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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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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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:

If you leave now, help them you could, but... you will destroy all, for which they have fought, and suffered.

[...]

Told you I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse.

Yoda, RotJ:

If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Luke and Obi-Wan, RotJ:

Luke: You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father!

Obi-Wan: Your father was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view.

[...]

Luke: There is still good in him.

Obi-Wan: He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil.

Luke: I can't do it, Ben.

Obi-Wan: You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Darth Vader again.

Luke: I can't kill my own father!

Obi-Wan: Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope.

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.

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.