Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA: IN MEMORIAM

[Document #MS8619 (“Unpublished Reflections on Jyn Erso”), from the personal files of Mon Mothma (via the Hextrophon Collection).]

I regret to say I only met Jyn twice. To claim I knew her well would be an insult to the young woman whose fervor captivated so many. Conversely, to speak only of her effect on our movement—to recount yet again the rallying of the Rebellion and our transformation from a wary coalition into a unified nation—would be both redundant and insulting.

So put no stock in my words. I can tell you of those two meetings and what I saw in her—or what, looking back, I remember seeing in her, which may be far removed from the truth. You may find more of a weary ex-senator than Jyn Erso in all this.

Jyn was in chains when we met before Operation Fracture. I’d seen her file and chosen her for the mission for reasons I wish I could be proud of. I expected to meet a troubled girl who had been failed by the Alliance in a hundred different ways: failed by Saw, failed by those of us who knew Saw, failed when she went out on her own, and failed by our inability to save her father or mother. I expected she could be persuaded (by which I suppose I meant manipulated) into helping us, and that in doing so we might help her, too.

But the woman I met at Base One could not be manipulated. There are a very few people whose will and ferocity are so great that they pull other people in their wake. I’ve known some who cultivated that talent as politicians and generals, for good or ill. Jyn, I think, never knew the effect she had on others—never realized the intensity of her own humanity or the presence she brought to a room. She was, as expected, troubled and quarrelsome; she was also impossible to ignore or forget.

In her short life, she had seen relentless hardship and become hard herself. But her fire shone bright.

If our first meeting was brief, our second was even briefer. We exchanged a handful of private words when she briefed Alliance High Command on the threat of the Death Star, and the woman I met then was far different from the one we’d chained. Was she at peace? I don’t believe so. But she held herself with a newfound certainty.

It’s become fashionable in some quarters to claim Jyn Erso went to Scarif intending to die a martyr—that she realized she had lost everything and chose her path by its inevitable end. I will dispute this claim until my own dying days. I think Jyn fully recognized who she was and sought a way to channel her best and worst impulses, her darkest moments and her brightest, toward a cause worthy of her true incandescence.

In a kinder universe, she would have walked away from Scarif. I cannot imagine who she would have become, but I think she would have been extraordinary.

I am grateful I knew her, no matter how short the time.