Vladius

SparkySywer said:

I’d embrace the idea of the Jedi being kind of a cult. The Jedi, on their quest to defend peace and justice in the galaxy, have tried to systematize good and evil to help them understand what their quest even is. I like the idea of the Jedi thinking Yoda was the Chosen One, so maybe he, or some other legendary Jedi who deserves that level of respect, would have defeated the Sith, established the current Republic and a new Jedi order, and came up with a perfect moral code which always illuminates the greater good. In the 800 or so years since this, the Jedi have set out on perfecting both themselves and the galaxy.

The cult-like behavior comes from their sheer commitment to the greater good. The Order is socially engineered so all of its members always prioritize the greater good. They train Jedi from birth so they never meet their family and prioritize them over the greater good of the galaxy. They don’t allow Jedi to fall in love or even have friends because the galaxy’s history books are full of Jedi who turned to the dark side for their friends. It’s dehumanizing, but the Jedi justify it because the Force gives you an immense amount of power, and if you can’t give up your own humanity for the greater good, you don’t deserve that power. Anakin, the one who wasn’t brainwashed from birth, who will fall in love and have a child, is going to be the one who ultimately destroys the Jedi Order and hands the galaxy over to Palpatine.

The Jedi are still flawed though, and if I were to actually write this I’d like to frame it to make the argument that the greater good itself is not for the greater good. The Jedi and the Republic tolerate slavery because the effort to end it would cost many times more lives than it would liberate, and (temporarily) tolerating some evils is for the greater good. But you can’t exactly tell a slave that their slavery is a good thing, and if it turned out that the Chosen One is a former slave, you’re going to make a natural enemy of him by continuing to tolerate slavery, even if he recognizes ending slavery would let out more evils than it would abolish.

Anakin’s fall to the dark side has more to do with the Jedi’s failings than his own inclination toward evil. Anakin’s respect for all the good the galaxy’s done at first puts him on their side. But as it becomes more clear to him how much evil they tolerate, he becomes disillusioned with them. When it becomes clear that he’s the Chosen One, not Yoda/whoever, and their arcane rules prioritize the greater good over him fulfilling his destiny by ending the war and defeating the Sith, he becomes radicalized against them. He embraces fear because it’s a natural reaction to danger, anger because it’s a natural reaction to injustice, and hate because it’s a natural reaction to evil. He turns to Palpatine and the Sith, not because they were the real good guys, but because in a galaxy where moral thinking is so completely dominated by the dishonest, delusional, and ineffective Jedi, the only option he really has to turn to is the Sith, who definitely do not give a damn about the greater good, but don’t force him to tolerate slavery and don’t stop Anakin from ending the war destroying galactic civilization itself. With the Sith and the Empire, the galaxy is his to shape according to his will, but radicalized against the extreme selflessness and peacefulness of the Jedi, he becomes a brutish tyrant whose will becomes just as much of an evil as what he once fought against.

I’d like to reconstruct this in the ST. If the PT Jedi’s failings were that they prioritized the greater good over the individual good, and there’s this idea that in the ST that the Force is to become decentralized, maybe Luke and/or Rey teach the galaxy to defend their own personal good. The galaxy shouldn’t have one group of people defending peace and justice, but everyone should be defending peace and justice in their own lives. The Republic, too, would have to go, because there’s no way to enforce one singular greater good over trillions or quadrillions of people in the galaxy. Someone’s always going to get fucked over for the greater good, and some people more often than others. The political status quo after Episode 9 would be a network of small, local Republics which keep order and peace on a small scale. This is bittersweet, because without the institutions that keep galactic civilization together, civilization can not exist on a galactic scale. But that scale of civilization led to the tyrannies of the Republic and the Empire, and the hell that the Clone Wars and the Empire were weren’t worth the luxury of galactic civilization.

This is the bog standard internet interpretation right now with almost no changes.

I think you’re right that starting with him already as a Jedi or at least as Obi Wan’s young adult student would be much better. Also remove anything to do with chosen ones.

Wexter said:

Yoda doesn’t appear at all, but is talked about a lot, being a living legend with unknown current whereabouts. Obi-Wan is kind of a big deal in the Jedi order as he has been trained by Yoda himself. Anakin and Obi-Wan may actually only be supporting characters in this story to preserve the surprise reveals of the OT. Obi-Wan takes multiple apprentices during the prequel trilogy.

At least three decades separate the Clone Wars from the OT and it is actually the bad guys who start with the cloning, creating themselves an army of mutants of all shapes and sizes to combat the Republic and its Jedi. The Clone Wars is actually a series of conflicts, not just one war.

Cloning, especially for military purposes, is generally considered unethical. However, chancellor Palpatine shows a remarkable interest in the technology. Shortly after the discovery of his own DNA in a cloning laboratory on enemy territory – which proves to the Jedi he has been orchestrating the war all along – he manipulates most of the Republic military into turning against the Jedi and declares himself the Emperor. All (or nearly all) of the cloning facilities are however destroyed during this period. Palpatine’s possible Force-sensitivity is suggested, but is never confirmed.

Most of the antagonist figureheads – some of whom are Force-sensitive – are interested in the cloning technology as a means to achieve immortality. Others are however motivated mostly by ideology or greed.

