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Worldbuilding Wednesday -- The Jaesa Problem (minor spoilers)
[This is my Jaesa headcanon, with all the disclaimers of headcanonry. Minor spoilers for Sith Warrior story and Jaesa's companion story.]
Jaesa represents a great concept that’s confusingly executed. And I don't just mean the uneven voice acting, ahem.
There’s the initial play up of her Great Powers and then the essential brushing off of them. Then, at least to me, there’s her mis-characterization of the light side Sith Warrior's orientation as "a mask." Xhareen has never hidden who she is or her perception of the Force. She sees the Dark Side not as evil, but as night to day. Everything comes from passion, not cruelty and not narcissistic hedonism.
[I’m also completely ignoring her LS companion story of “hey, I just became a Sith. Let’s go recruit more people to our super secret club house!” And DS, I can not even.]
So what I headcanon for my LS Jaesa is this: Jaesa has the ability to connect with people and "read" them. This being so many centuries before the movies, it's relatively unheard of to be able to see such things so readily, and on command. Most Force visions come unbidden, but Jaesa has more control over them than the Jedi had experienced to date. But it's not perfect. It can be rather blurry and hard to interpret especially for a relatively young and sheltered person.
It's important to remember that she could root out spies while apprenticed to a rather accomplished Jedi spy. Now, I also headcanon that most Jedi are unwilling to live a life of lies. They’ll do covert missions here and there, most of them anyway. But to do it for a long time, and while chasing a Sith as powerful as Baras?
No, Nomen Karr is quite an outlier. If he hadn't been Force sensitive, he still would have made an excellent SIS agent. He has an uncanny ability himself to read people. And he projects his senses to Jaesa. None of the Jedi Council could see the ability Nomen Karr could, which is why he had trouble convincing them.
Therefore, Jaesa’s real ability is to channel the intuition of others and thereby see it clearly. Like a lens. Xhareen, otoh, has the uncanny ability to read adversaries (which is why someone close to her can, you know, pull one over on her). It wasn’t a real stretch on Taris to think that conscripts might be disloyal chickenshits. Xhareen assesses the situation and Jaesa clarifies it and puts it into words for her, becoming the ensuing course of action. Used by someone with less skill, Jaesa's power could turn into little more than confirmation bias.
I leave it up in the air if Jaesa could have sensed Quinn's deception, which I also play as having happened in a short period of time. Xhareen couldn't see it, never would have seen it, and therefore, she would have blinded Jaesa. I do have a non-canon scene where Jaesa, on her own, is able to determine that a piece of technology might somehow have a Force imprint. And she is able to sense a strong Force user in their vicinity, but she's also on holo and therefore, connecting with Xhareen.
++++++
Back to the canon story, though: Why after all the searching and killing does Baras let you keep Jaesa? Why doesn’t he want her for his own toy, or for you to kill her like you were supposed to?
By the time Jaesa comes into service of the Sith Warrior, Baras is starting to show signs of losing control of his vast network of spies and servants and contacts. He might be the Great Puppetmaster, but he's overreaching even his own abilities. Too many strings, and eventually they start to cross and break. He's also making his plans to kill his own master. When he realizes he, too, has over-estimated Jaesa's abilities, he loses interest in her.
So Baras leaves Jaesa to the SW. Even her parents are soon forgotten after they arrive on Dromund Kaas, because he learns right afterward that he now he has Nomen Karr to play with. So Baras is content to keep Jaesa at least close by.
Jaesa turns out to be a superb fighter, though, and that is a skill Xhareen can use. Xhareen also helps her to the realization that Passion does not mean all the dickish stuff that passes for Dark Side in game. That Xhareen focuses her Passion on her duty to the Empire. That duty sometimes means not killing everyone in the room. That strength sometimes comes from granting your enemy compassion, especially if they no longer represent a threat to the Empire. That is what sets Xhareen apart from the stereotypical Sith, especially the stereotype the Jedi put forward. It's not a mask, it's the essence of who she is.
That's the real lesson she needs to teach Jaesa. Be who you are.




I like the idea that Jaesa's powers are not quite the game-changer they appear to be early on, because it is frustrating that they're made such a big deal of early on and then never figure into the main storyline in any significant way after Taris, and the idea that the SW's blindness to Quinn's deception might in turn blind Jaesa to it is interesting!
I...also tend to mostly ignore the "secret LS Sith clubhouse" subplot. Ruqi's position for most of the vanilla game is that she'd like to see certain reforms made in the Empire but working in secret for those reforms while also trying to deal with Baras is not her style. And as much as I love playing LS Warriors (and I have three of them so...I love it a lot) I find it really frustrating that the game tends to interpret that as "Sith who secretly want to be Jedi". By the time I finished Ruqi's initial playthrough she was Light IV, but no one would ever, ever mistake her for a Jedi.
I totally see where youre coming from, theres a lot that was messed with the way the executed Jaesa's story and unfortunately I think a lot of that might be based on her romance. side eyes bioware
I've always taken it to be that when you take Jaesa as an apprentice, either LS or DS she just went through some traumatic shit, is the first time Baras really takes pause of the SW, cause up until that point it was like 'my apprentice is very dedicated and efficient' but taking on Jaesa is proof of the SW desire for advancement and that they clearly are as much of an opportunist as Baras himself is. So I figured he lets you have her, just to see what comes of it.
As for her powers, Ive never played a SW that left her LS (Cause Zhaire isn't here for all that LS Jedi nonsense), but I really hate that DS Jaesa is all vicious, bloodthirsty, and crude as a Sith. Like Zhaire is poised and educated, proud and has had years of 'proper' channeling of her passion and ambition, and theres no way she'd teach Jaesa to be the kind of Sith Zhaire herself looks down on. So I figure her powers are less 'sense alignment' and much more 'sense motive' in conjunction with a kind of empathy that allowed her to reach out to people . Nomen Karr was the one so fixated on Baras and his spies and on the superiority of the LS over the DS so I canon he defined it like that, and Jaesa learned to start to use it with that simple definition.
When it comes to her training, Zhaire I imagine would be more of a philosophical and intellectual teacher than with fighting and tactics. She'd mirror what her mother did for her, small bits of combat separated with long meditation and being grilled on aspects of the Sith Code, it would be breaking down the pathways of thinking that the jedi taught, and replacing them with the more forward, emotionally powered arguments of the Sith. Jaesa at the end of it would be in line with Zhaire's Dark 1/Dark-Leaning Neutral. I was always sad there wasnt a neutral option for Jaesa's turn out.
I truly think of my Jaesa as falling into the fandom concept of "gray," which of course the game now pisses on entirely. Xhareen is a Light V Sith and my JC is a Light V Jedi, and while they will eventually become friends, they are quite different. My neutral-Dark I JK is also quite different from Xhareen, something Scourge will make note of, soon. ;-)
DS Jaesa is really creepy and fetishy to me. I followed through with one once with a female Pureblood because of the old achievement for 10K affection for both LS and DS but even without the romance, it was bad.
Because Xhareen is an alien (even if she can "pass" as human and eventually wins a powerful spot in the Sith hierarchy) she identifies with the otherness Jaesa and Vette feel.
Also, my story is only loosely compliant with canon, and because I started with the Quinncident, I never wrote up exactly when Baras decides to turn on her. He learns something about her that she has tried to keep hidden (this I do mention: who her original Sith master was years ago) and realizes it might come back to bite him in the ass. Then he sees she has great sway with people she comes in contact with -- he might be the puppetmaster but he is obviously not a charmer, lol -- and he becomes afraid of what she could do. I am actually working on Baras backgrounding atm for my NaNo writing.