Jedi_Joanna

like. these are not neutral historians. these are not unbiased narrators. these are men who wake up every morning and choose manipulation as a lifestyle.

and yet people hear palpatine whispering into anakin’s ear like “the jedi are hiding things from you… they don’t trust you…” and go. wow. compelling. source: dude in a hood who has never told the truth once in his life.

HELLO???

of course he’s going to say that. what else is he supposed to do. sit anakin down and go “hi yes i am actively trying to emotionally isolate you from your support system so i can turn you into my apprentice and ruin your life” like be serious 😭

same with maul going “you’ve been indoctrinated by the jedi” as if HE wasn’t raised in a sith pipeline since childhood. sir. that is not a revelation.

and dooku. walking around like a philosophy professor going “the republic is corrupt” yeah okay, we know, and your solution is… fascism with extra lightning???

What do I mean?

Well, let's take the Drill. When faced with the problem of Big Wall, Ozai's Fire Nation comes up with Big Drill. One singular Big Drill. Which, as anyone except an idiot could have predicted, immediately breaks down and accomplishes nothing. And if the Fire Nation had made it past the wall, then they would have been fighting through a narrow opening against people who can hurl long distance rocks! Which, if your face or body is vulnerable to high velocity rocks, is a bad thing for you and also for the battle.

Not to mention the resource cost of that thing! It's so insanely gigantic, it must have cost the Fire Nation the equivalent of trillions. For ONE drill. Not ten smaller drills. Just ONE drill. (Fanfic fuel: how much did Ba Sing Se profit off of stripping that drill for parts? Did they reverse engineer it? Did Long Feng keep that for himself?)

And you might be thinking, fairly, that it was War Minister Qin who came up with the drill and you'd be right, but it's Ozai who's approving all this shit. Instead of doing the reasonable thing and asking Qin if he et the whole edible, or even the in-character thing of burning him to death, Ozai just goes... big drill. Makes sense. We should have the biggest drill, because we are the biggest nation. Drill, baby, drill. sorry

It's not the first time, either! He also approves Zhao's invasion of the North Pole, apparently just because Zhao is good at kissing ass and hates Zuko? I couldn't tell you what merits Zhao has. We do not see him lead a single successful mission. The closest he comes is Pohuai, and even then its the Yuyan archers who do most of the work. (My longstanding headcanon is that the reason we don't see the Yuyan archers again is because Zhao blamed the whole thing on them and they were disbanded. This is great fic fuel for displaced Yuyan archers just, wandering around, being elite.)

He approved a massive naval invasion of the North Pole, surrounded by and made of water and ice, inhabited by people who bend water. A nation that was, by its own choice, completely out of the war.

Every time we see Ozai doing something, it's something stupid. Like disfiguring and banishing his firstborn child in a culture that has primogeniture. And then (once he's done pissing away a massive fleet of ships) he does the logical thing and sends his only other heir to bring his first heir back - even though his first heir would have been willing to return with a simple invitation. Like he could have sent a letter saying "dear son come home miss u pick up 200 000 tons of steel qin wants 2 build a drill lol", and Zuko would have come. (Okay, he did have a valid reason for having Zuko escorted, since he thought Iroh was a traitor, but there's absolutely NO reason to risk Azula. Why not send Combustion Man? It's the luckiest stroke of luck ever that Azula is 100 times more competent than her dad.)

Of course, a dictator(-wannabe) sending his daughter on high-level diplomatic missions is pure fiction. Nobody would do that.

The best part of this is that it's entirely realistic and in-character. I could absolutely imagine Ozai purging all of his competent admirals and generals, and then promoting brownnoses like Zhao and crackpots like Qin, because they promised him glorious destinies and secret knowledge of Big Drill.

I also really, really want a scene of Zuko and Azula realizing that their father is a fucking idiot.

Zuko being burned, banished, abused, etc. didn’t make a better person; arguably it made him a much worse person(but it’s very hard to tell since our perspective on pre-exile Zuko is so limited).

Azula being abused didn’t make her a better person.

Jet being orphaned by the Fire Nation didn’t make a better person; it just embittered him and made him committed to winning the war, no matter the cost.

Mai and Ty Lee having awful family lives didn’t turn them good people, or people who weren’t OK with imperial conquest. It didn’t make them nicer or more compassionate.

Sokka and Katara losing their mother and being left behind by their father didn’t make them better people; being victims of genocide didn’t make them better people.

Hama being brutalized just embittered her and led her down a dark path.

Suffering just hurts people(and often makes them bitter and angry), it doesn’t lead them becoming nicer or more compassionate or more pure or more moral or free of sin.