The Jedi are not celibate monks and they don’t wear Tatooine hermit robes. Leia’s mother doesn’t die immediately after giving birth. No Boba Fett origin story and no Chewbacca. The Jedi are very much present throughout the prequels, but many of the main characters are not Force-users – there’s the military, politicians, and common people of many different trades and convictions. Bail Organa plays a prominent role.

Excellent. I agree with all of this.

NFBisms said:

Vladius said:

I like the show a lot but I wish people wouldn’t throw around terms like “spy thriller” or “political thriller” or talk about how it dissects capitalism or something.

Those are corporate buzzwords just as much as anything else. The MCU does the same thing, they put out a movie and they’ll call it a “political thriller” or a “heist movie” or a “horror movie” and then they just make a normal superhero action movie with some genre flavoring. And I like those movies a lot, I just don’t like it when people read marketing materials and then spout them verbatim from whatever Kevin Feige or whoever said. People here did it with “The Skywalker Saga.” That was a marketing term used to promote Rise of Skywalker. Even though most here hated that movie, they bought it hook, line, and sinker and felt compelled to make unnecessary 9 movie mega edits because of it, because you have to have the complete Skywalker Saga.

Guarantee most people today who use the term “political thriller” would not even know that genre existed if it weren’t for these corporate brands using it in that way.

Star Wars stands on its own without feeling insecure and talking about how this is ADULT and SERIOUS and INTELLIGENT. It’s just a well written, well made, well directed show.

I think the counter-shill can be just as unproductive, because I do think someone like Tony Gilroy put a lot of thought and effort into making his show.

I think it’s a shame that all other media more or less gets to be taken in as their own pieces, to be analyzed with all the nerdy film stuff that I fell in love with as a film fan in the first place. But Star Wars doesn’t get to have that anymore, because of The Boss, I guess. Not saying every project released under Disney deserves it, but I lament how we can have threads discussing stuff like what balance in the Force means to us individually + other headcanons, or even how much George Lucas may/may not have known what he was doing, etc… But Andor - dense with its own substance and cool things to dissect - is still stuck in the culture proxy war. Even when it’s positive, it’s just, “Can you believe how much better it is than BOBF or Kenobi???”

Either way, I think drawing attention to Disney [The Nebulous Entity] Doesn’t Care, as though that’s news to anyone, is ironically far shallower a direction to lead discussion than anything the show is putting down itself. I’d rather appreciate where studio and artist meet in the middle and that there can be wins on the creative side of this soul-crushing churn, than rehash the same tired cynicism that fundamentally misunderstands how the industry works anyway.

I haven’t used the “political thriller” moniker myself, but I do think this show is very, un-accidentally political. I don’t see the purpose in handwaving any intentions or themes in the material.

It’s just a little disheartening to write up an earnest, excited breakdown of cool things I could take away from the work, and then for someone to twist it as corporate shilling

I don’t necessarily mean Disney specifically, I just mean the marketing around the show and the way people talk about it. The show is good in large measure because it seems like they permitted a lot of creative freedom and budget, which is unusual for them and deserves credit. Like I said, it’s a good show. But I think it can stand on its own without people exaggerating how mature and “political” it is. It’s like they feel ashamed that Star Wars is perceived as childish, so they have to compensate by describing it in serious terms. And generally not serious terms that they would use in other cases, serious terms that come from marketing or from reading thinkpieces about it or watching YouTube essays.
It’s like people that don’t want to admit they read comic books, so they call them “graphic novels.”

The other thing that bugs me is when people say things like “Star Wars has NEVER been this realistic/grounded/detailed etc.” because that’s not true either. There are lots of Star Wars stories that get into that kind of mindset. It’s just that most people only know the movies, and movies by their very nature can’t be too slow or too detailed because of their runtime. The show reminds me of an EU book, in a good way.

edit: Obviously it is political in some ways and some of that is intentional. But I think it should be acknowledged that it is much more subtle and well done than what the people who say “Star Wars was always political” generally mean. Star Wars politics are a mishmash of the Roman Republic and Empire, Napoleon, the American Civil War, World War 2, and the Vietnam War, but when people say “Star Wars was always political” they’re generally defending the sequel trilogy or people in real life interpreting Rogue One in the lens of the 2016 election, for example. An oversimplistic us vs. them narrative that just calls the Empire “fascist space Nazis” as though there’s nothing else to it and nothing else going on. Although Andor seems like it’s aimed at those people and the marketing and some creator statements point that way, the show itself is much smarter than that. People in the Empire are portrayed as real people with real motivations, emotions, and reasons for what they do. People in the rebellion have to make difficult decisions and don’t always come off as sympathetic and heroic. This is good stuff strictly BECAUSE it does not agree with any particular real world political philosophy, it just depicts the realities of bureaucracy and the use of force in various ways.

I like the show a lot but I wish people wouldn’t throw around terms like “spy thriller” or “political thriller” or talk about how it dissects capitalism or something.

