A few weeks back, a critical discussion of the Legacy of the Force series at the TFN Literature forum turned to a topic that doesn’t normally come up too often: privilege.
The specific impetus was the penultimate novel, Revelation, wherein Jaina Solo spends time training on Mandalore in preparation for a confrontation with her Sithy twin brother. Boba Fett’s fellow Mandalorians, thoroughly established by this point as hardscrabble farmers for whom mercenary work is only an intermittent source of income, are quick to laugh off the ex-Chief of State’s daughter with the (possible) Coruscanti accent, and what they see as her pretensions of warriordom, but over time she proves herself up to their challenges and, eventually, earns a grudging respect.
But this is Karen Traviss, an author with, well, a singular perspective on the Jedi Order’s place in the larger galaxy—so it’s perhaps unavoidable that the prose squeezes a little more sympathy for the Mandos (even from Jaina’s POV) than we’re used to seeing, dwelling here and there on, say, the softness of Jaina’s hands, her education, her growing up well-fed, and so on.
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