I have been trying so hard not to rant on the internet. I have been holding this back for months now. I can’t take it it. I am so sick of people “You can’t like the Sith because they are fascists and bad”!
So here is my rant about why this pisses me off.
As a Jew I hear “You like fascists. You’d like hitler. You’re a horrible person and a traitor.” to me fascism isn’t the ultimate evil. Genocide is. and the Jedi have done that too.
The Jedi are try to get rid of all the Dark siders in the galaxy. They have tried. In legends which I’m mostly thinking about the Jedi have tried to kill all the Sith. If you’re playing swtor, the hyperspace war is as canon swtor. Canon is what you make it but it is exists. In disney canon Bane was the only survivor of the last Jedi- Sith war. (I don’t know the full canon but I’m guessing if Bane didn’t murder all the Sith the Jedi did)
and the Sith are trying to murder all the Jedi. In my opinion They are both bad and both trying to commit genocide on the other. There is no moral superiority. They are both bad. they are both super fucked up.Their trainings are both fester pits of mental illness. They are both evil.
Insert Anakin gif here.
Jedi and Sith are both fucked up cults from the same source dragging the galaxy into a religious war time and time again, degrading themselves in fear until you get the war leading Jedi of the prequels and the unconnected Sith of the OT. It’s a tragic. It’s messed up. The Sith are a ticking time bomb and I like them.
I like messed up things. I like fucked up characters. I like villains. I love villains who are people. That’s why I like the Sith empire. Evil functioning society sounds cool. I want to know how it works. I want to make it work. Let me have that.
I like the Sith as the Antithesis of the Jedi. The Sith as connected to the imperials as the Jedi are separate from the republic. The Sith as Angry and attached and emotional and “Fuck the will of the Force. This is My life.”. I want to play with the pros and cons of that.
If I go back to can we debate the the Sith and Jedi code. OF COURSE WE FUCKING CAN. “All debates of Sith Versus Jedi Code are essentially underlined with the Sith ethos is evil”
OK. WE GET IT! The Sith are the bad guys! WE KNOW! I KNOW. Let us debate the codes. I don’t get the Jedi code. I had to work and do research to guess at it. The sith code I get.
The Jedi philosophy comes to down to “Everything is connected. Things happen for a reason. handle it calmly and wisely.” The Sith: “Life is chaos. You can do shit with your will and ambition.”
That is something to debate. Let us have fun. It’s fiction. You can like the bad guys.
Well hi there, and thank you for the compliment. I’m a little less calm than I look, honestly, but at least with questions on tumblr I can take my time to answer them. It definitely helps me get my thoughts together.
And I do have a very long answer for you, and it comes in several parts. Bear with me.
Answer part one:
The basic idea of Jedi/Old Republic = good and Sith/Empire = bad is a very, very simplistic premise, and significantly unreflective of anything remotely realistic. I like highlighting the grey areas, the areas where the Jedi and Old Republic were NOT good, and the areas where the Sith and Empire were NOT bad. And mostly it’s a heavy emphasis on the former.
Many times I do this because it’s something that not a lot of people are doing, and I feel it’s something that should be taken notice of more often. While we might be told we’re supposed to see the Jedi and Republic as pure innocents, as saints, as the heroes and the ones who are purely Good, and at worst maybe a little misguided sometimes, that is not what is depicted. I take issue with people showing me a picture of a grassy field under a blue sky and telling me that even though that’s what’s depicted, I’m actually seeing a cityscape. And that’s kind of the impression I have of how Star Wars is presented to its audience right now.
What is depicted is the Republic/Jedi/Alliance performing questionable and sometimes downright atrocious acts of religious persecution, murder, slavery, brainwashing, terrorism, and unethical warfare.