Those are corporate buzzwords just as much as anything else. The MCU does the same thing, they put out a movie and they’ll call it a “political thriller” or a “heist movie” or a “horror movie” and then they just make a normal superhero action movie with some genre flavoring. And I like those movies a lot, I just don’t like it when people read marketing materials and then spout them verbatim from whatever Kevin Feige or whoever said. People here did it with “The Skywalker Saga.” That was a marketing term used to promote Rise of Skywalker. Even though most here hated that movie, they bought it hook, line, and sinker and felt compelled to make unnecessary 9 movie mega edits because of it, because you have to have the complete Skywalker Saga.

Guarantee most people today who use the term “political thriller” would not even know that genre existed if it weren’t for these corporate brands using it in that way.

Star Wars stands on its own without feeling insecure and talking about how this is ADULT and SERIOUS and INTELLIGENT. It’s just a well written, well made, well directed show.

Servii said:

There’s still the problem of Jedi being taken in as babies. Because of that, their lives as Jedi are all they know. They have the option to leave the Order if they wish, but with a few exceptions, none of the Jedi have lives or key social connections outside of the Order. I’m not counting casual friends like Dexter Jettster. I mean connections that could take the place of a family or a community. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if padawans would stay in the Order simply out of fear of being on their own in the outside world.

This sort of ascetic lifestyle is something that a person really needs to consent to be a part of. I know the rationale, that if you wait too long before you start training, they’ll develop attachments to their family. But that doesn’t stop people in the real world from becoming monks on their own. And feeling a connection to your family is certainly not a bad thing, anyway.

Again, that’s a very modern point of view. No one consents to who their parents are or where they grow up. You could just as soon argue that anyone’s parents are being cruel to their children by not having them tour around the world and figure out which of the thousands of cultures they want to join. I don’t personally agree with having Jedi raised from birth but that’s just me.

And we don’t really know whether or not Jedi could find friends elsewhere. It seems reasonable that they could. In one of the Jedi Apprentice books, Obi Wan finds a political cause on a planet that he agrees with and he’s ready to leave the Jedi to help out his new friends. Qui Gon has to talk him out of it.

RogueLeader said:

Even if TLJ leaves some narrative threads open, I kind of think it stands on its own regarding the thematic elements it has. Even if we don’t see what happens with Kylo Ren, or we don’t the restoration of the Jedi or the Republic proper, we know there are still people that the fight will continue after the film ends, and they will eventually succeed.

I also kind of like the parallels TLJ shares with Le Morte D’Arthur, where King Arthur story ends with a duel with his wicked kin, Mordred, and the ruin of his kingdom, but there is hope that Arthur will return from Avalon one day and restore the kingdom.

Like Arthur, the OT and these bookends could be seen as focusing on the birth, life and death of Luke Skywalker. Ironically, though, I don’t know if I actually would want to show Luke dying in this version. I like the idea of leaving his fate ambiguous, allowing the audience to choose what happens to him. Does Luke die there on the island and become one with the Force, or will he live on to restore the Jedi Order as Lucas intended to depict?

Kind of the same idea with Kylo. I like how TLJ ends showing Kylo “winning” the battle, but losing spiritually. And the audience is left to wonder if Kylo is doomed to the dark side, or if there is still hope for redemption.

Regarding George’s ST ideas, we know that at some point George suggested combining the Jedi Killer character with Han and Leia’s son. So in some version of his treatment, he still fell to the dark side just as he did in the final version of those films, but we don’t know what his fate would have been in George’s version. So leaving Kylo’s eventual fate ambiguous and letting the audience ponder on it fits with what little we know about Lucas’ version of the sequel trilogy.

And the intentional ambiguity of what comes after mirrors the intentional ambiguity of what comes before the prologue. By having ROTS operate as a standalone film, the audience can be left to imagine a version of how Anakin and Obi-Wan met that is more in line with what the original trilogy tells us: Anakin followed Obi-Wan on a idealistic crusade, and Owen thought Anakin should’ve stayed on Tatooine and not gotten involved.
That’s not really what we see in the actual films, but by not showing how they met and coming in on their story in medias res, the audience could choose to imagine the events before the prologue however they want, whether it be more in like with the OT, or how it is depicted in the rest of the PT.

I don’t think it finishes thematically either. People love the broom kid for some reason but it doesn’t show anything new or inspiring. Ordinary people can be force sensitive? People believe in legends about Luke Skywalker? We knew that already. That was what Rey was about. Likewise Kylo Ren’s story. What is the lesson there? Luke has to learn that certain people can’t be redeemed and he should just abandon them? All the sequels have the same problem of retreading the same ground as the original trilogy and the prequels, and The Last Jedi is no different.

In the sense you’re talking about, every episode could be standalone (the original movie was designed to be but none of the others were.) But it’s your edit, do what you want.

Darth Malgus said:

You know, the more I read this discussion, the more I realize that this is not a discussion about the Jedi teachings and theology, but simply a confrontation between two philosophies and two different ways of understanding life.

On one hand, there are those who are in favor of Romanticism, expressing their passions and having selfish feelings, but without letting these things take over and balancing them with altruism. On the other hand, there are those who are completely opposed to passion and selfishness and profess absolute altruism, instead of a form of altruism that Is balanced with selfishness. It’s for this reason that Anakin’s story and tragedy have a different meaning depending on the person who talks about them.

