#jedi discourse

[milliekenobi99]

I’ve been thinking a lot about terms I’ve only seen in fanon for Jedi, such as “lineage-sibling” or “grand-padawan”, and I have no problem with the terms in themselves and have also used them in my fics, but I often wonder what that would actually mean to a Jedi. If specific familial references would actually hold that much weight. We know the Jedi consider each other family, but it’s based on community and shared devotion more than anything else, and that’s definitely special and beautiful. I just think some have a tendency to project a very nuclear structure onto independent lineages and I don’t think that’s a realistic lens through which to view Jedi culture, since most of them don’t know (or even want) life outside the temple. Like, I don’t think a lot of Jedi would have to dignify their masters by comparing them to a parent, because they are pretty far removed from the concept of one or two parents, and already value and love their master as a teacher and mentor, and that is the part that’s meaningful for them. I’m not trying to gotcha anyone with this, it’s just something I think about when writing Jedi family. I think sometimes we undersell how community based they are.

[the-bulletproof-heart]

I'm Jedi Critical until the day I die, but the one thing I can fully agree with the Jedi defenders on is that Mace Windu really got screwed over by both the movies and the fandom. He wasn't even that mean to Anakin compared to someone like Yoda, who was a lot harsher to Anakin imo. All of Windu's concerns about Anakin are justified. He's skeptical about Anakin being the Chosen One because there is absolutely no evidence for that other than Anakin being more powerful than the average Jedi. I honestly think Windu was looking out for Anakin in his own way. He's basically saying it's not smart to put all the Jedi's eggs in one "chosen one" basket, which is true. If more people had treated Anakin like a normal Jedi the way Mace does, he wouldn't have been under so much pressure. And I don't think it's "mean" at all to say that a 23 year old is not emotionally mature enough to be a master. It's kind of true, especially based on Anakin's actions.

Like, I think the Jedi screwed Anakin over in a number of ways, but I don't get why the fandom targets Mace specifically? I honestly think he was trying to do the best thing for Anakin. And I like to think that they were genuinely friendly with each other. They almost died together in CW. That's gotta be a pretty big bonding experience.

[hestiasbastardgirl]

the prequels and ot aren't about selfish vs selfless love. they're about love that was shunned and forced to be hidden vs love that was allowed to be there and flourish. the prequels aren't a backtracking of the values promoted in the ot, nor is the love presented in the prequels somehow different or wrong compared to love presented in the ot. the only thing that was wrong in the prequels was how love was treated from the outside, and that's what lead to the tragedy

[sherlockholmeshound]

what if i said that the way the jedi order worked might have also influenced the way Anakin-as Vader, would behave later as a warlord, what then-

The jedi order doesn't elect their council members at large, there's not elections or votes- Is only council members that elect new members. You can't deny there's a strict hiearchy amongst the jedi order. Not only that, but making sacrifices you don't agree with in order to achieve your goals for the greater good (who's making that choice? who's deciding what the greater good is? The Republic-The Council-Your Master).

Whenever someone wants to bring up how Anakin did nothing about the clones-who were slaves, when someone wants to bring up that Anakin should have left to be try and do something by himself- when someone wants to bring up that Anakin is a goddamn hypocrite for doing what he disagreed with- I need to point out that not only he was slave, but the jedi on itself works on a strong hiearchy in which Anakin felt under the peer pressure to go along with what the council wanted. Anakin and every other jedi felt forced to play into this dynamic, wether they agreed or not, and be generals leading slaves and child soldiers into war.

The idea that Anakin 'thrived' in war is so weird to me, because you're forgetting that one of his goddamn goals as Vader is to literally stop war-by any means. While Anakin was a general, this doesn't mean he had that much power; his command was only over the 501th and Ahsoka. Many Jedi, and especially Obi-Wan, had much more power in rank and over troops. Because Anakin was just a jedi knight; everyone loves to joke about how whiny and disrespectful and ungrateful and a big meme is that he isn't a master, but as soon as someone wants to point at the jedi order's flaws as an institution people absolutely forget this and want to point at him for being a hypocrite.

Anakin might complain all he wanted and would be dismissed; this isn't to mean that he didn't play a role into this, this doesn't excuse him from participating in the treatement /slavery the clones were subjected, or not trying to be more vocal over not sending literal children to war (hey! the guy that was a slave as a kid, the guy that was working as soon as he was able to walk, the guy that as a kid saw other kid's dying and exploding, has weird ideas about when to follow orders???? impossible). And this is of course not me saying Anakin was correct on murdering children, and this doesn't mean I think the jedi should have died. But be so for real right now, the jedi aren't fucking hippies, they aren't communists; they're a fictional fantasy religious order that at times works more like a cult, with a orientalist paper wrapping.

