Imagine being a Jedi Padawan in The Clone Wars. Before the war you have tens of thousands of family members all throughout the galaxy, tens of thousands of bright lights and warmth. Then the war comes and your already spread out family is spread out even more. Some of them you will never see again, slain on the field of battle, without mercy. The war goes on and those bright lights begin to flicker out as countless members of your family are slaughtered without hesitation. Then the war is coming to close, it’s almost over, you think. We’re going to win, you realize with such joy, but the win will come with a huge cost, many of your bright warm family are dead, but now at least they won’t die anymore.
Then, then the biggest thing happens, all that hope about winning the war is vanquished in an instant. Clones march on the temple, then men you have grown to trust, you watch in utter horror as children are slain without hesitation. Masters giving their lives to defend the younglings only for them to be cut down by a Jedi, no he was no longer a Jedi, a Sith. You can’t do anything, you realize with the utmost horror. If you do, you’ll only be killed like so many others. Your master isn’t around to protect you, as they’re just another body on the ground, having been slain without a second thought. They fought bravely to protect you and you have to honor their sacrifice. So you run, you run as fast as you can, as far as you can, because you can’t save them. It breaks your heart but you cannot save your family and you feel it, you feel all of their light going out, and the darkness that you fought so hard to defeat seep in through the cracks of the dying light.
When it is finally all over it’s still not over. Thousands of your family lay dead across the galaxy, and what’s worse is if there were any other lucky survivors like you, their fight is still not done, your fight is still not done. You and anyone else are hunted down and killed like animals, and if not killed turned to become the poachers. Your once big and bright family had dwindled down into only a few hundred, maybe even less, and the only way they can survive is to give up their life, become completely new people. Then you think as your heart sinks even more, about the children. The children born after this genocide, the ones that will never know the light and warm embrace of the Jedi. Never knowing what it was like, and your people, your family are forgotten, erased from the history books. Thousands of years of helping people only to be killed and forgotten.
You still remember though faintly when there were tens of thousands of Jedi, but now they are destroyed, their legacy is nothing, and only a few hundred of you remain. You can never escape, you can only run, because even years later you are still hunted like an animal, just like how on that initial day your family was killed like they were animals. Nothing will ever be the same, and the galaxy, even if the Jedi did somehow by some miracle return, it would never be as bright as it was before.