And here’s the kicker – obviously, the Empire and the Sith are/were doing these things too. Every faction on this playing field is utilizing the same horrible set of skills and tactics and behaviors, but only one side of the conflict is being vilified and blamed for performing them, via the narrative. The narrative is quick to highlight, in high relief, all of the atrocities that the Sith and the Empire perform, yet doesn’t even acknowledge that the Republic/Jedi/Alliance are prone to doing these same things. At least, not openly. But the overwhelming evidence that they DO perform them is all over the place. I have cited many common examples before, but I’ll run the risk of repeating myself here:
the Jedi kidnapping children from their parents because they feel they have a religious right to these childrens’ bodies and minds before they even have the capability of making the choice themselves;
the Jedi readily going along with utilizing a slave army born and bred solely for the purpose of dying in a war;
the Republic utilizing orbital bombardment of Mandalore to the point where the planet’s entire surface was rendered unlivable for over 300 years, even though Mandalore was not currently at war with the Republic, and had made no move to declare such a war;
the systematic genocide of a wide variety of non-human species that the Republic performed for over eight hundred years that resulted in humans taking up the huge percentage of the population of sentient beings in the galaxy that they do today;
the Republic designing and utilizing a staggering variety of weapons of mass destruction capable of inducing planet-scale catastrophes (Hammer Station, Shadow Arsenal, Baradium Bombs, the Death Mark, the Shock Drum, etc. etc.);
the Alliance to Restore the Republic performing actions and displaying behaviors identical to modern-day terrorists (sabotage, espionage, theft, kidnapping, assassination, bribery, violence, and widespread destruction of government and public property in order to instigate political and ideological change);
the Republic actively endorsing and allowing an extremist religious sect to take a heavy-handed lead in, and sometimes even take entire control of, almost every aspect of the government and social lives of its people, including but not limited to politics, law enforcement, law making, judicial affairs, the military, religious freedoms, family planning, and forcibly implementing their own insular religious culture’s needs and desires upon non-member’s cultures;
The Republic claiming to be a “democracy” being run by “senators” and representatives where an alarming number of worlds have representatives which were not elected by their people and had no standard bar of leadership to pass to be included in the Republic’s proceedings (Republic worlds’ leaders range from actual senators, governors, and presidents to kings and queens, emperors, nobility, influential clans and families, military warlords, despots, dictators, heads of corporations and other business leaders, religious leaders, and criminal kingpins, not to mention the dozens of puppet governments that the Republic itself set up after it invaded and subjugated “problematic” planets).
This is a very brief and partial list, by no means exhaustive. And very few people talk about this stuff. Much of what I write is because I feel that this is a dialogue that can only benefit from being put out in the open, because there’s never just one side to a story. People are not arithmetic - there’s never just one right answer and all the rest are wrong. Things are complicated. People are not Good or Evil, they’re just people. And I think that’s very important to highlight, particularly here on tumblr, because it’s something that often gets lost in the highly charged and highly polarizing world of tumblr discussion and politics.
Answer part two:
One of the problems that I tackle frequently is people assuming that since I like the Sith and the Empire, that means that I must approve of everything that they do, and assume that I view them as the “good guys”. I don’t. Overall they’re just as terrible as the Republic and the Jedi and the Alliance, I just like the Sith and Imperials better than my other options. I like them for many reasons, and none of them have to do with me assuming that they would hold the real-world moral high ground. A few examples:
Aesthetics. I like the way they look, I like the way they feel, I like the atmosphere and mood that they set.
Childhood bias. I grew up thinking Darth Vader was The Coolest™, and the Star Destroyers were so awesome, and I got really excited hearing the shriek-roar of the TIE fighter engines, and red was my favourite colour and all the Sith had red lightsabers.
Individual characters being favourites within each group. Almost all of my favourite characters in Star Wars happen to be Imperials, Sith, or other disapproved-of fringe groups like bounty hunters, mercenaries, pirates, crime lords, etc. This tends to put me in the position of looking more favourably towards their faction or allegiance of choice, however slight.
None of this has anything remotely at all to do with whether or not I think the Sith and the Empire have the moral high ground. As far as I’m concerned, nobody has the moral high ground in Star Wars. I just don’t feel the need to echo and parrot the sentiment that everyone already knows, that the Sith and the Empire do bad things. Of course they do. They’re made of people. People do bad things. It doesn’t matter what sect or organization or government they belong to. And the same can be the reverse, as well. People do good things, regardless of what sect or organization or government they belong to. The Sith and the Empire are no exception, but we rarely get to peek into their side of things because that’s not the direction the dominant narrative prefers to go.
Everybody knows that the Republic and the Alliance and the Jedi are capable of doing good things. Everybody acknowledges those things already. The same with the fact that the Empire and the Sith do bad things. Everybody acknowledges that already.
But it’s the things that nobody likes to mention, the bringing out in the open of the fact that not everything the Republic and Jedi do is good, that not everything that makes them what they are is right; that is something that I feel is important to discuss. So that’s what I focus on. I feel like I’ve said the same thing in five different ways, but it’s something I want to be certain I’ve been clear on.
Nowhere, ever, have I said that the Sith and the Empire are the Actual Good Guys. I may like them more, but likability and intrinsic goodness are not the same thing, and have zero correlation. Personally, I don’t believe intrinsic goodness or badness even exist, but that is for a talk on relativism in general, and we’re here to talk about Star Wars.
Answer part three:
Another thing that I’d like to touch on, at least in regards to the Sith, is a partial religious identification with what the Sith are subtly engineered to represent. This one takes a little bit to explain, bear with me.
I adhere to an animistic, polytheist Pagan religion that I will refrain from naming. It maintains that there is a lot of power in the earth and the elements and our ancestors. The dualistic belief in a war between good and evil like the type so characteristic of monotheistic religions has never entered into my religion, so I fail to understand the appeal of something like, say, Light Side vs. Dark Side. Instead, I am much more comfortable with a worldview and belief system that sees the world in much more relative terms.
