Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Politics aside, genre fiction exists to scratch a certain sort of itch. Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend, and I'll shamelessly steal bits:
In short, you can't keep asking questions like 'can the Light side of the force be immoral under some belief systems?' or, 'isn't an organised, militarised group of warrior monk cultists going to end up with some pretty dubious practices?' without ruining the thing that makes original Star Wars fans enjoy it. It can work occasionally in one-offs or side material, but if you do it too much in the main shows you're going to lose the fans even if your storytelling is impeccable, because you're not telling the stories people want to hear.
The above is a lesson I think about a lot because I had to wean myself out of the 'but it would be so interesting if you took X aspect of the genre seriously' writing mindset and realise that even if there were potential there, it would remove the aspect of the genre that made me want to write stories in the first place. It's especially a problem for the professional authors / scriptwriters / directors / critics, who spend far more time in their chosen medium than their average audience member, and therefore find their tastes diverging. The professionals demand originality, complexity and subversion because they're sick of the same old thing. And at some point somebody has to remind them that they're being self-indulgent and neglecting the interests of the people they're supposed to be working for (employers/audience).
Getting back to politics, KOTOR II did morally-nuanced discussions of the Force and nobody was particularly upset. Even the first game shows a variety of Jedi with some not-especially-admirable traits. Those games, and the prequels, were interesting precisely because up until then the Jedi has been pretty clear-cut good guys. People get upset now because:
But isn't that just the point? The original depiction and backstory of the Jedi Order was that they were flawed, arrogant and compromised their ideals in service to politics. That directly led to them neglecting the will of the Force, having their abilities clouded and weakened and led to their fall. It isn't a deconstruction to show that. KOTOR II is a great example. But in the vast majority of media the Jedi are depicted as always being unambiguously good and competent. That surely is then the deconstruction? Or perhaps Flanderization, that they serve the Light side of the force so therefore they must be all good, all competent.
I think 2 is more likely. That now people see it as enemy action (and perhaps it is!) and therefore instinctively side against it, even when arguably it is in fact being portrayed accurately.
To be fair, I do think this particular problem starts with the prequel trilogy. The order of Jedi Knights worked best as background mythology. Before the days of Jar Jar and Young Anakin, they were hazy and a bit nondescript. I think that worked perfectly for the kind of mythic tale the OT was trying to weave. Going back and filling in details did some irreversible damage to the universe's structural integrity, but it was at least offset by the spice of variety: new aliens, new planets, new factions, etc. The playground widened up enough where I think many fans could ignore the mess Lucas made with the core story and play with the toys of their own choosing.
Nu Star Wars instead often seems like its doubling down on the parts few people liked to begin with while offering little else in compensation.
tESB and RotJ, actually, started the "the old Jedi were good-hearted but were not all-wise" theme.
Yoda, ESB:
Yoda, RotJ:
Luke and Obi-Wan, RotJ:
Obi-Wan and Yoda are specifically portrayed as wrongly inflexible regarding the temptations of the Dark Side and the possibility of redemption from it. Luke does enter a Dark Side rage, but it does not forever dominate his destiny. Anakin does still have good in him, and Luke does not have to kill him to defeat the Emperor. Obi-Wan and Yoda are the stale thesis, which invited the comically-evil antithesis of the Emperor and Vader, and Luke represents the new, vibrant synthesis (his new lightsaber in RotJ is green, neither the cold blue of Obi-Wan and pre-fall Anakin nor the dangerous red of Darth Vader - the only three lightsabers that had been shown up to that point - but something new and alive).
Do note that this makes prequel and sequel aspersions cast on the Jedi different in implication. Showing the Jedi of the Old Republic being flawed supports the dialectic in the original trilogy; these are the mistakes that caused them to be supplanted by an antithesis. I haven't watched the sequels, but any aspersions they cast on Luke's Jedi in the New Republic undercut that dialectic; if the synthesis is bad, what was the point of the exercise? It is important that Luke's new Jedi are not the same as the old Jedi.
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There definitely is a disconnect, where we are told (and Lucas says!) the Jedi are good and moral and wise, and then shows them or implies them doing things which should render that judgement clearly flawed. Even back in the old RPG before the prequels the (Lucas approved) Jedi sections talk about how the Jedi would test and take force sensitive children, and that most parents saw this as an honor, but the ones that didn't had no choice. And how even alien species who had their own unique connection to the force were studied willingly or not by the Jedi, which is why there were so few extant Force cults because many of them went into hiding or died out.
The only option that seems to reconcile the two is that individual Jedi were good, but they were essentially operating within a system that had taken and raised them as children, taught them what was good and bad and was connected to a deeply corrupt Galactic Republic and so their viewpoint was very attached to this.
Yoda in the Revenge of the Sith novelization indicates he realizes this at the end, that the Jedi had become too entwined with the Republic, and too unbending rather than learning and evolving given they had become a galactic organization. And that Qui-Gon was probably right all along about listening to the living force.
It is perhaps to be expected that if you are writing a story about an order of wise enlightened space-knights who can see the future who at one point get wiped out, you are going to have to have these wise people holding the idiot ball at some stages of the story. They basically have to have been deeply flawed and blind for the plot to work. At the same time as being great role models for the last of them to want to take up the mantle again.
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I don't have anything to add here except I love it whenever somebody links to Shamus' blog. Really good stuff if you're a fan of vidya but also like reading walls of SSC or adjacent material.
I kinda stopped checking it once one of his kids took over after his passing. The content really wasn't as interesting and failed to meet Shamus' level of quality. And when I last did, his steadfast 'No Politics' rule had appeared to have been hollowed out entirely for the usual reasons. I was also really dismayed by what looked to me like his kid publicly throwing his corpse under the bus and painting him as some kind of raging anti-feminist behind the scenes.
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