Tessa Gratton Newsletter #34: A Jedi Love Story
I stopped reading Star Wars books around the turn of the new century for several reasons. Mostly it was due to college and graduate school, which afforded me essentially no time to read for fun. It was easy at the time to let go of a galaxy far, far away though, because what I was looking for (epic love stories, intense magical systems, kissing, monsters, and queer people) I couldn’t often, or ever, find there. But it was also the time the prequel trilogy came out, from 1999-2005, exactly the span of years covering when I graduated high school until I quit my master’s program in a fit of political rage.
I was already furious at the world, my own crumbling government, the obvious corruptions and failures of political systems I relied on and couldn’t extricate myself from, culture wars, the Iraq War, the myopic white feminism of my graduate program, etc etc etc. The last thing I needed was to look at a movie that finally had all those space wizards I’d loved since I was a toddler except they were just as corrupt and powerless and trapped in the logical fallacies of their predecessors as the U.S. government! Of course Anakin went off the rails! His saviors told him he couldn’t have feelings! They were tacitly pro-slavery! Warmongers! Republic attack dogs!
(I was in my Anakin phase, too.)
Look, in retrospect, I actually think that’s one of the great things about the prequel movies: the trilogy shows a pretty complicated story about the collapse of a complex government that was founded centuries ago on fairly solid philosophical values and ideology. People were trying. Good people. Also bad ones and ambitious ones and lonely ones and people who just needed to be allowed to love things. The system couldn’t hold up under the weight of its own bloat, and especially in the Jedi Order’s case, hubris.
But this newsletter isn’t really about the prequel trilogy, I swear. It’s a little bit more about Anakin, but only because for all the prequel movies’ greatness and flaws, Anakin is who people are going to think of when you hear the words “Jedi love story” and his love story is about the failure of the system, and the failure of the Jedi.
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One of the best, if not the best things about the High Republic time period is that the Jedi are awesome here. The books take place a handful of centuries before Anakin was born, when the Jedi Order is not yet fully in bed with the Republic, not quite the police, is its own totally separate organization that sometimes works alongside the Republic, but not always. The Jedi are at the height of their strength, their efforts, their hopes, their expansion. They’re everywhere. There are thousands of them, different kinds of people with different relationships to the Force. Of course they’re not all good at it, but they’re all actually trying to be.
Although when I was first officially invited to write for THR, three years ago this very week, I was mostly excited because I got to write about cults and teenagers descending into villainy and monsters and kissing, which are all things I write about in my normal books, only now I could impose them onto Star Wars! AND I got to start by writing a brand new Jedi however I wanted, as long as he would fall in love with said teenager descending into villainy. It wasn’t proposed to me as a Jedi love story, even though it certainly was, for one reason: that sunshine Jedi was there to love, to argue about the Force, and to die.
What I didn’t realize at the time, nobody did, was that Path of Deceit and the conversations between Jedi Padawan Kevmo Zink and future villain Mardo Ro were the start of what has essentially become my multi-book manifesto about what goes wrong with the Jedi Order between now and the Skywalker saga.
It’s love.
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When the powers that be told me to make Temptation a Jedi love story, and also that it should feel like The Empire Strikes Back, I felt some pressure. Quite a lot of it. Fortunately for me, I like nothing more than to write messy relationships and characters struggling with emotions, morality, and devastating choices.
Of course I thought about Anakin, and Leia, and Kevmo, and a bit about those promises Charles Soule made at the end of Light of the Jedi re: Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann. But I also started to think about Jedi love more broadly. I watched Obi-Wan Kenobi which is definitely a Jedi love story, and Andor which isn’t but has a lot of different kinds of love in it and made me think a lot about Rogue One which has an unbelievable Jedi love story even though the characters I’m thinking of aren’t technically Jedi, which maybe is why it’s so good and joyous even in the beautiful tragic ending. I thought about Yoda and wondered if he loved Dagobah just a little bit. I thought about Luke, especially in The Last Jedi and the kind of love story that movie is on so many levels.
Maybe most Jedi stories are love stories, after all. Do you know why? Because Jedi are people and most people (human for sure, everybody else probably) have to love things to live.
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When I was in graduate school I was angry all the time. Too angry. It was my first immediate reaction to everything. In my defense, people make the world a terrible place, supporting and maintaining oppressive systems and once you start peeling away the layers you find worse and worse things. It can be very difficult to hold on to the scraps of goodness and beauty when atrocities are committed constantly, when you can’t change anything, or when you finally find ways to affect change but they’re slow and so hard and exhausting. When if feels like the only way to grasp at happiness is to ignore other people suffering. It’s enough to make anybody angry all the time.
And anger leads to the dark side, right?
Listen. Anger can change the world for the better! It has. It will again. But only when it doesn’t burn you up first. When you have a family, a community, a support system to help turn that burning anger into a sustainable hot coal, a controlled burn on the prairie meant to recharge the ecosystem and make the earth bloom better.
The reason Anakin burned up is because the Jedi who should have been his family, his community, his support, failed him. They did nothing to mitigate the very correct and righteous anger he felt about a lot of things—like for example slavery, something that shouldn’t be controversial at all. He had no choice but to learn to lie and manipulate in order to protect what he’d loved since he was a child. That’s what made him vulnerable to the villains.
Like Anakin, I’m an emoter. I’m a feeler. I feel things before I think things. I’ve worked hard to stop lashing out, to find an inner peace, a calm place inside myself which I don’t even want to admit here because too many of you are High Republic readers and will find this embarrassingly funny: when I need to balance my anger and grief I have always visualized sitting alone under the cold dark weight of an entire ocean. So far down there’s no light but what you bring with you, the water shifts in strange currents, and when fire emerges from the fissures cracking the earth it hardens into mountains.
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Temptation of the Force is not a Jedi love story: it’s Jedi love stories. It’s non-Jedi love stories, too, and it’s what happens when a Jedi feels a lot and struggles with balance and anger, with light and dark, with love and hope and friends and family but…doesn’t have to hide it. Has support. The Jedi Order isn’t broken yet during the High Republic, and although emotions and attachments are still seen as dangerous, messy, things to strive away from, there’s room to push at those boundaries. To explore them. To embrace them.
I spent quite a bit of my life thinking there was no place for me among the Jedi, because I refuse to give up my heart, and that’s what it’s always seemed like the Jedi were asking me to do. I’m happy to say that’s not the case in THR. It started before I joined up, but I’ve done my best to infuse the Jedi of this era with everything I want them to be. Starting with Kevmo, who loved the Jedi and loved the Force, who loved helping people because he loved people. That’s why he could love Marda, too, and it’s really too bad he and Anakin couldn’t have been friends.
The culmination of my manifesto is Temptation.
The book has space battles and the Nameless and Marchion Ro on a new, curious mission. It has freedom fighters and romance and peril and new planets and a Wookie I personally fell in love with. But every character with a point of view, even Marchion, is dealing with some form of love story: self-love, sibling love, communal, partnership, romantic, love for a cause, for parents, a gaping lack of love, and love for a whole galaxy.
But despite all that it has, I wrote Temptation toward one moment: It’s a speech Avar gives just to Elzar about the relationship between love and the Force. It’s an arrow pointing toward why Jedi (why everyone) should be encouraged to reach out, to expand hearts, not just territory and justice. Encouraged to love.
If the Jedi had been, maybe they’d have survived.
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I am thrilled to announce that other than a short story in September, Temptation is my last release of 2024! WHEW. We can all relax a little, focus on our work, draft a new book (or two, omg) and revise another one, and maybe write a few weird newsletter essays.
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Thanks for reading!
Tessa
