it's okay to be afraid

I'm continuing to love this Mace Windu book for how it portrays the Jedi lifestyle (and also, it's just a fun and engaging read):

"Jedi must ignore their feelings." "That's quite a statement. Is it your own?" "Yes." Then the boy considered. "Well... Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan said much the same." "I think you misunderstood," Mace said. "Jedi do not ignore their feelings. They integrate them. Own them. They fear, but they are not afraid of fear. They grow angry, but they allow their anger to motivate only honorable action. Do you understand?" The boy nodded, but Mace knew he did not --yet. There was time. -Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss by Steven Barnes, pg 24

hey babe wake up in three days the first Mace Windu-centric novel since 2003's Shatterpoint drops

Continuing my Legends posting with some Dooku duel analysis... The titular Dark Rendezvous show down between Yoda and Dooku is one of my favorite pieces of writing in old or new canon. Yoda almost has Dooku convinced to truly give it up and come home, and then Dooku sees on his security cams that Anakin and Obi-Wan have shown up (Palpatine, rightly suspecting Dooku could be swayed, sent them without Yoda knowing) and assumes he's been set up and betrayed. And then Dooku proceeds to have the messiest emotional breakdown of a duel....

Here, we have a classic "Dooku failing to make a kill" where he's so surprised (distressed?!) that he actually managed to hit Yoda that he totally botches an otherwise perfect chance to finish him off. His little horrified/fascinated/shocked "I've hurt you!" is tremendous. He almost seems scared.

This next part is so fucking sad. He can't help telling on himself in front of Yoda. What a miserable fool. I truly believe no one hates Dooku as much as Dooku hates Dooku:

Then he gets complimented and can't help returning it like the good teacher's pet/favorite son he still is:

So then, Yoda tells him he still loves him and...

This whole scene is in Dooku's (unreliable) POV btw. Since when does sweat run down in streams down (bearded) cheeks? This motherfucker is crying.

So just to summarize: he starts crying, whines about not being called apprentice like he clearly liked earlier in their talk, DROPS A MISSLE ON HIS OWN HEAD, and jumps out a 5th story window to leave the conversation.

10/10 cringefail Dooku. No notes. This is the most pathetic fucking fight of your life and I'm counting that time Sidious and Mother Talzin kicked you back and forth like a football.

In a mood, so have a handful of my favorite "about Sifo-Dyas re: badass" quotes from current canon:

“I’m warming to this Sifo-Dyas. Not only does he seem to be the only one willing to stand up to Dooku, but he has a rebellious streak so large you could fly a Dreadnought along it.” -Asajj Ventress, Dooku Jedi Lost -

“Master Sifo-Dyas was a powerful Jedi,” Yaddle said. “Powerful, yes. Great at many things - including prognostication.”  -Yaddle, The Living Force -

I always sit next to Sifo-Dyas. I think you’d like him. He’s my best friend, although Master Braylon insists we shouldn’t form attachments. Most of the time I don’t have any problem with that, but Si’s different.  -Dooku, Dooku Jedi Lost

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“I’m afraid we’ll never replace what Master Sifo-Dyas could do when it comes to sensing the future.” -Mace Windu, The Living Force

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Only one boy saw through my bluster, an Initiate as likely to cause trouble as I was expected to excel. Perhaps I needed someone to burst my bubble. Perhaps I just needed a companion. But whatever the reason, we became inseparable. -Dooku, Dooku: Jedi Lost

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“He was always in a big damn hurry.”  -Even Piell, The Living Force

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"Sifo-Dyas is an explorer, while I am doomed to endure ridicule from my students." -Dooku, Dooku: Jedi Lost

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“And the truth is, we won’t make it out of this alive.” He looked exhausted and frightened, but determined. “If that’s the case, so be it. But there are things that mustn't be lost. This is what it's come to - and I want... I want everyone to understand that I've done my best.”  -Sifo-Dyas, Force Collector

Thanks, Geode! I am having a great holiday weekend, I'm actually running off to France for a bit!

First, I've never listened to it, but this podcast sounds like so much fun. It's amazing to me how overtly political Star Wars can be. There's so much wild stuff George put in (successfully and unsuccessfully both) and its greater context is really interesting. I STILL sometimes think about the about the significance of him including Palpatine's emergency powers while Bush was doing the real life Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq.

Second, that's fascinating! I'm so glad the book is getting some love! It's amazing how much Dooku's feelings about Serenno parallel Padme's about Naboo. And, for a least a moment, we get to see Dooku as exactly how the Council characterizes him in AotC as "a political idealist" (who quickly becomes a murderer!) And it does set up quite a lot for the series. Dooku meets Palpatine, he leaves the Order and tells us... kind of... why, and we get backstory to understand both why Sifo-Dyas would trust him with the Clone order and how he even got back in secret contact with him to pull it off.