Our contrasts have actually nothing to do with Star Wars, they’re simply a reflection of what we think and what our philosophy of life is. So if anything, if we have to discuss these things, I think we should do it in the appropriate sections, where we can discuss about personal things, philosophy and stuff like that. Because again, this discussion about the Jedi is nothing more than a transposition of what we think and what our philosophy of life is. So I think we should bring the discussion back to the objective reality of things, without necessarily having to involve Star Wars.

Pretty much everyone in real life, as well as the Jedi, agrees that you have to have a personal balance of acting for your own self-preservation and interest, and altruism.

The divide is more modern versus ancient, secular versus religious, or western versus eastern. The modern, western, secular perspective is essentially Freudian and liberal - your strong emotions and desires are your authentic self, and as long as they don’t harm other people, you should be able to do whatever you want. If you constrain them too much, then you’re “repressed” and it’s going to make you blow up eventually or act out in some way. It’s focused a lot on sex, and the whole thing is a sexual metaphor. From this point of view, having a large group of people all commit to control their desires is bound to fail spectacularly, and it’s only justified and held up by a bunch of superstition, mysticism, and unnecessary tradition.

The ancient or medieval, religious, eastern perspective is that emotions and desires are like horses. They’re extremely useful, but you need to train them, bridle them and keep them in check. Once you’ve done that, you can keep doing it indefinitely because you have the training and discipline. You might slip up occasionally but if there’s a big deviation it’s because you made a choice. When people make oaths or give their word, they generally mean it. Their “word is their bond.”

From the first perspective, the Jedi are doomed to failure because they don’t allow attachments and they teach initiates to control their emotions, which is ultimately impossible. Anakin is just the latest and worst in what must surely be a long line of blow ups. The Expanded Universe and the sequel trilogy seem to confirm this for a lot of people because there’s almost always someone turning to the dark side so that the story can happen. Luke’s Jedi got massacred too? Welp, looks like it was his fault for not “learning from the Jedi’s mistakes,” and suppressing Ben Solo’s emotions somehow. (This is inferred because of course we don’t see it.)

From the second perspective, Anakin tragically chose not to live the Jedi’s teachings. He chose ambition and power over his own family, friends, and allies. It’s a Faustian deal with the devil. But that only makes complete sense for people that believe in the concept of a devil, or temptation, or evil, as opposed to just competing priorities or sets of desires.

yotsuya said:

Vladius said:

yotsuya said:

G&G-Fan said:

The only reason people have come to this uncharitable view of the Jedi Order is because George Lucas is not a good writer. Simple as that.

Sorry to cut out most of what you said, but that would be too long.

The Jedi have fallen from their high point and are now struggling and sacrifices have been made. Their teaching relies on avoidance rather than learning how to resist the dark side. Their missions have become more political - controlled by the Senate and Chancellor - than moral (going to help where they are needed). The Clone Wars are the final nail in their coffin because it emphasizes everything they are trapped into doing. And they get destroyed for it.

I don’t think it is the writing, at least not this part. I think this is all pretty clear. If there is nothing wrong with the Jedi, why do they need the Chosen One to come and balance things? We are left to imagine how the Jedi would have been before all this in their glory days. But the PT does not depict their glory days, it pictures them in decline and clinging to traditions and that is included in the films.

Please explain your distinction between avoidance and resistance. That just doesn’t make any sense. If you’re talking about temptation, avoidance is legitimately the best strategy FOR resistance. It’s better to prevent a situation or avoid getting into a situation than to intentionally put yourself near it and grit your teeth and focus really hard on not doing it. But the Jedi absolutely also teach how to do that if you’re in the situation. That’s the point. That’s why they’re always talking about clearing their minds, and meditating.

Sometimes the political missions are the moral missions. If they were sent out to free slaves, that would absolutely be a political mission as well. We don’t really know the details of what their missions look like anyway, or what most Jedi are up to outside of Coruscant. For all we know, they’re serving the people perfectly well.

The Chosen One isn’t to balance the Jedi, it’s to balance the Force, which in some way involves destroying the Sith. The idea is vague and not explained well, but at the very least it doesn’t say anything about getting rid of the Jedi or fixing them.

The PT does depict their glory days. According to Lucas, that was the point of Duel of the Fates being so different from the OT duels. They’re at the height of their abilities, so they’re doing all kinds of flips and whatsits and have faster choreography.

Avoidance vs. Resistance. When you are teaching someone and you don’t want them to do things you teach them to avoid them. You focus on that. But when you want to teach someone how to get along in the real world and you don’t want them to do something, you teach them the dangers in detail. You give them the tools and knowledge to know what the dangers are and how to avoid them by resisting the temptation to do something that might make sense in one situation. In the case of the Jedi, if you don’t want them to give in to fear or anger or hate, you need to teach them what fear, anger, and hate are, and how to avoid fear turning into anger and how to keep anger from turning into hate. We see this in TPM with Obi-wan. Qui-gon dies and Obi-wan acts in anger (he skips fear). For him to avoid going further down that path, he needs the teaching (which is sometimes instinctual and for others it is not). The same thing happens with Luke in ROTJ. Both avoid taking it any further. Both resist the temptation and recenter. Ankin is not able to do this. His anger takes control and the hate sets in. He was not given the tools he needed. Even though they sense several times that he is edging the wrong way. They sense he is in danger and they do nothing to help him. A good teacher (or master) would address the situation with Anakin and make sure he had the teachings he needed.

