Just Shadows in the Starlight

ahsoka doods

but i’m going to talk about this anyway, because if anything i can lock out reblogs and force people to look at this post and have no recourse with which to yell things at me. i was thinking about the jedi as peacekeepers. i’ve always read this as an intentional oxymoron by the time of the clone wars - a thing that is formerly possibly true but you lose absolutely all right to call yourself a peacekeeper when you start lining up large amounts of men and asking them to kill and die for you. palpatine’s trap is clever in that regard; sending the jedi to war is the precise, total, and complete opposite of what the jedi ever wanted to be, and what better way to destroy the jedi than to force them to violate their own principles? all palpatine does is sit there and ask people to become their worst selves - it’s kind of a theme with him. he is the prince of lies on his shitty little throne going, “let the hate flow through you!” because he has very little interest in luke or anakin being forced into the dark side, and a lot of interest in convincing them to choose it, and it works overly well with the father and almost works with the son. the galaxy claps when palpatine very nicely asks it to submit to an authoritarian government; palpatine very nicely asks the jedi to go to war for the republic and the jedi as a whole stoically hop to it, because palpatine doesn’t force anyone into shit, he just games the set-up. and that’s necessary to the theme of star wars - that’s the point!

but the war is inherently, by its very essence, antithetical to the jedi way; the jedi are not some ragtag freedom fighters striking back at an oppressive government the way the rebels are, where the power dynamic is entirely different. they are themselves tied intrinsically to the state of the republic. they are the government. they are the long arm of what will be the empire here shortly. the jedi will be persecuted following order 66, but they are, at the clone wars, the upper brass of the military, ascetic wizard monks taking the place of commissioned officers. the jedi place immense value on life and then line millions of lives up and ask them to go kill people because the republic decides they need to. that’s a pretty big surrender of ideals they presumably hold very close - there is an inherent oxymoron to “this weapon is your life” when the culminating victory of the series involves the symbolic gesture of the main character throwing that weapon away, and that point of the saga in particular fascinates me. you simply just would not have that depth if the move of the jedi-become-military is not interrogated a bit.

star wars will always have an anti-war undertow to it because that is partially what george lucas meant when he was writing the OT. “wars not make one great,” is one of the most vital themes of the saga, and the villains in ANH being jingoistic, murderous maniacs, bloodthirsty war pigs, exists that way for a reason. the narrative catharsis is not an act of violence, but the refusal to sacrifice yourself for the sake of violence. that’s integral to the point, if not the point of star wars. i think it’s significant that obi-wan and yoda go from generals, military commanders whose job it is to kill and order people to kill and then sacrifice lives to war en masse, to people who die nonviolent deaths. deaths that are the opposite of violent, even, for their lack of a corpse - yoda rolls over and disappears, and obi-wan all but just raises his hands and lets vader murder him. completely bloodless, completely removed from the guttural sight of owen and beru’s bodies burning, or even vader’s armor on blazing fire, or anakin’s uh, you know, crispification in ROTS. those bloodless ends equate to ascension into Force Ghosthood, a kind of vaunted extra-life you get if you’re Jedi Enough, it seems. both of their (obi-wan’s and yoda’s) thematic battles against the sith in the PT end up being futile - both obi-wan and yoda ultimately fail to stop the rise of the sith and the empire, and retire to obscurity. but luke succeeds, and succeeds unarmed. there is an innate discomfort to the idea that obi-wan and (it’s implied, but granted yoda never says it directly) yoda share the sentiment of vader and the emperor, two shattered mirrors looking at each other - obi-wan and yoda believe that vader has to die to save the galaxy, and the emperor and vader are looking for luke to take vader’s place as resident sith bastard warlord.

and that was part of the trap, wasn’t it?

like i sort of knew this already, but i tend to think of making the enemy army extremely dull and interchangeable droids as primarily a lazy writing move, to sidestep the issue of Whether The Enemy Infantryman Deserves To Die in the messed-up situation of the prequels. and it is that.

but also it was absolutely key to Palpatine’s trap, because if the Jedi had been faced with ‘go take people and have them kill other people’ they’d have been much more likely to dig their heels in. to notice that this was antithetical to their selfhood and would break them.

but instead he gave them a conflict where all the ‘people’ were on their side, and refusing to be involved would just be sending those people off without their protection, and wouldn’t obviously save anyone but themselves. so it was easier not to register the cost of waging war.

