Well, okay…I don’t stan them.
But I have mixed feelings about them.
As a kid I was really into Star Wars and looked up to the Jedi, so I think it’s a hold over from that.
The Jedi are flawed, foolish, short-sighted and kind of cowardly (among other things) and The Republic is a stagnant beasts with an inefficient anachronistic and byzantine system where the worst kind of poverty has existed for millennia.
…But I still kind of like them, despite their tragic faults.
Well…Idk if I like The Republic as depicted in Star Wars, in some ways I hate it.
But the idea of a galactic society where hundreds if not thousands of peoples and cultures are brought together to coexist is one I really like, and I can understand in the early days why the Jedi would of supported the creation of such an organization.
Of course it is just that, an idea , and the lore is filled with the many ways The Republic as a bourgeoise order failed these ideals.
Ultimately I think the Jedi erred in so closely associating themselves with and mooring themselves to a state.
Their understanding of the force and themselves is also incomplete or lacking, I think.
But at the end of the day I still like the little space wizard monks.
I respect their aim in controlling their emotions (even if it often materializes in suppression instead) and in being diplomats and peacekeepers for the galaxy (even if it often materializes in propping up an unjust status quo).
But now I am starting to ramble about children’s media, which is an unforgivable crime, so I’ll stop.
I don’t necessarily hate the Jedi, but the biggest shortcoming in KOTOR when I replayed it was that there was never a “good” option that didn’t also support the establishment and all of its failures in some way. It made me realize that if you became some kind of populist revolutionary in the Star Wars universe and lead a proletarian uprising, you would almost certainly be smeared by the Jedi Council as a “Sith Lord” regardless of whether you had actually turned to the Dark Side, and god damn there’s a piece of Star Wars media I would love to see.
I mean, the French Revolution can be a good thing and the Liberal Capitalist State bad at the same time.
Puts on gigantic nerd hat
That said I love a stupid argument about fictional universes.
In Legends (and increasingly in the new canon as Filoni et al shove KOTOR back in), the first iteration of the Republic was formed in 25,000BBY by the former mostly-human slaves of the Infinite Empire (chiefly by a group of former praetorian guards of a petty post fall warlord), as such they had a very liberal and decentralised constitution, one that allowed a wide variety of polities to join, as long as they didn’t have formal slavery.
There were several major reformations, The Republic in ep 1 is the same Republic in the same way the Qing Dynasty of China was the same government as the Xia Dynasty, but the ossification we see in Ep 1 is literally the weight of a system designed for completely different post dark-age material conditions, like if the government of Charlemagne survived and was trying to be a Liberal Democracy. The foundation is no longer fit for purpose.
The Jedi were not integrated with the Republic until the Great Hyperspace War in 5000BBY (1000 years before KOTOR) that followed discovery of the True Sith. They’d allied and occasionally involved themselves with Republican affairs in the preceding iterations of the Republic but never become a formal part of the system.
So the Jedi have spent the last 5000 years defending several iterations of the Republic (the current canon states the Republics current form is only 1000 years old) which is based on a 25,000 year old political ideology. Yeah, they’re corrupt, decadent, and stagnant. How could they not be?
Star Wars is in the weird spot where people are randomly born with like, demigod tier powers. Having them be volcel monks with no emotion is basically a 99% effective form of harm reduction, since every other method tends to end with evil people starting wars that kill millions. Can you even imagine if Earth had the same system, fucking Sith capitalism or some shit?
This is why Kreia in KOTOR 2 has the only correct take, that the force should be deleted entirely. Obviously she has to fail, it’s not Star Wars without the force, but removing would save literally billions of lives.The Empire didn’t need the Force to build the Death Star, but Luke did need the Force to stop it.
Yeah, but the Empire needed the Force to become the Empire
Honest question; At what point did Palpatine use the force to bring about the Empire? As far as I remember he only used the force to hide his own force power from the Jedi. Everything else was done by straightforward political manipulation, playing on people’s fears and greed.
Apparently in the old canon, he got angry at his dad and “accidentally” killed his entire close family, which got him scouted by the previous sith and all the connections that come with that. It also puts him in the comfortable position of being more or less the strongest person in the universe, the dude was almost invincible and being immune to assassination attempts and whatnot as space Hitler is a big bonus.
Have you checked out the High Republic? It’s very much “What if we go back to when the Republic was awesome and the rot hadn’t taken hold yet”.
I’ve heard of the High Republic, but idk what it is.
I haven’t looked into it, besides seeing a tweet of it’s announcement or something and it’s host (?) trying to be cancelled by racists.
What is it?Basically a new “era” of Star Wars set a few centuries before the Prequels. There’s a few novels set in it that have just been published, and also some comics and I believe a couple of character shorts on the Star Wars youtube channel? The racists are angry because Star Wars is once again allowing women and black people to be in space.
The standard intro is the novel Light of the Jedi, which actually made it to the number one bestseller on NYT.
Interesting.
Tbh my understanding/ interpretation of the time between the Ruusan reforms and TPM was that the rot was getting really bad.
Which was one of the reasons Palpatine could spark a separatist rebellion and the formation of an Empire.But I guess the reforms and the defeat of the sith could of ushered in a Golden Age, that slowly eroded.
I’m open to it I guess, but I think a big part of the narrative leading up to the movies is the Republic and Jedi are deeply flawed, so something that overly valorizes them might be hit or miss.It hasn’t been explicitly stated but the impression the setting gives is that the war with the Sith fucked things up WAY MORE than it did in Legends. In the time of the High Republic, Coruscant is not even completely covered in city yet.
In essence the rot hasn’t had time to set in because they’re only barely finishing repairing the damage of the last gigantic galactic war, only mere centuries before the Prequels, which in essence implies that the Republic that stood for thousands of years was really only at the height of its fabled power for a fraction of that time, and a lot of the early time was spent scrabbling to put things together.
I’m confused.
So it was a Golden Age, but Coruscant was barely together and they were still recovering from the wars with the sith?which in essence implies that the Republic that stood for thousands of years was really only at the height of its fabled power for a fraction of that time, and a lot of the early time was spent scrabbling to put things together.
also not sure I comprehend what you are trying to say here.
It’s a very…Roosevelty New Deal type of Golden Age. It’s a Golden Age because the government is constantly funding various infrastructure mega projects across the galaxy, but the mega projects are needed for a reason, too.
I was trying to say that we had previously been given the idea that the Republic was basically static and unchanging for thousands of years after the Reformation, with the only marker of change being the unsuspected and invisible rot spreading within, but in actuality the period of the Glorious Iconic Era was a very short portion of the Republic’s entire existence.