My favorite little detail about Dooku: Jedi Lost (and I've harped on a bit about it so forgive me if I'm repeating myself) is that it's dedicated to Christopher Lee, and on closer analysis, the entire format is set up to be an homage to his extensive autobiographical/memoir writing. There are so many subtle references to Lord of Misrule or Tall Dark and Gruesome, right down to Dooku not liking spiders.

I finally sucked it up and bought Light of the Jedi and The Rising Storm to read on the plane/get hype about the High Republic era ahead of Acolyte.

I don't think Cavan Scott can cause me more psychic harm than he has already with Dooku: Jedi Lost and the Yoda comics, but I'm ready to be hurt.

Okay, I finally finished The Living Force, and as promised, I have thoughts. These are just my musings as a fan and a reader - if you enjoyed the book more than I did, I'm really glad! If you hated it, good for you too! Let people like things, let people not like things. <3 My feelings with this book were somewhat down the middle. I'm interested in reading it again in a couple months and seeing how I feel.

Overall: a fun, engaging read, genuinely hard to put down once the action starts going. The book isn’t afraid to be funny. SO MUCH GOOD JEDI CONTENT! Miller takes on a huge task trying to write perspectives for all twelve Council member characters and does a pretty good job bringing them to life. Mace and Depa steal the show. I had a hard time with some of the meta plot and overriding messages about the Jedi Order.

Andddddd the long version:

The Living Force how dare you be good now

Depa, who just spent the last half of the book being tortured, borrows Mace's lightsaber to go confront her torturer. Grim determined beat-up badass Depa with her Master's purple lightsaber mmmm. The Shatterpoint Lineage vibes in this book are everything.

Also, the baddie, Zilastra, hates Sifo-Dyas SO much, so cartoonishly. At one point, Depa unknowingly misgenders him (actually, it's not the first time I've noticed a Jedi using a universal "she" when speaking of an unknown Jedi's pronouns, I think Dooku does it too in either M&A or DJL?) and Zilastra is like "bitch. HE." But so funny. For like for 30 years she's done an Arya Stark list of just him in her head. I kind of hope she was sending him fucked up anon hate mail at the Jedi Temple and he's shrugging over them like "wow, the messages of doom from the Force are getting oddly weird and specific with it..."

I mostly agree with you about Sifo-Dyas’s characterization in the Living Force! 

We’ll eat for years on Seeker Sifo. (I always thought it was cute that as a kid, Sifo-Dyas had found out who his own Seeker was, and that it was a cool High Republic Jedi to boot?! No wonder he wants to be one.) And I like that the book seems to go out of his way to establish that Sifo-Dyas wasn’t just on the Council as a token guy, but he was their whole Future Department, and that his departure left them seriously lacking in their ability to perceive that. It adds some complexity to the Council’s comments on how clouded the future is in the prequel films.

The last time we saw Sifo-Dyas in any Star Wars property, it was 2019 in Dooku: Jedi Lost. We leave him collapsed on Serenno, completely out of his mind, laughing and crying on the ground after watching Dooku burst a fucking dragon out of the planet. It's seriously great to pick back up with our boy's story in this book, and get some content about the period after that devastating moment. Content which suggests he’s not only been functioning, but on the Council and clearly an important person there, acting with agency and an agenda to try to save his people. 

And pissing off Even Piel lol. He deserves to be a problem, as a treat. This is Lene Kostana’s son, after all. He is a person Asajjj Ventress thinks is too rebellious, whose stated reason for breaking into a forbidden Archive section full of dangerous artifacts is “because I’m a troublemaker.” I love a sweet, soft Sifo characterization as much as the next person, but let’s face it, he’s a sarcastic little shit who spends most of Dooku: Jedi Lost choosing chaos, probably because his own defiance is the one thing in his life he feels any control over. 

And I love your point about his (understandable!) disregard for the present. In that way, he makes the perfect conflict/foil for the Living Force and Qui-Gon’s message about living in the moment. 

Not to contradict you on this last point, and please, someone chime in if I’m incorrect about this - I think current canon doubled down on Sifo-Dyas definitively being the one to order the Clone Army. In the canon novel, Force Collector, the main character finds Sifo-Dyas’s last recording before his crash, where he explains his whole reasoning behind ordering the Clones and takes responsibility for it. And I think the Clone Wars episode “The Lost One” also discusses his involvement in the plot, initially collaborating with Dooku before being murdered and Dooku taking over/sabotaging the project with the chip interference. Dooku: Jedi Lost seeming to go to some length to create backstory around that particular detail - why Sifo-Dyas would go specifically to Dooku with the Clone project (not realizing he’s fallen) and how he had secure, untraceable means to get in contact with Dooku after all those years. (That stupid cursed comlink Dooku gives him at the end of the book in case he ever needs him.)