also i think he played on the weird self-destructive tendencies they tend to get as part of their ideology of selflessness. like in the obvious way in terms of courting their own destruction, but also with regard to the clones.

the jedi tend to have a huge blind spot about the ethical issues with asking other people to risk or destroy themselves for a cause. because that’s virtuous, so how can it be wrong?

he has basically no stakes in taking over the galaxy and the war is really inconvenient for him and he's a huge problem for both sides because he keeps kidnapping people to do horrible (and frequently lethal) experiments on them and he also kidnapped a whole bunch of clones because he's Way Too Interested in how they were created and trained which is overall a very weird experience for all of them

also also, repeat test subjects (kidnapping victims). he just grabs them off the battlefield and does some fun little body modifications or sith rituals to them and then releases them again for 'field test data' to kidnap again at a later time so he can collect the new data. the changes seem generally helpful in some way but nobody knows if there isn't something else going on and obviously it is very disconcerting to not know what is going on with your own body. I imagine this comes with some kind of tracking band or implant (if you are fun it could be a collar), like when wildlife scientists tag animals, and nobody can figure out how to remove it without killing the patient

Anakin was arguably much more of a father to Ahsoka than he ever was to Luke (even if he was more of an older brother figure to Ahsoka than an actual father figure). He trained her and built her lightsabers and had a dumb nickname for her and made dad jokes and like - everything Luke ever could have wanted out of his dad. She knew him when he was still Anakin Skywalker and not Darth Vader. She knew Padme!! Padme also was kind of her mom! Luke doesn't even know Padme's name until sometime post ROTJ - it's possible Ahsoka was the first person who could have told it to him.

Not only that, but she had the Jedi Order. She was trained by the Order at its peak, raised from infancy in the rituals and knowledge that Luke now must piece together from whispers from ghosts and whatever old texts he can scrounge up from the corners of the galaxy the Empire somehow missed. He is doing all of this on his own with no guidance, no oversight, meanwhile it's knowledge that came to her as easy as breathing.

And she walked away from all of it. Everything Luke has ever wanted - a relationship with his parents, proper Jedi training, the Jedi Order itself - she had without ever asking for it, and she walked away from it without a backward glance. And she's still walking away from it - she's not a Jedi, she won't claim that title, she won't join Luke's new Order. Maybe she shows up from time to time and tells him some stories and shares from knowledge, but she won't train him, and somewhere deep down he knows that he will never be as much of a Jedi as she is even though she doesn't claim that title anymore, and part of the reason because is she won't help him.

And for Ahsoka's part. Anakin returned from the Dark Side for Luke. He couldn't - or wouldn't - return for Ahsoka, who he trained, who knew him and loved him and would have died for him. He tried to kill her and would have if Ezra hadn't saved her. But this boy, who shares nothing with Anakin but a name and half his DNA - he was enough to bring Anakin back. She wasn't, not with everything they shared, not with all the times she'd almost died for him, and he'd saved her, and she'd saved him. How do you not kind of hate someone for that?

And besides, he's trying to bring back the Jedi Order. The Order that cast her aside as soon as it was convenient for them, the Order that allowed Anakin Skywalker to become what he did and was too blind to see a Sith Lord under their noses and that died for those mistakes. And sure, he's trying to do it differently, he's trying to do it better, but what does this boy know of better? What can he know of the sins of the Jedi Order? When he speaks of the Order with stars in his eyes, what can he know of the pain that she suffered? That so many suffered? How can he correct what he doesn't understand?

it’s the way mon, from the beginning, has chosen the rebellion over her family. it’s the way she sacrificed her daughter’s future for the future of the galaxy. it’s the way she would have done almost anything to protect leida, to stop her from being trapped in an unhappy marriage as a child just as she was, but not quite anything, because the rebellion has to come first. it’s the way that she’s both selfish and torturously selfless, and at every moment the guilt of it is tearing her apart. it’s the way that she watched as perrin literally gave leida away, to a marriage that she herself arranged, watched how close the knife came to leida’s throat, knowing that she may never again be able to protect leida at all.

Then Kleya finds her and pays a visit.

 The cast of the Prequel Trilogy had interesting concepts that were executed poorly enough to make them seem utterly stupid.