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The Force itself is played much more ambiguously in my prequels. There’s some lyrical description by the likes of Kenobi; describing suns’/stars’ connection to Jedi as “It shines, it warms, and it gives. It helps to create life, and from life comes the Force.” There’s definitely a sense of reverence towards it by older Jedi, but there’s not overt discussion about its nature, largely because it be redundant given such conversations already do happen in the original films.
The more significant deviation is what the Jedi are in a pre-Clone Wars galaxy, because only some are Knights. The expansion of the Republic, the troubled problems in various territories, and the lack of any real large scale was for millennia has gradually changed the make up of what the Jedi are. Most are serving the galaxy in peacetime roles as engineers, farmers, teachers, and so forth. The old time role of lightsaber wielding guardians of peace and justice has fallen to people like Obi-Wan and soon Anakin who are first on the front line of the worst galactic war in thousands of years.
This context exist to serve as tragedy in what was lost by the purge (with beneficial cornerstones of communities gone forever), but also serves as the central question and conflict of the prequels “What role are the Jedi to play?” Nellith, the old, mentally scarred former Knight desperately does not want to Jedi to lose what they’ve gained in the past few centuries; a growth into being not just guardians of peace and justice but builders of it as well.
This is the ultimate dividing point Anakin and Obi-Wan, as Skywalker becomes more disillusioned with the war and the flaws of galactic government, in spite of his master’s assurances to have faith in the Force. Kenobi finds himself as the compromising middle ground between Anakin’s desire for the Jedi to take more control as a means to save the Republic and Nellith’s wish to preserve what the Jedi are and prevent the potential fall to the dark side by keeping them away from the front lines.
The dark side itself is presented less as the eternal yin to the light side’s yang and more of a Tolkien esque corruption than anything else. Its not brought up until the second film, and its danger is more underplayed compared the original films, largely because there haven’t been truly dangerous threat from it for a long time. Nellith briefly fell to it in the past, but there’s a subtext that most Dark Jedi are too irrational and emotionally compromised to be a long team threat.
That’s why Palpatine proves to be so dangerous and a complete shock to the Jedi, because an emotionally focused and controlling person mastering the dark side rather than the other way around proved be outside of their expectations. He’s not a devout Sith following tradition, he’s a cunning opportunist who used the Dark side as a tool to gain power. There’s a line I have where Kenobi tells Anakin that the Dark Side takes the best parts of ourselves and makes them our worst; the insidious nature of Palpatine is that he takes the Dark Side and somehow it makes it worse.