So basically, teaching avoidance is good for things that you are certain to be able to avoid. If situations can arise where total avoidance is not possible, you need to teach to resist. So for general students, teaching to avoid the dark side might be all you need. Drilling into younglings and Padawans that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, and that all leads to the dark side might give them the ability to resist just by virtual of persistent training. Anakin starts late. He hasn’t had as much time. A good teacher would know how to adapt the teaching. Yoda should know how to adapt and be able to advise Obi-wan on what to do. But instead there is a total failure to provide Anakin any additional teaching to keep him from being tempted by the dark side. He has been taught the theory without the tools to resist a real world test.

They do teach all of that. There’s nothing showing that they don’t. Like I said, that’s what all the meditation and “clear your mind” stuff is for. Qui Gon tells Obi Wan to keep his mind on the here and now. It sounds hokey but this is exactly what people everywhere teach now as mindfulness training, which is supposed to help with stress and negative emotions. (It doesn’t help me personally but it does apparently work for a lot of people.)

Anakin’s choices are the issue. All this extra baggage that people place onto the story about it being the Jedi’s fault comes from their own cultural assumptions.

G&G-Fan said:

yotsuya said:

The Jedi teaching that we get in the first 6 films are all based on avoidance.

A big part of the path of the Jedi is about confronting your fears and overcoming it. It’s what the scene with Kanan and the temple guards is about, in Rebels. The Ithorian youngling getting his kyber crystal (overcoming his fear of the scary cave) in The Clone Wars. Yoda overcoming Dark Yoda in The Clone Wars. It’s why Yoda told Luke to go into the dark side cave on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. Because he knew Luke would see what he’s afraid of. He needs to face it and overcome it. If Jedi’s relationship with fear was avoidance, he would’ve told Luke not to go in there.

Exactly. It astounds me how many people don’t understand the nature of Yoda having Luke go into the cave or go to face Vader in ROTJ.

The Last Jedi doesn’t stand alone. At the end there’s still Kylo Ren to deal with, and the resistance has been reduced to a handful of people that can all fit comfortably in the Falcon. You might as well say that The Force Awakens stands alone.

Honestly it just sounds like a reason for another Revenge of the Sith edit, which is fine. I like when people try to make it fit the original trilogy.

yotsuya said:

G&G-Fan said:

The only reason people have come to this uncharitable view of the Jedi Order is because George Lucas is not a good writer. Simple as that.

Sorry to cut out most of what you said, but that would be too long.

The Jedi have fallen from their high point and are now struggling and sacrifices have been made. Their teaching relies on avoidance rather than learning how to resist the dark side. Their missions have become more political - controlled by the Senate and Chancellor - than moral (going to help where they are needed). The Clone Wars are the final nail in their coffin because it emphasizes everything they are trapped into doing. And they get destroyed for it.

I don’t think it is the writing, at least not this part. I think this is all pretty clear. If there is nothing wrong with the Jedi, why do they need the Chosen One to come and balance things? We are left to imagine how the Jedi would have been before all this in their glory days. But the PT does not depict their glory days, it pictures them in decline and clinging to traditions and that is included in the films.

Please explain your distinction between avoidance and resistance. That just doesn’t make any sense. If you’re talking about temptation, avoidance is legitimately the best strategy FOR resistance. It’s better to prevent a situation or avoid getting into a situation than to intentionally put yourself near it and grit your teeth and focus really hard on not doing it. But the Jedi absolutely also teach how to do that if you’re in the situation. That’s the point. That’s why they’re always talking about clearing their minds, and meditating.

Sometimes the political missions are the moral missions. If they were sent out to free slaves, that would absolutely be a political mission as well. We don’t really know the details of what their missions look like anyway, or what most Jedi are up to outside of Coruscant. For all we know, they’re serving the people perfectly well.

The Chosen One isn’t to balance the Jedi, it’s to balance the Force, which in some way involves destroying the Sith. The idea is vague and not explained well, but at the very least it doesn’t say anything about getting rid of the Jedi or fixing them.

The PT does depict their glory days. According to Lucas, that was the point of Duel of the Fates being so different from the OT duels. They’re at the height of their abilities, so they’re doing all kinds of flips and whatsits and have faster choreography.

Servii said:

If there is nothing wrong with the Jedi, why do they need the Chosen One to come and balance things?

I don’t think the reasoning for why Jedi think things are out of balance is conveyed well. If the Jedi had become complacent, then they would think that everything is fine and that the Force is balanced. By all outside appearances, the Force does seem to be fine until the Sith start to reveal themselves, and even then, the Jedi are skeptical when Qui-Gon first tells them about the Sith’s return.