As soon as someone doesn't blame everything on Palpatine, as soon as you bring something that should be as obvious as 'the powerful religious wizards should get off of their literal ivory tower' , anakin needs to be the escape goat even when he has NOTHING to do with the conversation, even when he's just another jedi knight, that was literally knighted due to the war so he could be sent to the front as soon as he recovered from losing a limb.

Like i don't care if he's evil or a hypocrite or whiny. Is just that he can't ever win at anything because either he's not conservative and respectful enough, or he isn't radical and loud enough, pick a side at the very least.

"The jedi didn't want a war" Awesome, that's....the bare minimum? In the movies against war, in the movies where the main hero defeated evil by throwing away his lightsaber, chosing love and going against his master, you would think the jedi order chosing to engage into a war and lead slave soldiers because they got too used to be close to power, should be a given! But nope uhh a-a-anakin>:((((((( he's a murdered, he probably loves to send children to war for shit and giggles!!! And he should have done more for the clones because h-he was a slave and he should know better!>:(((( Yeah, probably! But probably the jedi should have done more in general as well! Probably the fact he was raised into this strict hierarchy after being freed made him realize he needs to play into a dynamic he isn't comfortable with!

And then as vadeer he's a fucking crazy evil monster that behaves coldly and does what he deems necessary to bring that damned peace because he's obsessed with stopping violence- through violence, it makes no sense. As much as the keepers of peace making concessions and leading an army of slaves to war makes no sense.

T-the jedi had not choice:(((( but to send:(((( children:(((( to war:(((( Are you listening to yourself.

And if you really want to debate. They were fine with death penalty, as they were going to execute Ahsoka, a 15 years old, and Palpatine didn't have his hand on this, btw. I wonder if this had an impact of Anakin's already turbo-messed-up mentality. I wonder.

and again, THEY DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE KILLED.

okay, bye that's all -drops the mic-

[indigo-symphonies]

sorry. I should not be awake but I am crying over Anakin having to prove himself to literally EVERYONE his whole life—and somehow never being good enough.

and you better believe he was giving his all every chance he had.

you cannot tell me he wasn't exhausted from all that pressure and those unrealistic standards. you cannot tell me he had any self-worth or confidence.

(((any pride or arrogance he had was mask for his deep seeded insecurities!!! especially when it came to Padmé. in the Clovis arc(s) in clone wars, he was jealous because he never believed he was good enough, even for her. I am NOT saying she made him feel that way, because I think she genuinely loved him for who he was. but he was so angry because 1. he wasn't allowed to be publicly vocal about the one person he felt safe to be himself with, and 2. Clovis was actively jeopardizing that safe relationship AND completely ignoring Padmé's personal boundaries!!! anyways.)))

no. he was stripped of all of that and they wondered why he ultimately broke under the pressure!

not to mention he was simultaneously being groomed by the most evil being in the galaxy for all of that time too.

any righteous anger he had, he was encouraged to hang on to that. but the Jedi gave him no reason to believe any different, so why should he?

no wonder he fell so hard—he was aiming for the stars and was always being dragged through hell anyways.

[macabre-muses]

this jedi discourse stuff is getting boring cause like. they're doing objectively dubious stuff. they are doing it because they are constricted by their roles in the republic. and we can go on and on and on about how wrong or right that is and what they should or shouldn't have done but at the end of the day all of those flaws (because they are. their complacency is a flaw.) are necessary to the narrative. we wouldn't have a story to watch without them. (also almost every stern defense of the jedi turns into anakin bashing and whatever. i get why a jedi lover might not be anakin's number one stan. but looking at something the jedi canonically did and saying "that's more like something anakin would like" is pretty weird ig).

[kathrahender]

Controversial opinion but saying the Order 66 was okay and the Jedis deserved to be killed is as wild as saying the Jedi Order were perfect/pure good and didn't make mistakes.

[the-far-bright-center]

The Jedi *Order* in the Prequels came across negatively to me in comparison to my previous impressions of 'the Jedi' in the Original Trilogy

I’ve said it before, but I really struggle to relate to the side of the SW fandom that is obsessed with stanning the Prequels-era Jedi *Order* for its own sake. Debates about the specifics of the Jedi belief system aside, it's just that, from my personal perspective, based solely on the Prequels films, the Prequels-era Jedi Order as an *institution* is so.... uninspiring??? And, even, I daresay, rather unsympathetic. There are of course individual Jedi I adore, but the Order as a whole??? Ehhh. I can only speak for myself, but growing up as a massive Star Wars fan who had only ever watched the Original Trilogy films (I didn't have much exposure or access to the Expanded Universe material until I was older), I remember thinking the way the Jedi were portrayed in the Prequels was unexpected for a lot of reasons, and that it was largely a NEGATIVE 'reveal'. NOT that the story was bad, but just that the Jedi as an institution was not what I'd expected when Jedi were mentioned in the OT.