🔥The avatar

🔥Appa

🔥His lost uncle via a sweaty sandal

🔥A secret civilization thought to be long gone

🔥The last 2 dragons existing

🔥Katara and Sokka’s Father plus Suki

🔥Katara’s mother’s murderer

🔥His honor

🔥His entire nation’s honor

🔥 Family

And then this exchange occurs:

Mace: Are you sure we are taking the right path?

Yoda: Hmm, the right path, no. The only path, yes.

And... I'm rather inclined to agree with Yoda, that it was the only path available to them (at least, the only one that could feasibly lead to a tolerable outcome for the Jedi, as pretty much any other course of action would likely have immediately spelled the end of the Jedi's ability to act on people's behalf at all).

Because, in my opinion, the Jedi Order lost the moment Palpatine became chancellor. Palpatine held the power, and he could manipulate the Senate to his own bidding.

Yes, a decade later the Jedi could have refused to fight in any war... And then Palpatine would likely have charged them with treason, and even if he hadn't then the people of the Republic in general likely would consider such inaction on the part of the Jedi a betrayal as Dooku and the droids take over their homes.

But why were the Jedi subject to the Senate's whims at all, one may ask? Why not separate themselves from legal oversight; why submit to this oversight at all? I'm not sure we really stop and think of what that would have meant for the Jedi and their opportunities to help. Would the galaxy really have accepted wandering Force wielders stepping in and meddling in planetary affairs without any authority? Given how resistant some were to accepting the Jedi's intervention even with legal backing, I don't think so. Dooku believes the Jedi Order has become as ineffective as the Senate by the time of the Clone Wars; but the Republic is what gave the Jedi the authority and credibility to act at all.

Order 66 destroyed them. There is never any coming back from that.

Even if you look at the comics, at the most distant point in the future they go with Cade Skywalker when it’s like 156ABY. It’s not back.

I don’t think it ever could come back either though. When the temple was destroyed everything was. The archives, the traditions, the robes, the statues, the gardens.

All of it was gone.

Even more than that it took out the lineages. So so much of the Jedi was them passing on the mantle to the younger generation. Master to apprentice. Everyone else around the apprentice as well. When that chain was broken? It can’t be fixed.

Which is awful. At their core the Jedi were truly good. They wanted to help people. They committed their *lives* to helping people. Thousands of years of them did this.

Where in AOTC or ROTS does it ever look like the Jedi don't know how to fight alongside an army? At what point in either of those films do they ever show the Jedi struggling with that and the clones having to step in to do the work themselves? Never. The one real scene where we see the Jedi and clones working on a strategy together is when Obi-Wan and Cody are discussing their approach to Utapau and Cody seems perfectly content to follow along with Obi-Wan's plan.

And in TCW, the only Jedi who we ever see coming up with plans that won't work and getting corrected by the clones are Anakin and Ahsoka. With Anakin, this is specifically showcasing how he's so powerful that he often just goes with the brute force plan because he CAN but he forgets that the clones won't be able to survive alongside him. It's a character choice to show his arrogance and short-sightedness as well as just emphasizing his abilities. With Ahsoka, she's literally a student who is still learning things in general, so the idea that she does sometimes have to be corrected isn't that strange. But as far as I can recall, there are NO OTHER ADULT JEDI who have similar scenes with their own clone forces. Yoda, Mace, Obi-Wan, Kit, Shaak Ti, Aayla, Luminara, Eeth... they all seem to manage JUST FINE on their own and we even see them shutting down plans given by the clones in order to protect more of the men at their own expense.

The Clones start to wonder if this is how the Jedi get their revenge, haunting them by the smell of a tea and a joke they always said. But then they curse themselves that maybe it wasn't revenge, but grief. And now, here they lay in the mud and misery of the life of something their Jedi would break at. They were meant for the Jedi, and now the Jedi are gone and the Clones aren't meant for anything at all. They betrayed their meaning.

Anakin: *doesn't follow advice, falls to the dark side*

Fandom: of course he fell, yoda's advice sucked!

If Luke is the Jedi that Anakin should've been, then Leia is the LEADER that Padme should've been.

Padme is a hypocrite, proclaiming that all people deserve basic decency and the right to safety, but at the same time allowing Anakin to get away with a mass murder with no consequences by covering it up.

Leia doesn't even let Han get away with being a little bit of an asshole, there's no way she'd let him get away with mass murder. She holds everyone around her to a higher standard, believing in the best of them but also but refusing to accept excuses for cowardice and selfishness.

