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Eh not bad, but it’s not Lapti Nek - Disco Mix.
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Leading them into battle to fight a war on behalf of their own enslavers isn’t ethically complicated. It’s just straight up evil.
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I mean, how did formerly enslaved people who ended up fighting for the Union end up doing at the end of the Civil War? I don’t seem to remember a wave of violence led by the formerly enslaved against the enslavers once the war was done… in fact it was the opposite.
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uhhh that’s not the Return of the Jedi I remember seeing.
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Well Luke did say
“Threepio, tell them if they don’t do as you wish, you’ll become angry and use your magic.”
Followed by a demonstration meant to convince the Ewoks that they had an angry god on their hands. Five minutes later C3PO said that the Ewoks had agreed to fight on his side in a war. I don’t see those two things as being separate in any meaningful way.
Also, it wasn’t necessarily in the Ewoks’ best interest to blow up a huge space station while it was still in orbit above Endor…
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That is one point of view of it I guess.
C3-PO however was the only communicator with the Ewoks and we don’t know exactly what was said. But I counter: all those traps set up to fight the empire? You think the Ewoks built that over night? They themselves were already planning on ridding their beloved forest of the interlopers. More than likely 3PO mistranslated and the tribe really agreed to let this puny squad of 3 humans, 2 droids and 1 wookiee join them on THEIR side.
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Jedi aren’t ‘bad’ for metaphysics purposes; but it seems plausible enough that what’s basically a paramilitary cult that, almost entirely unaccountably, carries out certain specialist statesec operations and has been in existence long enough to have completely normalized being composed of heavily indoctrinated child conscripts would have a weird organizational culture and a lot of staff with screws either loose or badly overtightened.
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Really the best explanation for the Jedi would be that they’re weird because they started with a species that acts very differently from the ones we see now. That would explain how, for instance, they spent over 1000 generations without ever needing to figure out how to deal with the problem of “Padawan has a secret crush on someone”.
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remember, when the Jedi knights were just…
…in a silly, fun adventure science-fantasy film without any deeper meaning than good-beats-evil. now its a fucking religion.
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Yes. But they edited out the A-Team Montage™ in the final cut because the music didn’t fit.
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han did call it a “hokey religion” with ancient weapons. so it was always that.
but, really nothing about the first movie makes sense anymore. the “old republic”? it ended sometime after luke was born. most people would just say the “republic” in that case.
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And here I thought it was showing how attuned to the Force he was, how to a Jedi the podrace’s outcome was already preordained. But yeah, clumsily handled.
This was the biggest misstep, the idea was set up in Yoda’s lessons to Luke that the more in tune with the Force one becomes, the more detached one becomes from the rest of the world. That the strength of the Jedi was in letting the Force flow, the dark side being the how moving against the flow causes turbulence and disruption.
I find the worst idea Lucas had was to put Yoda on the Jedi council, that it should have been that the true masters of the Force would have been at secluded monasteries. Let the Council exist, but have the members be weak in the Force, so caught up in everyday politics that they no longer feel the ebb and flow.
I keep coming back to having Yoda never be mentioned by name in an alternate version of the prequels, instead a simple gardener that Obi-Wan consults with. Who knows the Jedi and the Republic will be destroyed in a Hari Seldon psychohistory way. That way, if viewed in order, a newbie would go “oh, so that little guy was a master all along? Mind blown!”
Then again, I also keep coming back to the idea that Vader and Anakin were both taught about the Force by Kenobi, the reveal being that Vader died and a badly wounded Skywalker, to survive (and to his shame), took his identity.
I need to let go of these woulda coulda ideas, and stop thinking I could have done better.
Also, the general on the Death Star mocked the Jedi “religion” right up to the moment Vader force choked him.
I’m upset that the show was cancelled, because while the story was serviceable and mostly predictable with a few surprises, the underlying theme was interesting and articulated early on: “power, and who gets to wield it.”
The witches utilized the force. They were refugees from Jedi persecution, and fully expected to be attacked and killed by the Jedi, and were.
The Sith stated he just wanted an Acolyte. Apart from using the force as a tool of vigilante justice, there wasn’t anything particularly “evil” about his actions.
The Jedi are morally suspect, as highlighted by many in this thread. In the show the biggest red flag was their statement that, legally, they could abduct children into their order. They preferred parental and child’s consent, but wouldn’t necessarily honor the decision. The second biggest red flag was their own position that the force should only be wielded their way.
I remember reading an article online about how Star Wars’ villains reflect American fears of the time. In the original trilogy it was the Empire: an unstoppable, implacable foe — Space Nazis or Space Commies. In the prequels it was corrupt politicians and corporations insidiously working together and against each other to undermine democracy and enslave the citizenry. In the sequels it was rage filled young men willing to kill anyone and anything indiscriminately.
In the Acolyte, it is unaccountable police/law enforcers (Jedi as peace keepers) who are more intent on maintaining their status and power than justice and who, when they do “protect and serve” do so selectively, deciding who deserves that protection and who does not. And woe unto anyone who falls outside their narrowly defined “proper order.” (I don’t think it an accident that the Witches were also a commune of Space Lesbians.)
I don’t have much hope that Disney will continue the series and explore these themes further (still upset they cancelled and pulled the Willow series), but they were interesting and part of why I was eager to watch the show.
(Edit: change “maintaining the peace” to “justice,” as those two concepts are not necessarily synonymous.)
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In 100% agreement there. Sorry if my comment left any doubt on that front.
It seems they moved more and more into non-attachments meaning unhealthy relationships vs just don’t destroy a planet cause you got dumped.
High Republic novels address a lot of this.
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damn, youre right; “religion” with reference to the jedi is mentioned 3 times in it…
I figured that it was probably best not to even go near that.
I’m not accusing any specific jedi, especially well-liked canon ones, of anything; but it would be a midsize miracle if an outfit with the structure and capabilities of the Jedi Order managed to not have a sordid pattern of padawan abuse kept from being a scandal only by intense secrecy and a willingness to use mind control on pesky civil authorities.
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