gffa: Force Collector | by Kevin ShinickTHIS WAS AMAZING AND HEARTBREAKING AT THE SAME TIME.The over
gffa:Force Collector | by Kevin ShinickTHIS WAS AMAZING AND HEARTBREAKING AT THE SAME TIME.The overarching theme/point of this book is that the Force apparently decided that it was tired of the Jedi’s story being mistold, that all the propaganda and outright lies about them were enough already, and so it sent Karr on this path to discover the actual truth in a way that the Empire and other bad faith interpretations couldn’t touch. It literally put him on a path specifically for this purpose–not to be a Jedi himself, but to be their storykeeper, to find these pieces of history that they touched and literally see it for himself through his psychometry.The tangle of it is difficult at times, because sometimes visions got crossed with other visions, it’s not so easy to just touch things and not have the Force kind of explode on you, because that’s what these abilities are, they can be incredibly painful (Karr basically has dangerous seizures because of them) and incredibly difficult to handle, and if it weren’t for the Force taking special care with him, who knows how that might have gone.But it makes sure he finds the pieces he needs, snippets here and there to understand the bigger picture, until he gets hold of a golden droid arm that tells him the entire story (with bonus pieces like a Jedi Temple Guard mask to see things like Anakin’s march on the Temple, that Threepio couldn’t have witnessed directly) and he sees how it all fits together. Not with piecing it together through whatever maybe-warped, maybe-twisted, maybe-true fragments that Palpatine or Vader couldn’t wipe out. But through the Force itself.And that’s why the climax of the book is so important–that Karr meets his great-grandfather, who is a former Jedi Padawan that disagreed with the Jedi’s path towards politics and had lost so much faith that he literally believed the lies Palpatine told, that the Jedi were traitors to the Republic. This belief is paralleled with Karr having mixed up the visions of Jedi and Inquisitor, something that is shown to be completely and utterly narratively untrue.The whole point is that those things are not true. The whole climax of the scene is Karr going, no, I actually saw what happened (and we the audience see enough of it with him to recognize the scenes’ accuracy), the Jedi were the ones who were betrayed. "They were everything you once believed in–they were protectors, guardians, and helpers. They fought for the light, but the darkness won. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you didn’t know. I’m so sorry there was no one to tell you.“ "It isn’t possible.” "It’s not just possible, it’s true. But the thing is, hardly anybody knows about it. Not anymore. The lie you knew became so many people’s reality. The Emperor poisoned the well for the Jedi.“ "Sir, you took such noble measures to protect your family–and those measures were successful. But there was no need to turn your back on the Jedi. They never turned their back on the Republic. Or you.”The other half of the importance of this scene is Naq Med’s horror that he believed the lies about the Jedi, that so much of his life had been wasted on thinking the worst of them, that both his life and the entire galaxy’s view of them had been poisoned by the Emperor, that nearly everything told about them had been filtered through that poison, even when it wasn’t done on purpose/because people didn’t know better. And that horror is important because he asks if the Jedi’s name has finally been cleared.He dies not long after Karr tells him, no, the Jedi’s name was never cleared.It’s not all terrible, he had a life that had meaning to him, he had people he cared about, the Jedi never turned their backs on him, it wasn’t worthless. Karr is here because he walked the path he did! That’s worth a whole hell of a lot!But that horror leads into THE WHOLE BIG POINT–that the Force literally chose Karr to see all these things so that he could tell the true story of the Jedi. That’s the ending of the book, he sits down and starts to write out the truth about these guardians of the light.Which is remarkable because literally no one else in the galaxy, that we know of, has this much of a clear view. Not even Luke Skywalker, who worked so hard to find everything he could, could avoid the Emperor’s having poisoned the well on the Jedi. Hell, The Last Jedi says it, in the scene that is specifically set up to be knocked down about Luke’s view on this (as well as Rian Johnson has explicitly said that Luke is conflating a personal failure with the idea of it being a failure on the part of the Jedi):Here’s the thing: There’s almost nothing to support what Luke says about the Jedi being romanticized or deified in the rest of the franchise. Believe me, I scour everything I can for mentions of the Jedi, and it’s always, they were a cult this, they were a criminal gang that, they were child stealing demons this, etc. The most we ever see of someone being pro-Jedi is that Poe occasionally says nice things about them or people find out the truth of what the Jedi actually built and are like, whoa, I didn’t know that.Which is why it’s heartbreaking that Luke says this, that he’s speaking out of depression and being heavily implied to be suicidal (in the sense that the implication is that he was there on Ahch-To to die and take the Jedi with him), because all this stuff he says about them is explicitly shown to be narratively wrong (”You think what? I’m gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order?“ is literally exactly what happens, which is the most clear-cut way of saying, “This scene where Luke is shit-talking the Jedi and saying that he’s out of the fight and the Jedi shouldn’t rise again, that he’s the last of them, is here specifically to be contrasted against the actual truth of the story.”), is explicitly contradicted by other elements in the book (how the idea of the First Order being based on the Jedi’s methods was specifically attributed TO PALPATINE’S LIES ABOUT THEM), which shows that even Luke Skywalker’s view of the Jedi was filtered through the poison of the Emperor, no matter how much he tried to rise above that for most of his life.That he had his moments of faith about the truth, but that sometimes even Luke Skywalker, because there was so little left of the truth, because of his own internal crises and how he lost touch with the light, can fall prey to the bad faith untruths about the Jedi. And that it’s an uplifting story that, when he finds that light again, when he picks himself back up after those years on Ahch-To, he starts to slowly come back to the truth about the Jedi, too. That’s why these things go hand in hand together so incredibly well with this book, too.That the Force had Karr to be the Jedi’s story’s preservationist. Because no one else could do it as clearly as he could with his psychometry:So that’s it, that’s what this whole Force Collector storyline came down to, that the idea that the Jedi betrayed everything or that it was anything but a massive betrayal by the Republic towards the Jedi, that they weren’t fighting for the light up until the very, very end, the idea that what happened with Anakin was their fault, all of that isn’t true. They were betrayed. They were fighting for the light. They were good people.And now there’s finally someone to tell their story, because the Force wanted that to happen. Naq Med’s life wasn’t in vain, because people had lives and that mattered, but also because it led to a path where the real story could finally be told by someone who saw it for themselves, unfiltered by the Empire. -- source link
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