Star Wars flips the Legends-era story of Han Solo and Princess Leia’s children in an episode of Star Wars: Visions. The second episode, “The Twins,” tells the story of two powerful siblings, created to serve the dark side, who become adversaries when the brother turns his back on the dark side and decides to follow a different path. This resembles Han and Leia’s oldest children, the twins Jacen and Jaina Solo, who were born with incredible intrinsic connections to the Force and were trained in Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order.
In the Star Wars Legends continuity, Han and Leia had three children: The twins Jaina and Jacen, and a younger son, Anakin. Anakin died as a young man during the Yuuzhan Vong War, likely before he could reach his full potential as a Jedi. Jaina and Jacen, however, became exceptionally strong Force users, with Jaina becoming the New Jedi Order’s Sword of the Jedi, a title given to the order’s greatest warrior. Jacen mastered advanced and experimental uses of the Force (and the dark side, as Darth Caedus), such as flow-walking, which allowed its user to project their consciousness through time, potentially altering the timeline.
Jacen’s fall to the dark side began out of desperation, during his time as a POW in the Yuuzhan Vong War. After the war, Jacen explored numerous Force-using religions, even those that used the dark side. This brought him to the powerful Dark Lady of the Sith, Lumiya, who manipulated Jacen into seeing the merits and possible benevolence of the Sith. This rendered Jacen vulnerable enough to become addicted to the dark side, and he became Darth Caedus, but his reign of terror was eventually ended when he dueled Jaina, who reluctantly killed him. In “The Twins,” Karre desired to flee his sister’s cadre of Imperials, but not out of loyalty to the Republic or the Jedi, but simply a desire for freedom. Unlike the Solo twins, neither sibling died, and Karre endeavored to save his sister, even after escaping her.
Like the Solo twins, Am and Karre had incredible mastery of the Force, able to sustain themselves in the vacuum of space during their battle. They also empowered themselves further with their Kyber crystals, allowing Am to use her lightsaber as lightwhip-like tendrils. Karre enhanced his lightsaber to have a gigantic blade that sliced a portion of a Gemini-class Star Destroyer in half. While their fight was intentionally quite exaggerated in Visions, the powers that Jacen exhibited in Legends were unlike anything the Star Wars franchise had seen at the time. In addition to flow-walking, Jacen teleported objects, listened to beings anywhere in the galaxy, and infused his blood with a traceable Force presence (which he learned from the Witches of Dathomir).
The key difference between Karre and Jacen, however, was motivation. Karre sought freedom from the galaxy-spanning conflicts and desired to know about his and his sister’s origins. Jacen wanted to prevent more destructive conflicts and believed that becoming a Sith was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. While Jacen committed atrocities as Caedus and murdered the fan-favorite Mara Jade, he did so because he thought he’d save the galaxy as a Sith, not a Jedi.
What both sets of twins have in common, aside from incredible Force mastery, is that they represent the legacy of the Star Wars saga. “The Twins” seemingly takes place sometime after the Skywalker saga, with Am and Karre representing the latest iteration of the dark side and the Empire. Jaina and Jacen were the children of some of the Rebellion and New Republic’s greatest leaders, and Jacen, tragically, embodied the Sith legacy of his grandfather, Darth Vader. By flipping the Legends-era Solo twins in Star Wars: Visions, the Star Wars franchise proved once again that bloodlines and upbringing don’t define somebody as much as their choices do.
