I really love your meta on the Jedi of the prequel era. Without wanting to blame them for everything, I am constantly baffled by how they were supposed to be humble and peacemakers. How can you be humble when you've never experienced the most humbling moments of life and live a very privileged life in corusant, how can you be a peacemaker when you've declared that the opposite way of life to your creed is wholly wrong and evil?
But that’s humanity. That’s the flaw that make the Jedi – and all the characters – relatable. They make human mistakes because they face human issues. We could say they were more privileged in terms of resources and advances and yet so many of us still struggle with arrogance. The disconnection between what one should be and what one is is natural to all of us. we all should be doing better, we all have access to information to be better and yet here we are.
We all believe in kindness, equality, respect and harmony and yet we make so many mistakes, as a society and as an individual. These mistakes are not the result of malicious intent, they are simple the result of flawed beings trying to survived a complicated, flawed existence.
The jedi should be perfect but they aren’t because there’s no such thing as perfection. That’s not how human beings work. There’s no government, no belief system, no religion, no community that is without flaw, that works perfectly for *everyone* involved.
The jedi should’ve done better? Absolutely! But we can say the same about everyone else. that’s why I find so important to contextualize their mistakes. They didn’t made mistakes because they were bad people, they made mistakes because that’s what people do despite their best intentions.
I understand what you’re saying and there’s a disconnection between what they preach and how they behave but, if we are being honest, that disconnection is found in all of us. and like most of us we are blind to so much of it because we only have access to our own point of view. Jedi Order’s flaws feel more glaring because we can look at the whole picture. We can see it where it began and how it ended. That’s something the characters didn’t have. They couldn’t remove themselves from their own context to see things from our perspective.
Look at the coup they planned during ROTS. We understand the political/social climate at the time to understand the terrible mistake they were making. But to them it was the most heroic, honorable solution. We knew it would’ve been a coup d'etat because we had all the facts and povs. But they only had their POVs so to them it was a best possible solution.
I’m not denying their flaws or mistakes I’m just saying it’s hard to expect them to be without bias or flaws without removing their humanity. As frustrating as the Jedi Order can be sometimes, it’s their bad decisions that make them so relatable to us.