I know a common piece of writing advice is “show, don’t tell,” but I sometimes think George should have spelled some things out more clearly, even at the risk of giving too much exposition. Obi-Wan says that Qui-Gon doesn’t follow the code, but we’re never shown or told how he’s not following it. There are some references to Jedi’s connection to the Force being diminished, and we can infer that the Jedi have become too politically minded rather than focused on helping people, but that’s not something the movies acknowledge nearly enough. The films never call out the Jedi for ignoring slavery, for example. That could have very easily been made a major grievance Anakin had with the Jedi Order, but the movie doesn’t address it, which leads me to believe it wasn’t meant to be a moral failing of the Order.

Exactly. All of these perceived issues are something we read into it because as written it just doesn’t make sense or there’s too much missing or contradictory information.

As for the slavery thing, their jurisdiction is inside the Republic. If they go outside the Republic to start cracking heads, that could start a war and ultimately result in more collateral damage including to slaves. It wouldn’t be morally right or practical for them to conquer every system for the Republic and forcibly subjugate everyone into following their own laws.

I greatly prefer the decentralized pre-1999 Jedi, but with what we have, that part makes perfect sense.

I agree with everything G&G Fan said. I’ll also add some things:

1. The idea of “balance between the light side and dark side, Jedi and Sith” is nonsense. The light side doesn’t represent lack of emotion and the dark side doesn’t represent emotion. The dark side is a supernatural evil that exerts supernatural influence over people that are strong in the Force, specifically through the emotions of greed, hatred, and ambition. It’s not just any old emotion like romantic love or frustration or protectiveness. It’s not nature, it’s a perversion of nature, which is why it gets associated with looking gray and sickly, cybernetics, and the pursuit of immortality.

2. Individuals not living up to their own ideals doesn’t mean that those ideals are wrong. The Jedi probably don’t expect every Jedi to be perfectly selfless 100% of the time. As a religious person in real life I see this kind of thing all the time. Someone who is very openly religious or pious will make a mistake and then everyone pounces on it to call them a hypocrite. Even though those people live at a much lower standard of moral behavior, they think it’s somehow worse to try to be good and make mistakes than to not try at all. Having standards and trying to live them is not the same thing as arrogance or thinking you’re better than other people, even if sometimes there are individuals that act that way.

3. The Jedi don’t expect everyone to be Jedi. They never say that everyone is supposed to live the way they do. They practice self-discipline because they have more power and ability than other people, but they don’t tell average people on the street to be monks. George Lucas clearly wants the audience to take away the message of avoiding fear, greed, and selfishness, but obviously he’s not telling the audience to wear brown robes and leave their families.

4. There might be some loss of face if Anakin left the Jedi, but it wouldn’t be insurmountable or dangerous to him. They wouldn’t hunt him down and kill him. He would still have plenty of friends who would wish him well. It would be perfectly understandable if he really loved Padme that much.
   Them thinking so highly of Dooku actually backs this up. As does the number of Lost 20 being only 20, after 10,000 years. It turns out the Jedi are pretty decent at retaining people and keeping them from going to the dark side, so it’s not this thing of the Jedi being inherently unstable and deserving destruction for the crime of suppressing emotions or whatever.

I watched the originals on VHS constantly and I’ve always been into the books, video games, and other stuff. I went to The Phantom Menace in theaters for my birthday (6 or 7 I think.) I loved it, loved all the merchandise and stuff. I fondly remember having some Darth Maul slapbands. When episode 2 came out I was hyped and I liked seeing it but something did feel kind of off, I didn’t like Anakin’s character and I didn’t care about any scenes with him and Padme, or C3PO and R2D2 (still feel exactly the same way.) I really liked the Tartakovsky Clone Wars. When episode 3 came out I was extremely hyped and I loved it, watched it as many times as I could.

As I got older I started to see why people didn’t like the prequels and I started developing my own opinions about them. I still like The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith a lot more than Attack of the Clones. I think if the middle movie was altered significantly (particularly in regard to Anakin and the Jedi) it could have been a really nice complete whole.

G&G-Fan said:

The latter is what I would prefer. I do love how Lucas used Anakin’s fall to have themes about the dangers of clinging onto someone too hard and not being able to let go. But I also think that having an added layer of Anakin’s unwillingness to accept his own mortality as well would add more to it.

Because you’re having a man literally slaughter his entire adoptive family. Going against everything he fought for and valued. His reasoning for turning should be multi-layered.

I feel like that’s a lot of the reason people cling to the “Jedi were ideologically flawed and Anakin was getting revenge on the Jedi for forcing him to repress his emotions” head canon when George Lucas literally agrees with the Jedi’s philosophy (and says they’re allowed to love and all that) and only blames Anakin’s greed and Palpatine’s manipulation for his turn. Anakin literally only turned to save his wife. Nothing to do with the Jedi.

“Some of the people had a hard time with the reason that Anakin goes bad… They didn’t seem to understand the fact that Anakin is simply greedy. There is no revenge. The revenge of the Sith is Palpatine. It doesn’t have much to do with Darth Vader; he’s a pawn in the whole scheme.”
-George Lucas, The Making of Revenge of the Sith

And that’s kinda hard for a lot of people to accept. So I think emphasizing more that Anakin’s only goal isn’t to prevent Padme’s death, but also his own and bringing order to the galaxy, bending the natural cycle of life and the state of the galaxy to his will, would be a good way to make his turn more layered.

