames as they
go about the business of rebuilding the parts of the galaxy they actually care
about.
Back on Dxun, Mandalore the Indigestible’s men are combing the forest for their leader. One of them spies his mask lying on the ground, presumably near a pile of bones and toothmarked armor. In the tradition of their people, he puts the mask on his own face, proclaiming himself the new Mandalore. We would be seeing him again in the next series, but they retconned it into someone else!
Costas Mandylor is dead; long live Costas Mandylor.
Two years later, Ulic returns to
Yavin 4 aboard his ship, Cay’s Dream.
He has searched the galaxy for a way to restore his connection to the Force but
come up with nothing. His pilgrimage to Yavin 4 is equally unsuccessful; he
finds no survivors, and no hint of what else he might be looking for. There is
nothing for him here. “Still searching, still lost, Ulic Qel-Droma walks away .
. .” As he leaves, he doesn’t hear the disembodied voice calling out to him
from the darkness: “Ulic! I can feel
you out there. It’s dark. I’m trapped. I survived . . . but I’m trapped. Ulic! Why don’t you answer me? Don’t leave
me! Ulic! Ulic?”
Meditations
In an interview a few months after
the final issue of The Sith War was
published, TotJ creator Tom Veitch remarked, “I don't feel I really had a
chance to get into some of the characters I created. Ulic Qel-Droma was taken
away from me and trashed. Honestly, I feel that some of the characters like
Master Thon and Master Arca have a built in richness that we barely began to
explore. We really should have woven a much more detailed and complex tapestry
before we rushed into the events of Dark
Lords of the Sith. I feel now that it was a mistake to ask another writer
to collaborate on that series.”
It’s easy to blame all the series’
missteps on Kevin J. Anderson, and The
Sith War certainly isn’t going to win any awards for its writing (and the
less said about KJA’s solo prequel arcs the better), but the pre-DLotS comics,
despite some interesting ideas, really aren’t anything to write home about
either. Veitch is absolutely right that the characters should have been much
better developed before the war broke out, but in the end KJA was the one who
actually made Ulic an interesting character, and that hasn’t happened yet.
We have one more item to go before
we’re done with Tales of the Jedi,
but The Sith War is basically the
culmination of the storyline we’ve been following since Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon. And as such, it’s . .
. ehh. Many of the structural flaws are the result of weaknesses in the
previous volumes, such as Dace Diath, Shoaneb Culu, and Qrrrl Toq being
non-characters and Ulic’s fall to the dark side being less than narratively
earned. Cay’s death probably would have been more dramatic if I didn’t keep
forgetting he existed, too.
The art isn’t completely terrible,
although it is noticeably much poorer than the first five issues of Dark Lords of the Sith and replete with
characters drawn with spit lines stretched between their teeth. Tom Veitch
wasn’t involved with writing this arc, but surprisingly the story doesn’t
suffer too much for it. The writing of this whole series has been pretty
lukewarm; Chris Gosset’s art, infrequent though it is, is really the heart and
soul of TotJ, as will become apparent in the concluding arc.
The tone of this comic also goes
hand in hand with KJA’s goofy, juvenile writing. Now that Exar Kun is a
full-blown villain instead of a tortured soul sliding into darkness, he can get
away with one-liners like “Looks like I’ll be chopping wood today!” as he
fights a tree, and his cavalier attitude as he invades the Republic Senate.
KJA’s penchant for over-the-top Force powers is also something of a boon here;
we have to deal with nonsense like Aleema wrenching the cores from stars, but
Exar Kun freezing the entire Senate in place and controlling the Supreme
Chancellor like a puppet are suitably impressive abilities for the Dark Lord of
the Sith.
Despite its frequent silliness,
this story also boasts a few genuinely cool or affecting moments, at least on
paper. Exar Kun’s final confrontation with Master Vodo is legitimately well
done, but one can only wonder how much better it could have been if more time
and care had gone into fleshing out their relationship beforehand.
Unlike Exar Kun, who is now
finally cool but somehow even less nuanced then before, Nomi Sunrider continues
to be utterly unlikeable. It’s clear from the text that her decision to strip
Ulic of the Force was motivated purely by revenge; Ulic was no threat to anyone
at that point and was clearly already remorseful for what he’d done. Nomi
literally cripples him just to make herself feel better, but no one ever says
anything to her about giving in to the dark side. Not like poor Ulic, who ends
up killing his brother and losing his connection to the Force because Nomi
refused to rescue him from the Krath when she had the chance. She just really
cannot get over being dumped, I guess.
In all honesty, this comic isn’t
that great, and it’s noticeably a step down from Dark Lords of the Sith, but it’s still easily above the first three
TotJ arcs. It’s worth it to see the conclusion to the war that this whole damn
series has been building to, even if we care about very few of the personages
involved. For a Star Wars comic, it’s
pretty all right. 3.5/5 Death Stars.
Really though you could probably
just watch the movie.