Padme talks so much about wanting the war to end, but then allows one of the opposition's biggest generals go free just to get Anakin back because she cares about him, causing the war to continue to go on for even longer.

Leia lets Luke sacrifice himself because she knows it's possibly the only way they might have a victory and beat the Empire, even though she knows what he is to her and loves him. She knows what has to be done and respects the choice Luke is making and would never condemn their efforts just to keep him with her.

Padme's story parallels Anakin's, she devolves as the narrative goes on, until she's barely a shell of the person she used to be. That strength and moral clarity she showed as a Queen is entirely gone, leaving only a scared woman pleading with a murderer to come back to her.

No. That's NOT what I'm saying here, AT ALL. Move away from biology and nature being the end all and be all.

First, Leia is Leia. She is not just "Character A with some of Character B sprinkled in." She is her own person with her own motivations and flaws. I am comparing her to Padme because I think the narrative intentionally builds that parallel for us and I find it interesting to look at the ways in which Luke and Leia are deliberately set up to be the successes to their parents' failures. That does not mean that Leia IS "Padme" in any way.

Secondly, Leia would never in any way be fortified by any of Anakin's anything. Anakin is a piece of shit and part of the reason he's a piece of shit IS his self-righteousness. And it's not like Padme didn't have plenty of her own self-righteousness, too. Leia is fortified by BAIL AND BREHA ORGANA, but it's not "self-righteousness" she's fortified by. She's fortified by their passion, their discipline, their wisdom, their kindness, their bravery, their willingness to stand up for what's right without burning down everything around them in the process. She's fortified by their absolute will to remain who they are in a world that wants them to capitulate everything out of fear. Leia learns how to be a good leader because she's raised by two of them.

Thirdly, Leia learns how to be a good leader because she actively CHOOSES to be a good leader when given the options. Leia does not succumb to despair and selfishness the way both of her biological parents do. Leia does not let love cause her to give up something that would allow the rebellion to win the war. She loves Luke, but she lets him go to the Death Star as a self-sacrifice because she knows it's necessary if they're going to win this war and respects the choice he is making in this moment. Padme starts off as someone who chooses to be a good leader, and remains someone who makes that choice SOMETIMES but not all of the time. Padme CANNOT give up Anakin for the sake of the war or anything else. She chooses to exonerate him when he murders children, she chooses to cover his murders up, she chooses to trade Grievous for him despite what that will mean for the war effort and the people who died to capture Grievous in the first place, and she chooses to lie to Obi-Wan to protect Anakin even after she discovers that Anakin committed a genocide and helped destroy the Republic. Padme would never have made the choice Leia makes in ROTJ.

If you think "self-righteousness" is what allowed Leia to let Luke go in that moment, then you might need to go watch it again. It's not self-righteousness that saves Leia from Padme's mistakes. It's compassion, something Anakin barely had any of in his adult life and something Padme struggled with by the end. And by compassion, I mean the way the term is actually utilized in Star Wars, a selfless love towards everyone. It's the opposite of attachment, it's an ability to let go of biases in order to show kindness to everybody, no matter who or what they are.

And then of course there's Luke. Again, it is not anything from Padme that saves him. He's never met Padme and, unlike Leia, he doesn't seem to have any kind of latent memory of her nor do the Larses seem to have ever told him any stories about her (not that they'd have had that many to tell, but we know they told Luke that his dad was a smuggler of some kind, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could've come up with a lie about who his mother was, we just never hear about it). If Luke is a better Jedi than Anakin, it's not somehow Padme's influence that saves him.

It's the Larses. This is Owen and Beru's down to earth hardworking values coming in. Unlike the Organas, Owen and Beru aren't really represented as these brilliant paragons of virtue. Owen and Beru make mistakes, even in terms of how they choose to parent Luke. But what this does for Luke is it shows him how to LEARN and GROW from his mistakes, something he uses quite a lot during the original trilogy. Luke learns how to be dependable and resilient. When it matters, Luke can rise up and do what needs to be done. He DOES have some of Anakin's darkness in him, that's a major element of his character and his narrative, but it's not his biological mother's compassion that saves him. It's Owen and Beru Lars's values, and it's the Jedi philosophies he was taught by Obi-Wan and Yoda. THAT'S what keeps him from making the same mistakes Anakin did.

Leia is Bail Organa's righteous passion and willingness to enter a fight tempered by Breha Organa's discipline and wisdom.

Luke is Owen Lars's protective instincts towards those he loves and firmness of opinion tempered by Beru Lars's empathy towards everyone she meets and open-minded acceptance of change.