The Jedi allow themselves to feel more emotions than the Sith do.
Was thinking about how, usually, the general audience interprets the difference between the Jedi and Sith as:
“The Jedi don’t allow you to feel your emotions, the Sith encourage you to embrace them with a passion. The Jedi can’t be in a relationship, but the Sith can” and more stuff along that line.
And… I disagree. Mainly because a lot of what we’ve seen in Star Wars material so far suggests that it’s basically the other way round.
First off: they aren’t emotionless.
Jedi are allowed to feel any emotion. We see this mentioned multiple times, both in Legends and current canon:
They simply can’t act out of emotion, keeping the peace needs to be the priority because that’s their job, as Jedi. Hence the line in the Jedi code: “Emotion, yet peace” or “there is no emotion; there is peace”.
For example: Anakin and Obi-Wan’s fight against Dooku in Episode 2.
They didn’t stand a chance against Dooku to begin with. But if they had taken him together, they would have kept him there long enough for Yoda to arrive and take care of Dooku. And then, they wouldn’t be wounded, so Dooku wouldn’t be able to distract Yoda, he would’ve been captured, and the Clone Wars would have ended before it even started. They would’ve had peace.
Instead, Anakin was angry that he had to leave Padmé behind, he was angry that about 80 of his Jedi friends were brutally murdered on Dooku’s orders, so he rushes at Dooku, gets taken out, leaving a tired Obi-Wan to fend for himself against a guy who was once the 2nd/3rd best duelist in the Jedi Order. And, when Yoda finally DOES arrive, the wounded Obi-Wan and Anakin become a burden, forcing Yoda to let Dooku go.
If Anakin had kept his emotions in check at that moment and focused on doing his duty, there would have been peace.
What a Jedi needs to is accept their emotions, face their fears and overcome them. This is a theme we see in many episodes of The Clone Wars, Rebels, and even in Jedi: Fallen Order.
As Luke puts it in The Rise of Skywalker:
“Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.”
So when Obi-Wan or Padmé ask Anakin if he wants to talk about his feelings, about why he’s angry or jealous…
… and Anakin says stuff such as “I’m fine, I’m not angry!”, when he so clearly is, Anakin is basically running away from his emotions, repressing them, which is the opposite of what a Jedi does.
In fact, I’d argue the Jedi feel emotions on a whole other level. Their sense of compassion is so strong, they allow themselves to feel so much, that when a group of living beings begins to suffer, they just perceive all of it, and they open themselves up to the pain, they endure it.
How many times have we seen Yoda react to the pain someone else is going through? Like when he’s suffering because Anakin just lost his mom, or when he feels the Jedi dying during Order 66.
Also about being in a relationship…
The problem, for a Jedi, isn’t really being in a relationship. I mean, yeah, the rules say that you can’t get married because technically, if you’re a Jedi, you’re ‘married to the Order’. If you’re openly in a relationship, holding hands in the temple etc, that’s definitely gonna be frowned upon.
The spirit of the rule is that you can’t compromise your better judgment, your efficiency on a mission. And the book Master & Apprentice (my favorite canon novel so far) shows us that a Jedi trying to loophole their way out of these rules is basically inviting disaster.
But, on the other hand… we see in TCW that Mace Windu and Yoda clearly know there’s something going on between Anakin and Padmé, because they ask him for advice regarding Padmé (we see they know something during the Clovis episodes, plus the deleted Episode 2 scene between Obi-Wan and Windu).
And, like… they’re not giving him any crap for it.
It’s not as if he’s great at hiding it either!
If you watch any of the scenes where Anakin is talking about Padmé (because “they’re just really close friends”) to the Jedi in the Clovis arc, he is so blatantly lying and the masters are so obviously aware and just let him believe they don’t know.
They do tell him to watch out for his greed and keep his head together. But they don’t tell him “How dare you be in a relationship?! You are expelled!” or anything like that.
They trust that he’ll keep his head in the game, warn him to make sure he does.