Circling back to how this relates to Star Wars, the Sith (and many non-Jedi Force-using sects, most of which turn out to be Dark Siders) as depicted in the many movies, books, comics, and animations are painted in unquestionably polytheistic Pagan colours. They are coded to look like Pagans, they have been designed to have rites and rituals geared to bring images of Pagans to mind, and underneath the Saturday-morning-cartoon “violence and blood and death and destruction! Yay!” veneer, many of them hold relative values and worldviews like Pagans. And to top it all off they are caricatured, vilified and reviled like Pagans so often are by many proponents of monotheistic religions in the world today. I am not impressed nor am I pleased.
From what I can see and the supplemental material I’ve read, the Jedi are modeled after well-established monotheistic religion, with bit of Buddhist and Taoist proverb taken out of contest and sprinkled on top to spice it up. And they play their part very well. Again, I am not impressed nor am I pleased, seeing the Sith – the biggest representative entity in Star Wars that’s painted in my colours, that reflects parts of my own worldview, however poorly – consistently depicted as the horrible evil Bad Guys that need to all be killed, for the good of the galaxy, and by the hand of the dominant monotheistic religion. That hits a little too close to home for me to be comfortable with it, particularly for the message it, intentionally or unintentionally, is communicating about how people should view or treat adherents of Pagan religions. My kneejerk reaction to that is to quietly say “no” and subversively adopt the Sith, and claim them as my own.
Answer part four:
This one is very related to that last sentence up there. My intrinsic nature is to find the people that nobody cheers for, to find the villains and the antagonists and the questionable side-characters and the morally ambiguous tricksters, and adopt them. I identify very closely with people like that. In life outside of tumblr, I fit into quite a few minority groups and often find myself on the outside looking in, when it comes to society and privilege and being deemed worthy or qualified to have good things in life. So I find that when it comes to fictional worlds and fictional characters in the stories and universes that I have grown to love, my heart goes out to the characters that nobody likes, or characters that everyone seems to think deserve to die, or just characters that get sidelined or ignored or left out in the cold. I take it upon myself to love them, and when many of them come from a group that is also deemed just as unworthy and unlovable as the characters themselves are, I tend to reach out to those groups as well. Honestly, this is the crux of the matter. I love Star Wars, I love the planets and the plotlines and the species and the technology and the starships and the magic of the Force, but I love it most for the individual characters.
So that’s pretty much it, I guess. This is all just my own personal reasoning for why I like the things I like and write the things I write, and I don’t claim to have all the answers or believe my word is some sort of sci-fi gospel or anything. There are lots of people out there who are perfectly happy with interpreting Star Wars in a dualistic light, and deeming that the Jedi/Republic have done nothing wrong, and that the Light Side truly does reflect Good and the Dark Side Evil. And you know what? That’s how they enjoy Star Wars and they are very welcome to a differing opinion. We tend to play in very different sandboxes, and none of us have any right to come stomping into the others’ sandbox and knock over their sandcastle. Dialogue and debate between us can be wonderful tools to help one another understand each other and enrich the fandom environment, as long as everyone involved is doing so willingly, and as long as those tools are not abused by using them to attack or demean others in a personal way.
When I make a post like this stating strong opinions I tend to get a bunch of angry anonymous messages bordering on hate mail, so I’m going to temporarily turn off anonymous messaging for a while. But I do appreciate the question, and I hope my answer was sufficient. :)
“falling to the dark side” is the jedi’s way of stripping agency from anybody who breaks away from them or disagrees with them, it relies on the notion that jedi beliefs are the default & that “nobody could POSSIBLY be a decent, sensible person and NOT want to be a jedi”, & that’s how they get away with othering and conquistadoring anybody who doesn’t think like them.
same energy as “believe what i believe or you’re gonna burn in hell forever” and “my ex is a crazy bitch you can’t trust anything they say”.
there’s no such thing as “light” or “dark” sides of the force, there never was. its all just different expressions & experiences of the same energy field. “falling to the dark side” is but a religious scare tactic akin to “you’re good and are going to heaven if you believe what we believe but if you don’t you’re gonna burn in hell for all eternity”, no amount of palpatine’s generation of fuckery, the psychos within the sith that could also be found within any group of ppl, or jedi worship will ever convince me otherwise.
“plagueis saw qimir and osha so that means he’s gonna kill them!!1” first off, not all sith believe in or follow rule of two, just like not every witch believe in threefold law. second, out of any sith you could learn from, plagueis may be one of the most legitimately chill of them. he doesn’t care about galactic dominance or whatever, he just believes in sith beliefs & wants to exist his way and do his cool force experiments. nothing’s set in stone, stop acting like anybody who disagrees with the jedi is doomed for suffering for daring to not agree with the jedi’s holy worldview. it was old and tired then and it’s straight up mold now. just stop.
