- No lightsaber duels for Yoda
This rule will annoy some fan geeks, but it’s important. The original SW films followed mythic storytelling patterns outlined by Joseph Campbell and so each character is an archetype. These archetypes have built-in rules that limit what a writer can do with such a character. If the writer breaks those rules then they aren’t writing an archetypal character. In general, there is nothing wrong with that, but that’s not SW. Yoda, like Obi-Wan, is a mentor to Luke, a “wise old man”. His age means the wise old man comes from a different time (and at 800 years old, Yoda exaggerates this as only science fiction can), but it is no accident that Yoda is also non-human. The wise old man is often a foreigner from another land, and making Yoda non-human exaggerates this yet again as only science fiction can. Finally, as a spiritual mentor, Yoda is a visual metaphor for the Force itself. He may be physically frail and diminutive in size, but that doesn’t matter. His strength lies in his spiritualness. He is brains over brawn, spiritual strength over physical strength. Consider how he trained Luke to be a thinking, feeling, and reflecting Jedi, not a soldier. Lucas’s prequels threw all that out of the window and turned Yoda into a back-flipping, twirling ninja.I wouldn’t include Yoda as a present character to begin with.
That’s interesting, but it does leave the question of how he escaped the purge.
A few of the Bantam-era novels implied Yoda had already been residing on Dagobah decades prior to the Clone Wars. I imagine only a very small amount of Jedi knew where he was during the Purge, and they took that secret with them to the grave.