Still reading The Living Force. I'm actually much farther in now than when I took this pic over the weekend, before I got kicked out of the winery for throwing the book across the room--

No, no, I kid. In fact, there's lots to like about this book. Much of it is warm, funny, and full of Jedi details and lovingly crafted little scenes given to more obscure Council characters. Depa and Mace continue to shine.

I'm still... very much struggling with some aspects, some inconsistencies and contradictions that I can't tell are there on purpose to make a point in the narrative, or just unsuccessful writing. But I'll try to post an actual write up shortly when I'm officially finished.

Sorry, yeah, Satan told me it's the day to copy out Sifo-Dyas's last words over Oba Diah from the novel Force Collector by Kevin Shinick and put it on tumblr: (just pulled out his relevant lines)

---

He looked like a man who'd taken a beating, and he rocked back and forth in an effort to hold his footing. "This is Master Sifo-Dyas, en route to the desert moon that orbits Oba Diah. I'm with... with... Silman, flying emergency survival capsule number seven-seven-five-one-nine, and our long-range transmitter has been knocked out. We're under attack by the Pykes, and I'm preparing to jettison this projector in hopes that it will be found and -" Sifo-Dyas came back into focus. "And the truth is, we won't make it out of this alive." He looked exhausted and frightened but determined. "If that's the case, so be it. This is what it's come to - and I want... I want everyone to understand that I've done my best. Some may disagree with my methods, but these are desperate times and someone, somewhere should know: as you are aware, I've seen a vision of the future that I feel warrants an army. You've disagreed with me, but I felt I had no choice. Therefore I have ordered one: a clone army from the Kaminoans. Something must be done, and I made that decision. It may haunt me, and," --more static, garbled shouts from someone else in the shuttle-- "or then again, maybe I won't have to live with that decision very long at all." Then, to anyone who might find the message and hear it, or to the Jedi themselves, he added, "Come find me!"

Star Wars: The Living Force by John Jackson Miller drops next Tuesday, a story about the Jedi Council set one year before the events of TPM, and I know you're all clamoring, desperately asking the same question I am - will that guy they mentioned once in AotC who only exists because of a typo be in it?!?!

It's just. That one year?? That's like the craziest year of Sifo-Dyas's life. His visions reach some critical mass to the point that he goes off to the Council about needing an army, gets subsequently kicked off (resigns?) from the Council, uses the horrible comlink to contact Dooku again after what, 20 years, successfully gets the Clone Project going, despite the fact that he's also apparently still running missions and is on the supreme chancellor's speeddial, and then still has enough free time leftover to get murdered.

It seems like he could come up, especially if the plot is "Council Drama."

On the other hand, the Master and Apprentice is about seers and prophecy and Dooku-adjacent, and Qui-Gon is literally waffling over the Council seat Sifo-Dyas ends up taking, and the man doesn't come up once.

I also think if we see more Sifo-Dyas content, it'll be from Cavan Scott, since he wrote him as such a huge character in Dooku: Jedi Lost and then went out of his way to include all the Sifo-Dyas drama in the Yoda comics as a fairly significant plot point for Dooku.

And what an incredibly fun ask too!!! Thank you so much!

Great question because I do hang out so much in the prequel era! This is a little embarrassing because I haven't read it in years and I feel like it might have been one of those that Really Didn't Age Well but Courtship of Princess Leia was the book that hooked me on the EU when I was probably... 12? And my little sheltered ass just devouring these hot lady Force witches riding around rancors and blowing up Han Solo's molars just because they can?? Old School Dathomir?? Ugh. I actually haven't re-read it because I don't want to ruin the sentimentality for myself.

...oh, and I know they're a bit corny, but I really like those Young Jedi Knights series too. Jacen Solo, get out of the way, you're blocking my view of Tenel Ka!

And of course my top pitch would be to write something in Dooku, Sifo-Dyas, and Jocasta's youth or early twenties: some chaos adventure where the three are on a (probably unsanctioned, lets be real) mission together and have to use each of their particular talents to work together, highlighting the different talents of different types of Jedi and ultimately getting myself fired from the project when it was deemed too gay.

The other idea I have is a really grimdark Clone Wars stand alone novel that's a character study piece on Kit Fisto in the war. I love that guy. I want to write about his lineage (I think he trained Bant in the EU?? Well I'd recanonize that shit) and his rich internal world.