What’s conveyed by the writing, cinematography, editing, and cultural context > authorial intent.
I feel like I’ve 180’d completely very quickly on this. Storytelling is a form of communication, and taking messages from a someone that they didn’t intend to convey would be considered dishonesty, or at the very least unfair. I think Death of the Author is a useful tool, especially in cases where an author doesn’t really get the appeal of their own work (e.g. George Lucas, JK Rowling) which go to show that treating authorial intent as objective truth misses very important aspects of a work of art. But I think placing authorial intent on such a low pedestal also misses very important aspects of a work of ar. I don’t know how useful of an analytical tool this is, but if disagreement between the author and audience is a miscommunication, then we should analytically look at a work both for its intended message and its received message, which are coequal.
I would tend to agree with you, but in this instance I think that the author (GL) has a history of being very loose with the historical facts in interviews and restructuring the story of the past to fit the narrative they are trying to tell. In this case it is not in his interests with his fanbase to delve into the flaws he wrote into the Jedi Order, but it is in his interests to expound on the ideals of the Jedi Order. He already established a baseline with Luke in the OT. In the PT he establishes a new baseline he doesn’t explain why it is different. He goes on as if it was always that when that was clearly not what he was doing when he wrote the OT. Fear had a minor part in Luke’s training. Ben and Yoda were more focused on anger and hate and not giving in to the dark side. Anakin is told not to fear. Controlling fear is the Jedi order. And yet from Luke we know that is not true. From Anakin’s fall we know that is not true. He doesn’t fall from fear, but from letting anger and hate consume him (exactly what they told Luke to avoid). His possessive love of Padme and his fear of losing her (like he lost his mother) drive him to the dark side. So fear has little to do with it. Anakin needed different lessons. Then Ben and Yoda acknowledge their mistakes when they train Luke indicates they see the flaws in how Anakin was trained and if they could go back and do it again Anakin would not fall. So it is a flaw in the system, in the institution. One that they fix for Luke.