Jedi Academy Trilogy/Headscratchers

• I just wondered about something for the first time ever. People like Michael A. Stackpole seem to despise Kyp Durron because he used the Sun Crusher. To the point where, instead of trying to maybe save the character, they write him as a total Jerkass. But why is there so much animosity towards Kyp...when everybody he killed was an Imperial? Luke killed a ton of people when he blew up the Death Star, but nobody cared because--presumably--they thought "Oh, they were all with the Empire, so it was okay." Well, as I recall Carida was a planet-sized military academy. Everybody there was either training others to go to battle for the Empire, or being trained to do so. So what makes Kyp's actions so much more unforgivable than Luke's? That there wasn't an imminent threat from them? The fact that the guys on the planet weren't stormtroopers yet? That some of them were there against their will (which was the case on the first Death Star too)? That he killed more people at once than Luke did, even though both of them killed thousands at the very least? Help me out here.
  • Most of the planet's inhabitants were actually civilians; aside from being the homeworld of the Caridan species, which lived pretty much exclusively on Carida, only about 150,000 of the inhabitants were associated with the Imperial Academy. You might still think it was an acceptable target, but the fact that Kyp murdered almost 25 million civilians is undeniable, and in terms of the effect on the Caridans it likely qualifies as genocide.
    • Plus, the Death Star was about to fire. It was a them or us situation. Carida was not sitting on a prepped superweapon about to fire.
    • Ah, I see, thank you. Not having read this series in a long time apart from I, Jedi, I'd forgotten any mention of civilians being on the planet. In which case no, I don't think it was an acceptable target any more than Coruscant would have been an acceptable target back when it was "Imperial Center". Still, for all the problems I have with Anderson's writing I liked the Kyp character, and considering that Han was able to talk him down and get him to reform it makes me wonder why Stackpole writes him as a complete bastard in his contributions to the New Jedi Order series rather than writing him as The Atoner like Chris Cassidy and Tish Pahl did in a short story they wrote set in 12 ABY. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Stackpole's writing, but it seems that as far as Kyp is concerned he simply can't conceive that it's possible to come back from the dark side and be a good person, despite that kind of redemption being a major theme in Star Wars. Vader, Mara, Luke...those are just some examples of people who've gone dark and come back from it. And then there's Pellaeon, who helped Thrawn almost destroy the entire New Republic before he changed his ways. I don't think that Pellaeon should be written as a mustache-twirling villain and I'm glad that Stackpole didn't do that with him, but it puzzles me that Stackpole can wrap his head around the idea that Thrawn's second-in-command can redeem himself, and that Palpatine's personal assassin can redeem herself, but can't bring himself to believe the same about Kyp Durron. (And bear in mind that we have no idea how many people Jade and Pellaeon killed, how many of them were civilians, etc.) Inconsistency like that just bugs me.
  • What gets me is how many people, both in-universe and out, seem to forget that Kyp was to at least some degree under Exar Kun's mental control. Exactly how much is up for debate, but once Kun is banished for good Kyp instantly stops being evil.
    • The issue there is that (as Stackpole has Corran point out in I, Jedi, that if Kun was controlling Kyp he could have just had Kyp kill Luke, instead of Kyp leaving and Kun spending weeks trying to find other ways to finish Luke off. Exar Kun influenced Kyp to indulge his darker side, but he didn't make him do anything.
    • I second that, Exar definitely just erased some barriers, but Kyp himself wanted to use the Sun Crusher.