#sequel critical

The PT begins at the end of its golden age, then concludes with its fall and the hopeful promise of its return. The OT follows the story of that return, ending in a movie literally called The Return of the Jedi. If the Jedi are Camelot, Luke is the second coming of King Arthur, who arises in a time of great need. The implication of the legend is, that in his second "life," Arthur will emerge victorious rather than fail and lead Camelot to ruin again. So if Luke is Arthur, and the story is aiming to keep to a similar mythic framework, then his character must follow the same path. Camelot (the Jedi) already fell once. We expect, that upon its return, it will not fall again, because if it does, then maybe it never should've existed at all. The problem is, the sequels tell us that Camelot did fall again, that the Jedi failed once more even with someone as humble as Luke at the helm, even though we'd already seen this happen in the prequels. That leads an audience to believe that maybe this Jedi thing was rotten from the start and that maybe the Jedi are actually evil. Introducing more stories like The Acolyte that serve to highlight the Jedi's flaws, without balancing those stories out with tales of their post-ROTJ betterment, only adds to this sentiment. This causes problems because it makes the OT - the thing that started it all, mind you - look wildly out of place in the way it encourages the audience to root for Luke to become a Jedi. Why are we rooting for that if it's a bad thing, if it's a concept doomed to fail no matter who is attempting to execute it? Why are we supposed to see him as the hero, then, if all the Jedi are destined for is pride and failure? But pride and failure are not who Luke is supposed to be. Luke is a character who, by the end of ROTJ, figures out how to embody the ideals that his predecessors, including his father and now Sol, struggled with in the age before. He figures out how to acknowledge his anger and his fear without succumbing to them, he figures out how to maintain emotional attachments without letting them overtake his reason, he figures out how to achieve true balance within himself - which in turn encourages Anakin to finally restore balance to the Force itself. The Throne Room sequence that ends with him proudly declaring "I am a Jedi" while showing the audience what that actually means should tell us everything we need to know about why he's the perfect candidate to restore the Jedi to what they were always meant to be. Luke IS the return of the Jedi - he's the return of an ideal they lost sight of long ago, and he's the return of an order that should've had the chance to grow beyond the mistakes of the past. I - and I suspect some others - wouldn't have a problem with stories like The Acolyte pointing out the old order's flaws time and time again if we had actually seen Luke create something NEW that did a better job of practicing what it preached. He should have been allowed to do it, but because he wasn't, this has totally upended the audience's perception of the Jedi and has yet again dragged the SW fandom into total chaos. This chaos was completely avoidable, and I don't think I will ever stop being mad about the One Big Canon Misstep that led us all here.

Now, I've made it no secret on this blog that I made the decision to enjoy the show for what it was, despite the fact that I think its flaws became more glaringly obvious as it continued to progress. I don't need something to be amazing for me to have an okay time with it, even if the writer part of my brain is constantly pointing out what it thinks is in need of additional revisions. What I have had a problem with, however, is how the show has spawned a plethora of posts bashing the Jedi as either inherently bad or flat-out evil. While the prequel era showed us the flaws in the Jedi Order and how those flaws contributed to its downfall, the OT showed us - through Luke - how the concept of being a Jedi in and of itself can be good, and what really matters is how that concept is executed on the part of both the individual and the whole. The issue I've seen arise as a direct result of The Acolyte is that there are more and more pockets of fans making the assumption that the Jedi are bad, because every iteration of the Order has fallen prey to hubris in some way. Almost as if the very concept of being a Jedi is also bad, and you should feel bad if you look upon them with any positive sentiment whatsoever. Almost as if the Jedi are doomed to fail no matter who is in charge and no matter how much of an effort their leader(s) make to do the right thing. I firmly believe this would not be the case had Luke actually been allowed to succeed after ROTJ. If fans (who I'm assuming have had little to no exposure to the very different version of Luke's order in the EU) had gotten to see that Luke successfully rebuilt the Jedi Order into something better than what came before, something that was capable of rising above the pitfalls of its previous incarnation, then I don't think we'd see quite as much a) vitriol towards the Jedi, and b) disgruntled Jedi fans getting upset at said vitriol. If Luke had been allowed to succeed, then we would've gotten proof that it is, in fact, possible for the Jedi Order to live up to its ideals rather than to always be destined to implode on itself due to hypocrisy and hubris. The thing is, in Disney canon, we don't have this proof because Luke's order failed just like its predecessor. So, beyond the end of ROTJ, there's not much to convince the audience that being a Jedi is and can be good, or that building a Jedi Order in the first place is even a worthwhile endeavor. (CONTINUED IN PART 2)