windona replied to your post: thewillowbends replied to your post: BEGGING ON...
On one hand, it’s fun to analyze this stuff and the various threads of power, complicity, and how unaware characters are of their own issues and the systems. On the other hand, part of the fun of the PT is that everything and most people are terrible, and moral arguments about that can rapidly turn into purity wank
And I think to a certain extent that is pretty fair, in an online environment where people don’t really know where the other speakers are coming from -- sure, I have an extensive history of talking about how well intentioned I think the Jedi legitimately were, how I think Palpatine’s master stroke was in finding levers to push the Jedi incrementally over the line morally, how I think Anakin’s grotesque punishment is important to narrative structure and audience satisfaction given his crimes. But it’s easy to see one post and say “WTF, Anakin apologist! The Jedi could never DESERVE what he did to them.” And that’s not a wild reaction, really.
But it’s a boring one, I think. SW is much more interesting when it’s not about black and white and good people deserving happy endings -- but bad people maybe deserving them too, because the story is deeper and more joyous when there is real forgiveness of even true evil. It’s also easy to downplay or disengage with SW as an allegory for the evils of real world institutions that we are personally mired in, but I think it is less thoughtful. The Jedi and the Republic were corrupt. Are we corrupt? Yeah, absolutely. How do we think about that through fiction? What can we get out of fiction that helps us? Rooting for the “good guys” gets us a lot less than analyzing their flaws and how large forces compromise good people.