gffa:

gffa:

Thrawn: Alliances | by Timothy Zahn

This is, of course, part of the bigger pattern of this novel’s need to make everything The Most Unique And Special, so I do kind of hate how the Force works with the Chiss, but at the same time, I’m willing to at least cautiously allow it?

Basically:  Force-sensitive children happen in very small numbers (well, that’s consistent with the GFFA everywhere, one strong enough to be a Jedi is something like 1 out of 6 to 20 billion people), it only happens with girls (ehhhh, I’m willing to handwave it as maybe the Chiss’ biology interacts weirdly with the midi-chlorians) and that the ability fades over time.

And it’s that last one that I actually brings me around.  There was a series of tweets from Pablo Hidalgo about how he explained Force-sensitive in kids, why it was stronger in them than in adults–because adults have this strong sense of individual sense of self that gets in the way of the connection to the Force.  That it takes a lot of training to be able to set that aside enough to be able to hear the Force, so you’ll have a toddler floating things around the room, but an older kid won’t be able to.  You have to learn to quiet your mind to hear the whisper of the Force and if you don’t have a teacher (or have someone else in the Force that you can feel doing it) or instructions, you’re probably not going to manage to get very far.

So, the Chiss’ ability fading over time?  Makes perfect sense to me when taken with the idea that it seems like only the Jedi really managed to get very far with Force-based skills, way back in the day.  They were specifically said to have EVOLVED IN PARALLEL with other groups (like the Guardians of the Whills) and this would have been waaaaaaay back before the Republic was even founded–so a) other Force groups exist alongside the Jedi and b) this was before the Jedi would have been part of the Republic government, so both ways they wouldn’t be choking out other groups learning to use the Force–and they certainly weren’t interfering with the Chiss.  Yet the Chiss never really learned how to use the Force beyond this incredibly limited version of it?

That makes sense to me, when you consider that learning about the Force is REALLY NOT EASY, you have to have someone who already knows how, you have to have generations worth of training to help discover things, and the Jedi just happened to be so good at it that they almost made it look easy.  But it’s not.

I’m taking this as that the Chiss have just as much potential as other beings in the GFFA, they just never had the chance to learn from an organization that actually knew even some idea of what the hell they were doing.

Narratively intended?  Almost assuredly not.  BUT YOU WILL PRY THIS INTERPRETATION FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.

veritascara said: 

That is absolutely the conclusion I came to in the novel—that without guidance from the Jedi to lead them deeper into the Force, the girls abilities faded naturally, but they would likely have been able to keep them with proper training. As for why the training Thrawn talks about doesn’t work, I think it may have to do with their approach to the Force: Ezra tells Thrawn “the Force isn’t a weapon, but you’ll never understand that”, and I felt like this book really laid the foundation for why 

Thrawn only sees the Force as a tool or weapon, because that is exactly how he has seen his people and Anakin/Vader always use it. It seems logical that as these kids grow up with their experience of the Force only treated as a tool or means to an end, that it damages their ability to connect to it over time by gradually erecting mental blocks that prevent connecting to the Force for its own sake.

This is a really great observation, too!  So much of what the Force is about is a mental thing in various ways–how the Force plays into your thoughts/emotions and vice versa, how the approach to it absolutely plays a part in unlocking potential.  I was thinking about your response and connecting it to this post about lightsabers from the other day as a similar example, how a Sith uses a lightsaber only for attack and domination and execution, while only a Jedi can use a lightsaber to its full potential.

I feel like this fits with being another aspect of what’s going on with the Chiss–you can achieve various degrees of success with Force-related things when you come at them from a more selfish or aggressive or weaponizing viewpoint, but that it was the Jedi who really connected the most with Force-related things.  If the Chiss are like Thrawn–and he does say about them, But one fact has always remained constant: The Chiss must be approached from a position of strength and respect. One must have strength, for the Chiss will deal only with those capable of keeping their promises.–then that fits with a culture of people who probably wouldn’t have a great time unlocking that connection to the Force, especially one that requires you to submit to it and let it work through you.

The Sith could achieve a larger degree than usual, because they learned from the Jedi, but the Chiss wouldn’t have had that and so the approach wouldn’t let them learn very much on their own, if their cultural foundations were accurate to what Thrawn says about them!