He doesn’t specifically want revenge on the Jedi, but I think he does get angry with them. His frustrations with the council make it easier for Palpatine to sway him and get him to accept moral relativism. I did like that it wasn’t so simplistic as him just hating the Jedi.

Touching on the greed thing, I think one part people tend to miss is that Anakin could have left the Jedi if he really wanted to be with Padme. He loved her but he also had an ambitious side that wouldn’t let him pass up chances to advance and increase in power. “I want more, and I know I shouldn’t.” He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Notice that’s how Palpatine tempts him with both things at once - he can save Padme by becoming more powerful. It appeals to his love for her and his ambition at the same time, and he gets swept up in it until his ambition lets the dark side overwhelm him and he’s force choking the person he’s ostensibly trying to save.

yotsuya said:

I like how some are implying that the original movie was more adult. It wasn’t. Lucas’s target audience was always about 11 for the movies. I feel the target audience for this one is more like 20. I grew up in the 70’s and many of the things in Star Wars are reflected in the movies and TV shows of that time. Evening TV had to be family rated, even the adult shows. That is the feeling of Star Wars. It is something that Lucas and Disney have always aligned on. Firmly Friendly entertainment that has something for the younger viewers and layers that only adults will get.

Today is a much different world and Andor is probably the first Star Wars series intended for an older audience. I’d say that The Mandalorian was a little more adult, but mostly Star Wars had just had hints of this world, even while dealing with a rebellion. I mean, how many millions died on the two Death Stars? Was that ever mentioned. No. Only that Darth Vader and the Emperor were ruthless in their control and rule of the galaxy. Vader was the face of evil, but on the grand scale of things, Darth Vader wasn’t seen to do much that was evil. His stormtroopers frying Owen and Beru is probably the worst thing in the original trilogy, but he didn’t do that himself.

It’s not only for kids. It’s for anyone who likes it. The original trilogy features plenty of violence, amputations, torture, death, destruction, and slavery. It’s an adventure story with a more youthful bent to it, and the toy sales are going to be driven by kids (or they were anyway,) but it was intentionally made to appeal to everyone. It’s a universal story. Even if you follow the logic that the target is 11, by the time ESB and ROTJ come out, those original fans are 16 or 17.

With that said, Andor is going for a different tone. But I don’t think it’s necessarily just “darker” like people are saying.

Anchorhead said:

All,

Let me clear up something before we waste any more time on this tangent. I’m not knocking Han in-universe or as written. It’s very likely that Han was my hero before most of you were born. I don’t need him explained to me. My point, and I stand by it, is that he’s nowhere near as dangerous a person as Cassian, nor is he ever in as much danger. When we meet him, he’s in trouble with one gangster because a single deal went sideways. If he were in any real trouble, he wouldn’t be hanging out in a bar down the road from the guy to whom he owes money.

As someone said earlier, he’s more of a happy-go-lucky type of guy. He’s selfish (as Leia points out), and has no apparent passion or higher cause. As presented, he comes across as a legitimate charter who sometimes takes side gigs smuggling. He’s shown to be that in EU novels also. Everyone we see him kill is in self defense. Cassian practically lives a witness protection lifestyle no matter which planet he’s on. We see him kill people in cold blood, not necessarily in self defense because he never waits that long.

They both make money illegally, they’re both interesting to watch, and both are sort of anti-heroes, but they are not the same types of people.

Originally I was taking umbrage with what you said before:
“Diego Luna is amazing. He’s what a real-world Han Solo would have to be to survive in that lifestyle. Cassian isn’t a western movie caricature like Han. He’s much deeper. The whole show is much deeper.”

So you did compare Han pretty unfavorably and call him an unrealistic caricature, and say that Cassian is a more realistic version of the same character. That’s why I brought up examples.

I still don’t think you’re presenting it accurately but I don’t want to waste time arguing.

Anchorhead said:

Vladius said:

Anchorhead said:

Vladius said:

I like what they’re doing but I wouldn’t compare him with Han. Two different things that are not supposed to be the same.

No they aren’t and that wasn’t really what I meant. To clarify, I mean they’re similar in how they make money and that they exist in a moral grey area.

Han isn’t an unrealistic character either though.

No, he isn’t. Just less dangerous and with a lot less at stake. Though we never see his house, Han appears to live comfortably. He has his own ship and runs a sometimes questionable side hustle. Cassian on the other hand, has to borrow a ship if he wants to go off-planet, lives in near squalor, and makes a living stealing. Sometimes from a burgeoning Empire, and with the hopes of bringing them down. When he’s not sneaking into their facilities and spitting in their food.

He’s constantly in debt and on the run from both crime lords (with bounty hunters) and the Empire, then has to live in a frozen wasteland and who knows where else to stay with the rebellion, gets captured and tortured by Darth Vader, then frozen and kept as a trophy. It’s not a side hustle, it’s a main hustle before he joins the rebellion, and if he does it wrong he will get killed. The Falcon is a great ship but it’s constantly falling apart and needing repairs. Han has fun flying and Chewbacca is a pretty good friend to have but it’s not exactly comfortable. If you go by the Solo movie, he grew up pretty much exactly like Cassian, orphaned on a planet dominated by the Empire, having to steal to survive. Arguably worse because he was enslaved by some weird alien instead of raised by a kindly scavenger.

