My Opinion On Mara Jade Skywalker's Death
Tuesday marks a very sad day for Mara Jade Skywalker fans. I guess you would call it the five year anniversary of Mara’s death.
On May 29, 2007, Sacrifice hit the shelves. Most of you reading this have either read the book or have heard of the ending. At the time, I was just getting into the EU and I had read a few books with Mara and I was starting to like her. Then, I read that they killed her off. I was kinda miffed, but I didn’t know all the details, so I waited to form an opinion. It was about six months before I decided the pick-up LOTF Betrayed. I read the first four books, then the big one hit. Then I read Sacrifice. At the end, the iPod (I ‘read’ it via audiobook from the library) flew across the room.
My opinion about the death of Mara has taken a few years to formulate and it’s still kinda grey. First of all, it sucks that she died. What pours salt in the wound is the way that she dies and how she was acting at the time. To say that she was written completely out of character through-out the entire book is an understatement. In my opinion, her death did very little to further the story. It could have easily avoided.
It felt too much like real life and I didn’t like it.
Let’s face it, Star Wars is ‘escape’ fiction. We, or at least I, read it to escape the real world, if only for a little while. In real life senseless things happen. People die for no reason. They get ripped from the world way too soon. My father was an ill man for most of his adult life due to dumb decisions he made as a teen. We all knew he was going to die around age 40. But he was ripped from us when he was 34 and when he was starting to turn his like around. It was not fair. Like Mara’s death, it was uncalled for, but Mara’s death was fictional.
People may feel that Mara’s death gave LOTF and the EU as a whole a dose of reality. It did. But if I want a ‘dose of reality’ I expect reality to give it to me.
I am all for killing off good characters in escape fiction when their time has come or when it furthers the plot/ends the plot. Yoda’s and Anakin’s deaths in ROTJ were beautiful because it felt right for them to die at that time. It was not the right time for Mara to die.
Yet, at the end of the day, Mara was a fictional character and her death was fictional. I am not going to cry, send people hate mail, or stop reading Extended Universe novels over her death. In both fiction and reality, the living must move on.
Besides, Mara lives on in our hearts and through FanFiction.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.