It was also clear to me that this was not an accident, this was a purposeful 'twist' on the OT audiences' expectations. And that it was therefore meant to tell us something about the state of the Jedi at this point in time.

The major thing that stood out was the fact that THE main Jedi Temple was located on Coruscant. I'd always pictured Jedi Temples to be in more remote and situated in nature, in keeping with their mystical, spiritual vibe established in the OT. Our only previous exposure to 'Jedi' from the pre-Dark Times at that stage had been two hermits who'd been living in remote areas, Obi-Wan and Yoda. So I'd certainly never imagined the main Temple would be a big ivory tower on a teeming city-planet and situated just around the corner from the Galactic Senate. Yoda being the 'Grand Master' and being so prominent in this setting was also a mindfuck. People may not even register it as such these days, but at the time it was unsettling to see him in that ‘grandiose’ role when all you'd ever known of the character previously was a quirky (but seemingly humble) swamp muppet. It immediately made me question what the heck was going on with the power dynamics of the Jedi Council in that era.....it actually seemed distressingly 'out of character' for the Yoda we'd always known from the OT, and this sense of incongruity informed my impression of the Jedi Order in the Prequel-era.

Going back to the OT, perhaps some fans who were familiar with the post-RotJ EU already had a certain view of Jedi Order prior to the Prequels' release that they were attached to....I don't know. In my case, I was a child when I watched the OT, and back then I never really thought about the Jedi one way or another as an organisation. And since I wasn't into the post-RotJ EU novels, I had no preconceived ideas based on that supplementary material, either. But once the Jedi Order was presented on-screen in the Prequels, I never looked upon it fondly or as something aspirational. It seemed pretty clear that this was an organisation that had changed from what it should have been and was no longer the most ideal version of itself. There was a coldness there, as well as a sense of being far removed from both humanity and nature that hadn't been present in my impression of 'a Jedi' in the OT (which was of course based almost entirely on Luke and his hero's journey). So I'm always pretty baffled when people want to view the Jedi at the Grand Temple during the Twilight of the Republic and Clone Wars era as some kind of carefree 'wizarding school set in space' rather than 'the Knights Templar just before their downfall'. I don’t share the rosey interpretation that some have, largely because the Prequels-era Jedi did not value love and family, and were essentially 'slaves of the Republic' themselves, in servitude to a corrupt and failing government. In the end, becoming militarised and participating in a Sith-run war, utilising enslaved soldiers as their cannon fodder. This is not a warm happy little enclave of space wizards that I've ever had any wish to fantasise about in a 'self-insert' kind of way.

While our first introduction to individual Jedi (Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan) in TPM is largely positive, there are already hints that something is off — the fact that they are so strongly bound to their 'mission' and answerable to and expected to obey the Council, for one. (Recall that Luke's trajectory in the OT is one of largely disobeying the Jedi authorities mentoring him.) And when we finally meet said Council— in a scene that is, chronologically, our very first introduction to the Jedi as an institution in the entire saga — we a shown a group of cold, unsympathetic monks sitting high atop their tower looking down upon a slave boy dressed in rags. And this slave boy, who had just been shown on-screen to be a selfless and heroic character, is nonetheless viewed disdainfully by this group as being unworthy of their time or attention, simply for the circumstances of his existence. His status as Chosen One, believed in so strongly by the warm and amiable Qui-Gon, is met with fear and skepticism by the other Jedi simply due to the fact that he's not what they expected. They expected to be handed a baby or a small child whom they could mold into their figurehead and ideal saviour from a young age. If the Chosen One was indeed real, then they'd hoped the one sent to them would be too young to remember his origins, rather than a boy raised in slavery who still feared for his enslaved mother's life.

Now, who am I going to empathise with, based on that scene alone? It's certainly not the Jedi Order, that's for sure.

To be clear, when I first watched TPM all those years ago, Qui-Gon Jinn was my favourite character, so it's not that I came away disliking 'the Jedi' as a concept. It's just that I could see that the Jedi character I'd found the most sympathetic and compelling was in fact viewed as a 'maverick' at odds with the majority rule, rather than as someone representative of the typical Jedi approach and mindset of that era.

In this matter, my view of the Jedi Order is still to this day founded on how it was first presented to the audience onscreen in the Lucas-era films (NOT how the EU or Disney canon or any other supplementary material portrays them). And in TPM, my very first impression was that some of the individual Jedi members are highly sympathetic and trying their best, but that 'the Order' itself comes across as cold and unsympathetic towards the characters who had already been established at that point as the protagonists of the story.