I think what you’re getting at is that Han’s story is more of a classic romantic adventure, whereas Cassian’s story is deliberately less glamorous. Though when he becomes a spy and goes on spy adventures that will change.

Wouldn’t you want to wait for the season to finish first?

of_Kaiburr_and_Whills said:

SparkySywer said:

StarkillerAG said:

SparkySywer said:

Darth Malgus said:

I think it might be simpler to just do it the way the Star Trek EU does and let people choose to integrate or not integrate whichever canon they want.

Well, no. Unlike most of you, I’m a person who actually cares about continuity. I would like Star Wars to be a multimedia project, a single universe made up of multiple media that’s basically consistent with itself and between the various stories, as much as possible. I’m absolutely in favour of the existence of and official continuity, I think it’s necessary. This doesn’t prevent the individual fans to create their own personal Canon, and in fact I am the first to do so. But I think the existence of a stable and consistent official continuity is important.

Why

Why not? Canon isn’t the biggest deal ever, but it’s nice to have everything in a fictional universe be roughly consistent with each other. That way, you get to avoid the confusion that comes with insanely tangled multiverse timelines, and every installment feels like it “matters” in the grand scheme of things.

I guess I just don’t see the value in that. I don’t think either Star Wars EU does anything especially interesting with the overarching history of the galaxy so I don’t think we’d lose much by moving away from an overarching continuity. It feels like more of a novelty that pretty wildly different stories have continuity between each other.

I’m not big on the idea of all these interconnected stories myself. I think a better approach is to let different creators do different types of stories however they want to. If they want to form a continuity, the only rule should be no contradicting other stories. I think at its inception, Lucasfilm marketing wanted the EU to work like this, but what ended up happening was authors started trying to interweave everything. Miss this one book that came out three years ago? Well looks like you’re not going to understand what this is all about then.

Its also one of my least favorite parts about comic books. Miss a story or read one you didn’t like? Too bad, here it is in another series and you have to deal with it here now! This is a very niche thing but still, I personally hate not having a full story like that. This is going to seem bizarre to some but I did not like the famous Thrawn trilogy. I do however, somewhat enjoy Jedi Academy. It isn’t a big deal, but it is annoying to see Thrawn and Dark Empire Palpatine brought up in Jedi Academy, a trilogy that I think should be its entirely own story.

Just my opinions of course.

It depends on what you like and don’t like. Eventually you’ll run into something you don’t like either way. But it is cool when the things that you do like reference each other.

Anchorhead said:

Vladius said:

I like what they’re doing but I wouldn’t compare him with Han. Two different things that are not supposed to be the same.

No they aren’t and that wasn’t really what I meant. To clarify, I mean they’re similar in how they make money and that they exist in a moral grey area.

Han isn’t an unrealistic character either though.

NFBisms said:

On top of the finally competent execution and fiery writing, I just love how overtly political it is.

It goes so much further in its anti-fascist narrative than Star Wars ever has - placing responsibility for oppression not just on diabolical evildoers, but everyday corporate motivation - an upper class, the policing that protects their interests, the systemic abuse, and even the complacency/banality of those employed by said institutions.

The bad guys are all finally white guys again, and there’s no sympathy for a tragic antagonist here. The corpo we follow is a lawful, pathetic stick-in-the-mud with too much faith in the systems everyone else rightfully has palpable disgust/distrust for. A working class community gambles their freedom for one of their own. It’s not even calling out corruption, it’s reckoning with a capitalistic system working as it should (in spite of the corruption), and still being the oppressor. It’s angry and rebellious and has something to say I love that.

After years of having people complain black people in SW is political, this is actually political Star Wars and it rules

Dude settle down, if you want to go out and kill white people do it somewhere else

Anchorhead said:

After watching just the first episode, This was feeling to me like the Star Wars sequel the way I’ve always hoped it would be. Hell, after the first fifteen minutes I was there. It’s Star Wars meets Blade Runner, meets 1970s dystopian sci-fi. Perfect. Now, after watching all three episodes, I’m feeling like this will be my go-to from now on.

This is so far beyond what they’ve done in the franchise in decades past. This is an adult show with real-world issues and some very interesting and very realistic characters. Very mild spoiler below;

In my life, I can think of a real world version of everyone of these characters; The hard working blue collar, the jealous boyfriend, the aloof beautiful woman, the brown-noser, the tough talker in a bar - We’ve all known these types of people.

Diego Luna is amazing. He’s what a real-world Han Solo would have to be to survive in that lifestyle. Cassian isn’t a western movie caricature like Han. He’s much deeper. The whole show is much deeper.

To paraphrase a car commercial from 40 years ago; “This Is Not Your Father’s Star Wars.” 😉

I like what they’re doing but I wouldn’t compare him with Han. Two different things that are not supposed to be the same.

It depends on what it is but there are general trends in a lot of things that do get better or worse over time. For example, now is actually the best time to watch any of the movies from the past because we have much bigger TVs, screens, better sound systems, better physical media, streaming, etc. But the movies themselves could have only been made in their own time, which can’t be replicated.