#book: jat: dark apprentice

[magnetarbeam]

Invariably, when I hear "quantum armor," I want to throw myself headlong into Yavin's depths to be crushed into a tiny ball.

[jedimordsith]

Sorry for the rant but what the hell is wrong with everyone in JAT? I’ve never seen such blatant character assassination in my life. I was reading Dark Apprentice and the part where Han and Lando act like literal 5 years old over the falcon and then when Han loses the ship he gives up on helping Leia because apparently the ship is more important than his wife. I wanted to throw the book to the wall after reading that. This is one of worst SW stories I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.

There is a reason that when ppl write in the JAT timeline 99% of the stories are fix-it fics. 

[teagrl]

Okay obviously I should be editing, but I don’t need much to go back to pinnacle JAT obsession. I love the idea of arriving at the Jedi Academy in the timeline. It’s the first glimpse of Luke’s research and experience as a Jedi taking form. And I will be frank, I also kind of love that it’s a fucking clusterfuck of epic proportions. That kind of failure is more persuasive from the get go than the type of failure from TLJ. There’s also the fact that unlike TLJ, Luke KEEPS GOING even with how disastrous everything ends up. The mission is bigger than him.

So I wanted to speculate on how things eventually get on a right-ish track. For anyone who doesn’t know, what I do here is fanwank, extrapolate and fill in the blanks, I’m aware that from an out-of-universe pov (aka the writers) there was no intention in keeping to a solid narrative. I like to pastede my own.

JAT is sold as a surprising success on the face of it, newly trained Jedi! Exar Kun vanquished! Reading against the grain, the consequences (loss of one apprentice, Kyp’s genocide at Carida, Luke’s coma and general ineffectiveness as a teacher) are much more ambivalent.

Since I’m committed to the idea that the academy’s first year was a failure, I’m interested in speculating on how it becomes less so later, not that canon gives us much to go on. I mean to suggest that a lot of the issues that came up in the problems had to do with Luke taking on too much responsibility too fast and trying to teach in a one-size-fits-all approach that clearly didn’t allow him to properly gauge and respond to the needs of his students. 

The later books make references to Kam and Tionne as administrators, which frees up Luke to have his adventures. So I think there’s something to this. It gives us some space to imagine that  Luke let Kam balance out the load more (I, Jedi suggests this with Kam doing lightsaber training, but I’d argue Kam needed to fully be Luke’s second, not just a rando TA). Add Tionne into the team once she passes her trials,  and you have three people working to see to student needs and the general administrative duties, which before this Luke was doing pretty much all by himself.

Eventually we know the academy does get more structured and honestly, I think that’s a great testament of Kam and Tionne’s management. Kam trained formally as a dark side adept and Tionne is a historian. There is no way the two of them wouldn’t bring the academy from a kumbaya-free-for-all into a legit training institution in the general mold of previous Jedi training institutions. 

[magnetarbeam]

The name doesn't bother me as much as how insanely overpowered it is.

Invariably, when I hear "quantum armor," I want to throw myself headlong into Yavin's depths to be crushed into a tiny ball.