People who were middle-aged during the Bush administration, September 11th, and the invasion of Iraq seem to have managed to completely forget about it…and if they had their way I expect those of us who haven’t would be hunted down and killed or else live in hiding in some god-forsaken desert (looks out window at Arizona landscape).
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I think it became quite clear after Rise of Skywalker, that it was really the Palpatine saga the entire time.
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As several others have already pointed out, living in a cave in a desert is possibly not optimal for one’s skin. Plus maybe he had to force-lightning a recalcitrant Jawa or two.
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In Episode I even a little slave kid from a backwater desert planet knew who the Jedi were. The “Declaration of a New Order” that literally established the Galactic Empire in Episode III mentioned “Jedi” no fewer than five times in a speech that totaled just ten paragraphs. And we’re supposed to believe that most people have never heard of them 19 years later? That’s just bad writing.
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In Star Wars?
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oh yeah Im not denying there is bad writing in star wars. Lucas likes to pretend he had it all planned out but that’s clearly BS. I just finished that lucas biography and it seems pretty clear he has big ideas but they are really vague and not well thought out and he often has had to delegate writing to other people because he’s too lazy and anxious and procrastinates a lot. ha. I mean, i get it, Im the same way personally.
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I think the idea is to put the last movie in the current year to help you match up the older movies with your own timeline to be able to picture it better.
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Nothing significant about the years. What it does is if the latest Star Wars movie, also the most recent in the timeline came out in 2019 that’s the year they started counting backwards from, so you can get an idea of an understandable time frame.
So 2019 is Rise of Skywalker, and then take the amount of time from that all the way back to when the Phantom Menace would have been 67 years ago, aka 1952 in the timeline as the start of the Skywalker Saga. Because The Phantom Menace took place in 32BBY (32 years before the battle of Yavin) and Rise of Skywalker happened in 35ABY (35 years after the Battle of Yavin) aka 67 year timeline.
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Is a timeline is even meaningful for a setting that spans relativistic distances and where faster-than-light travel is commonplace?
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What you forget is that the Empire did everything it could to scrub all mentions of the Jedi after the purge. The Galaxy is a BIG place, so the more outer rim you got the less likely the Jedi would have been common place. But once you go to the center of the universe aka Coruscant it became almost illegal to speak of the Jedi. Kind of like how china is about the Tiananmen Square incident, where people who talk about it end up disappearing. So the Jedi religion is basically swept under the rug, so the whole new generation of kids don’t hear about it. Unless their parents are brave enough to mention them to their children.
So after a decade or so of the Empire suppressing any knowledge of the traitorous Jedi, they just become some wizards who did fancy tricks, and had laser swords.
The Empire ruled with an Iron Fist, and make China seem tame with their propaganda. So it’s not that hard to think that after a while they’d be forgotten all together.
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Luke grew up on the same planet his dad did, and Anakin knew all about the Jedi before he ever met Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. Plus Luke grew up with friends who clearly had connections to the Rebellion (Biggs was already an X-wing pilot by the time Luke left the farm) so it’s not it’s not like he was so sheltered he only had an Empire-approved education.
Basically the prequels just screwed up the continuity in all kinds of ways. It’s a lot easier for me to accept “sloppy writing, whatcha gonna do” as an explanation than to pretend all the inconsistencies actually make narrative sense.
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I’ve done a little mental arithmetic on at least the first six movies, and the dates are awkward, certainly. But then it occurred to me that, even ignoring the fact that there’s no Earth or Sun, and therefore no concept of a year which matches ours, it seems likely that humans with that kind of technology might age much differently to us, and therefore might have a much different scale for life events.
In theory Episode IV starts with the twins around 19: Luke has missed one “year” of eligibility for the Academy, while Leia is somehow the Senator of one of the most important planets in the galaxy.
So, in my alternative, they could be youthful-looking, but several Earth-decades old with their extended life-spans leading them to have a relaxed attitude about milestones such that one person might be recently done with primary school while a more ambitious person might be well into their career.
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Nepotism plain and simple. When your “Dad” is Bail Organa, many doors are opened for you. Plus, she has that presence and dominance in her dna from her Mom.
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This is a great point, and reminds me that The Last Jedi only makes sense if hyperspace means Our Heroes can fuck off to Casino Planet for a week and then come back five minutes after they left
similar problems with The Empire Strikes Back, actually
It might as well be canon—people in Star Wars only age at the same rate if they always travel together
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When I teach real world history, I sometimes do something similar. Like, “Socrates was very roughly as far away from Homer as we are from Milton,” and that sort of thing. It can help give some context and a sense of the movement of time, though it also obscures the fact that we’re in many ways closer to Milton than Socrates was to Homer just because we have better records and a larger corpus of written history, etc. Still: people have a natural tendency to telescope “ancient times” into a small window, as if Plato and Homer were building the pyramids in order to hide in them from dinosaurs.
This just seems like a similar exercise, but with fiction.
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“A long time ago…” from 1977 could be considered 1962. 
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I haven’t followed it, having mostly walked away from the Star Wars universe quite a while back, yet with minimal information (i.e., this show is after RotJ) I somehow figured out they were not the same characters. That doesn’t mean I actually cared, of course, but I still understood that!
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But it still wouldn’t be 1984!
I wonder how big a thing the Jedi were. I wonder if they would be analogous to the special forces or intelligence agency of the Republic; maybe a big deal in the core systems, by relatively unheard of out on the fringes. Something like MI5; some Brits will have heard of them (probably via James Bond), but few ever have any direct involvement with them.
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I’m not sure people “forgot about the Jedi” exactly. There aren’t ever actually all that many Jedi and the Star Wars universe is absolutely massive and there doesn’t appear to be any mass media in it. Most people will never have been anywhere near a Jedi so only knew them through word of mouth. When they stopped hearing about the Jedi they to question if the old stories were ever true at all.