Because, really, the problem isn’t loving someone, or being in a relationship. That’s fine. It’s about getting too possessive and toxic with that relationship. It’s about not causing others to suffer, directly or indirectly, because of your relationship.
The bottom line is: if a Jedi need to choose between the person they’re in love with and saving the galaxy, they need to save the galaxy, because that’s their duty.
As George Lucas said, on BBC News in 2002:
“Jedi Knights aren’t celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments - and possessive relationships.”
And in Rolling Stones, in 2005:
“The story is not about a guy who was born a monster – it’s about a good boy who was loving and had exceptional powers, but how that eventually corrupted him and how he confused possessive love with compassionate love. That happens in Episode II: Regardless of how his mother died, Jedis are not supposed to take vengeance.”
“He was kind, and sweet, and lovely, and he was then trained as a Jedi. But the Jedi can’t be selfish. They can love but they can’t love people to the point of possession. You can’t really possess somebody, because people are free. It’s possession that causes a lot of trouble, and that causes people to kill people, and causes people to be bad. Ultimately it has to do with being unwilling to give things up.”
The Sith frame themselves as “the guys who will let you feel whatever you want”. And that’s just not true.
Sith are allowed to feel one kind of emotions. Anger, selfish pleasure, greed. The negative emotions, the ones that give you a brief boost in power/pleasure when you indulge them, but ultimately leave you empty inside.
Any other kind of feeling is seen as pointless, a distraction from the Sith’s goal of achieving unlimited power.
In the book From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, we get a glimpse into Sidious’ mind:
“Some might have felt a shadow of fear upon recognizing the disturbance, but Palpatine knew better than to ever give in to something as trivial as emotions. Those types of risks were shed long ago, in another lifetime. All he cared about was the source of the disturbance. ”
And in Darth Vader #6 (2020), when Vader was sad and depressed after seeing a recording of Padmé dying for the first time… Palpatine did this to him:
Because, like, how dare Vader have *gasp* a natural reaction to an emotionally hurtful event? Hell no! He needs to get his shit together and be a ruthless murderer again, amirite?
Cherry on the cake: in Legends, Sith Lord Darth Malgus killed his wife, Eleena, because he came to the conclusion that she was a weakness that he couldn’t afford to have.
No sadness or fear allowed, for the Sith. Just anger and suffering. Just lust for power. That’s it. Anything else is trivial, it’s a weakness.
So a Sith can’t be in relationship. Because they’re technically already in a relationship with themselves, with their master, and with the Dark Side. There isn’t any space for anyone else.
As Lucas puts it in this video:
“Being selfish, following your pleasures, always entertaining yourself with pleasure and buying things and doing stuff — you’re always going to be unhappy. You’ll never get to the point… you’ll get this little instant shot of pleasure, but it goes away and then you’re stuck where you were before, and the more you do it, the worse it gets. You finally get everything you want and you’re miserable, because there’s no… there’s nothing at the end of that road.“
Finally, there’s this thing I saw, the other day… which is very heart-warming.
In 2015, Colin, an autistic 7-year-old, wrote to LucasFilm (thinking George Lucas was still there) asking for a rule change in the Jedi Order: he wanted to be able to get married, one day, but he reaaaallly didn’t wanna be a Sith.
This is what LucasFilm replied to him:
“To be a Jedi is to truly know the value of friendship, of compassion, and of loyalty, and these are values important in a marriage.
The Sith think inward, only of themselves.
When you find someone that you can connect to in a selfless way, then you are on the path of the light, and the dark side will not take hold of you. With this goodness in your heart, you can be married.”
This is in no way an official confirmation… but the spirit of it does echo George Lucas’ thoughts on the matter, I think. Take from it what you will.
So yeah, bottom line: Jedi can totally feel emotions. The Sith only allow themselves to feel a specific kind of emotions.
After comparing the two, I’d say that the Sith are the ones with the more limiting ideology.
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