gffa:gffa:gffa:There’s a lot of small details that I’m going to yell about that are amazing in this

gffa:gffa:gffa:There’s a lot of small details that I’m going to yell about that are amazing in this issue, most especially how much Yoda loves his grandkid and encourages him to question things, but first I’m going to get right to the heart of what’s going on here:  Qui-Gon is questioning the Jedi’s path, about them being situated on Coruscant instead of some distant world where they’d be even further away from interacting with other people, questioning about how they work for the Senate, questioning how they fight battles.And, honestly, pretty much all of this lines up with exactly how I see things.  Ultimately, being part of the Republic is what dooms the Jedi.  Ultimately, being under the jurisdiction of the Senate is what dooms the Jedi.  Ultimately, fighting in the clone wars is what dooms the Jedi.  Do I think these were missteps?  Yeah, of course.  But I think this issue also does a solid job of illustrating why those missteps were taken.We see in the Jedi of the Republic - Mace Windu comic that people don’t understand and fear the Jedi.  We see that all throughout The Clone Wars, people fear and misunderstand the Jedi.  We see it mentioned several times when the Jedi come up in Star Wars Propaganda.  And Yoda himself says it right here:People fear what they don’t understand.  And Qui-Gon’s solution is basically to distance themselves even further from those people?  I think it’s pretty safe to say that wouldn’t have worked, either.And that’s why Qui-Gon can’t find answers by the end of the issue.  He goes on his Force-woo journey, he has a bunch of scary visions, and ultimately says, “Violence sows the seeds of the dark side.  Unchecked, the Jedi could become that which we fight against.”  And the very next page is him going to the Priestess of Wood and telling her that she should go talk to people on Coruscant, should reach out to them and create more allies.  To be more connected to this planet of metal.  That the whole point isn’t isolating themselves further, but instead working with the system.  Not going around unchecked, but instead having a system that helps them stay in their lane and forge allies.  (It’s only that the system they’re checked by happens to be in a moral decay spiral.)The page immediately after his Force-woo vision has him saying:“You may see it as a city of metal, but there is wisome to be found here.  And allies.”And then the final page with him going back to talk with Yoda, saying, yes, he found some answers (which are apparently, “Coruscant’s not so bad, I guess”) and they talk of how they have to find balance between not bending to the dark side, but still being flexible in how they approach things.You cannot clip any one piece of conversation out of this issue and take it out of context, because it’s a single story that’s meant to have themes, which means the ending is just as important as the middle (if not more so in some ways) and the ending is that: this is a quandary that doesn’t really have a good answer.THAT’S THE WHOLE IDEA.  THIS IS A QUANDARY THAT DOESN’T HAVE AN ANSWER.  There’s no simple, easy answer, no matter how much Force-woo shenanigans Qui-Gon has or how many conversations he has with Yoda.  Even in hindsight, knowing how the story goes, we don’t have an answer for how the Jedi could have avoided this.Leave Coruscant?  They’d have been fucked twice as hard, because people feared and mistrusted and misunderstood them even when they were already at the hart of the Republic.Leave being part of the Republic/the jurisdiction of the Senate?  They would be able to help no one, they would have no allies, they would be allies to no one in return.Stop fighting battles?  And instead just let people suffer and die?This is the conclusion Qui-Gon reaches when he goes on his Force Walk:  He ends up with more questions than answers.  He has some answers, but not enough to see things clearly.  Not enough to clear a path forward.That’s it, that’s the whole thing.  It’s not that the Jedi didn’t think about this stuff, they clearly did.  Obi-Wan questions it fairly often in The Clone Wars, about their greater path.  Yoda has several big speeches about it.  But there were no other answers.  Even when I look back with full hindsight and go, “What should they have done differently?” I can’t really come up with an answer, because every option I come up with, there’s another counter-move Palpatine could have made.  Not fight in the Clone Wars?  They’d have been ripped to shreds by the Republic for not helping, as well as they’d have had to stand by and let people die.  Etc.Ultimately, this comic just further illustrates to me that, no, the Jedi aren’t perfect, but every time we see them (and it’d have been fascinating to get the perspective of the Council, we don’t actually hear anything from them or their side of things) they care deeply and are trying to figure out the best thing to do and are encouraging people to learn and question and do their best.  GOD, THEY WERE SO GOOD, THERE WAS SO MUCH LIGHT WITHIN THEM, THEY CARED SO MUCH AND WANTED TO HELP SO MANY PEOPLE AND I’M JUST GONNA CRY ABOUT THEIR LOSS, THAT THIS IS WHY THEY WERE THE BIG THREAT TO PALPATINE, THIS IS WHY HE ABSOLUTELY HAD TO EXTINGUISH THEIR LIGHT FROM THE GALAXY.they were all just trying their best ok honestly at the end of the day it wasn’t the jedi that needed fixing it was the governmentthe jedi could have been an extraordinary institution under a competent & caring government they just weren’t given the chance (via @missmarthanightingale)Okay, first of all, those tags are rude as heck, I DID NOT ASK FOR THESE FEELINGS, but second of all THANK YOU FOR THIS.The state of the galaxy during the time is absolutely fucked up and I love how thoroughly the Propaganda book covers that, I love how clear George Lucas is when he talks about it, but one of the interesting things is that, because the Jedi are often the main characters, we assume that the responsibility rests entirely on them, that they are thought to have as much power and influence as the Senate does.When they very much do not!  