[ Star Wars - Jedi of the Republic - Mace Windu #3, #5 ] I’M GONNA YELL ABOUT THIS because I read the last two issues together and it really put into focus how this is one continuous story with a whole lot of deliberate themes. I’ve talked a bunch about them already, including how this is a story about emotions and the mastery of them, a story about good and evil, and now a story about the Jedi and their compassion. All of these tie together, the flashbacks and words chosen are all part of a greater narrative whole, the people who say the things they do and why they do, who fails to understand the people they’re scorning, are all important. And here’s where we see the culmination of everything with Prosset, who has accused the Jedi of falling into being war-mongers and killers. Prosset seems like he might be coming from a reasonable place at first, but he attacks first. He punches Mace first, he draws his lightsaber first, he started this. And when he has a chance to defend himself (FOR TRYING TO MURDER MACE WINDU) he devolves into frothing about it, he literally says he’ll laugh over their corpses. This is not someone who sees the truth, as the comic so directly put a lampshade on. This is someone who has lost his way. The reactions between the two are telling. He does not try to talk to them, he only rants at them and says, oh, well, surely you’re going to kill me now, because that’s what murders do! He says they won’t tolerate dissent, yet they hear him out. And his punishment? HE HAS TO WORK IN THE LIBRARY. Where he’s still free to talk about his dissent all he likes. Prosset was ready to turn his back on the Jedi, to scorn them and LAUGH OVER THEIR DEAD BODIES, rather than actually trying to do anything about it. Prosset is not a blind man who sees the truth. He is simply a blind man who has fallen. (You want to laugh over someone’s corpse? You have fallen.) And, oh, the Jedi. Whose aim is always and forever to try to reach out and bring someone back to the good. Mace explicitly says that Prosset’s feelings, while misguided, are understandable and that they value him and want him to come around. As @glompcat says in their fantastic meta about this issue, this also pretty definitively shows that Anakin’s fear about what the Jedi would do to someone who broke the rules (kick him out or lock him up or whatever) is entirely laid at Palpatine’s manipulative feet because it’s demonstratively not true. Prosset TRIED TO MURDER MACE WINDU (and continued to express a wish for violence upon him!) AND THEY JUST SENT HIM TO THE LIBRARY (I cannot get over this! How deeply compassionate the Jedi are, even when directly attacked and spat upon!), where he could still talk about whatever he wanted to talk about. I was wary that this mini-series would be able to do justice to a character I really loved or a people that I really loved, but instead it knocked it out of the park. The Jedi are forever compassionate, caring, and often misunderstood about how fundamentally good they are. And Mace Windu is absolutely one of the best of them and I’m so glad that this comic did justice to thim. ABSOLUTELY A MUST READ.
I was thinking about this again recently, how Prosset falls to the dark side and the Jedi’s response is to make him work in the library and show him compassion and try to bring him back to the light. And how Quinlan Vos falls to the dark side in Dark Disciple and their response is to send him to his room for awhile and show him compassion and try to bring him back to the light. And how, in Dooku: Jedi Lost, when Jor Aerith is basically selling information to the Hutts (?) to pay off her son’s gambling debts, which is pretty dark of her, they show her compassion and send her to work in the library. And how this fits with I see Obi-Wan having used the dark side in that first fight with Maul, but he’s never given any shit for it, because he got himself back under control. And how Obi-Wan says to Maul that he knows the choice to join the dark side wasn’t Maul’s own choice, but that embracing it when you do have a choice is what makes you weak. And how Qui-Gon was taught even in the creche, that the dark side was part of them all, that it was something they had to discipline themselves against. And how, via word of god from George Lucas himself, on how the Force works (basically, it’s in whether you use it through selfish or selfless motivations, which is what the Jedi teach, their teachings are almost word for word what George Lucas lays the Force out as, which shows us that, yes, the Jedi are narratively correct about how the Force works, that whatever we think of the set-up of George Lucas’ philosophies–which do echo real-world psychology, btw–with in the narrative the Jedi are reliable narrators on this) that the dark side takes discipline to overcome. It sometimes seems like the Jedi are too compassionate (and I can see some making the case for it, Qui-Gon definitely thinks that way in Master and Apprentice, that they were too compassionate to Rael, both when he was younger and when he got his padawan killed) but IT JUST MAKES ME LOVE THEM SO MUCH. LIKE, THE SECOND ANYONE SHOWED ANY KIND OF REMORSE OR WILLINGNESS TO DO BETTER, THE SECOND THERE WAS A GLIMMER OF HELPING THAT PERSON, THEY WERE RIGHT THERE TO HAND OUT ANOTHER CHANCE.