We see that they have military leadership, but The Clone Wars (and the comics) establish that they’re acting in a military role, rather than as a governmental one.  They are given their authority by the Senate and we see plain evidence (in TCW and in the comics) that the galaxy fears and mistrusts the Jedi, even when they go around helping people, even when they literally have outreach centers for people to come talk to them and learn about them and idk probably have a class about What The Fuck The Force Even Is.The answer wasn’t for the Jedi to secede from the Republic, because look how Palpatine used the Separatists for that.  The answer wasn’t for them to take over in a coup (as they were accused of doing, but they never showed any sign of wanting that power for themselves, only that it couldn’t be left in the hands of a Sith Lord who literally controlled the Senate, I mean, how would that even work, unless they had the Senate on their side and they made absolutely move towards the Senate).The answer was:  They needed a better government.  That was what needed fixing.The Jedi understood that they were walking potential nuclear weapons just by existing, that that’s why so many people in the galaxy would go after Force-sensitive younglings and literally steal them away and auction them off and why the Jedi had to protect that list so intensely.  Because they had all this power.  And that kind of power that people couldn’t understand–even when the Jedi literally had outreach centers!–needed to be kept in check by another organization, so that people would accept them.  They could have some autonomy within their area of expertise, but making them their own separate branch of government?  They clearly didn’t want that and they weren’t meant to be politicians by default.  (Though, some Jedi would have been good politicians.  But they had a higher calling, something that was more important to them, a more precious duty that they cared deeply about.  That’s not someone who should be in government.)Under a competent and caring government, they wouldn’t have been forced to choose between their ideals and the real, tangible lives of people.  Of course that wore them down, of course they made less than perfect choices, of course they made mistakes and the dark side ate into them because they were constantly surrounded by it and their psychic brains couldn’t help but soak it up, no matter how much they defended against it.  But they weren’t really given the breathing room to take stock or the power to do much more than flit from one tire fire to the next, during the war.Under a competent and caring government, they wouldn’t have been deliberately placed into a war meant to grind them down and make people see them only as violent, world-destroying soldiers, just so people would look the other way when the Jedi children were murdered.Under a competent and caring government, they could have helped give the galaxy another thousand years of peace.SO IT’S BEEN LIKE THREE DAYS AND I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS COMIC AND ALL IT BROUGHT UP.The thing that is so striking about this issue is in Qui-Gon’s actions after his Force-woo vision is that he immediately goes and tells the Priestess of the Wood to stick around on Coruscant for awhile longer and find other allies, to work with other people, to work with the system.  This isn’t just there for random filler, it’s half of the entire plot!And it’s so strikingly similar to the ultimate message that was the issue of the Jedi in the Star Wars: Propaganda book:  “That’s it, that’s their big flaw here. The Jedi were bad at public relations.”In fairness, they were trying, they even had outreach centers!  But, yeah, they were bad at PR and that was what led them down the doomed path they took.  Oh, it’s more complicated than that, to be sure.  There was the dark side constantly beating down on their minds because it was all around them, there was the impossible to answer quandary of honor vs real, tangible lives being lost without fighting for them, etc.But ultimately the problem was not with the Jedi, not really.  The problem was with the government and the Propaganda book makes that really clear in the way the Jedi are consistently not drawn into the absolute roasting the Republic gets.  It’s also really clear in this description of Palpatine’s plans from Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (scanned by the ever-wonderful @glompcat!)“He understands that the corrupt Republic and the subservient Jedi Order can be brought down by playing to the weakness of the former:  its mindless bureaucracy and attachment to power.”WHAT A SLAM DUNK ON HOW IT’S NOT THE JEDI THAT’S THE PROBLEM, BY SPECIFYING THAT IT’S THE FORMER OF “THE CORRUPT REPUBLIC AND THE SUBSERVIENT JEDI ORDER” THAT’S THE PROBLEM.Further illustrating that the answer to the problem was with the corruption in the Senate, that the Republic needed a better government, full stop, that’s it, that’s the real problem.  Whatever else got gronked up along the way, this was the heart of it.  That allying yourself with others is good, but when you’re allied to a body of government that’s spiraling into moral decay, it’s going to fuck you over hard.  The answer is to get a better government.  (Except that’s real fuckin’ hard when you’re only .01% of the public, you’re only ten thousand people out of a quadrillion people or whatever, when you’re kinda bad at PR.) -- source link
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