#he's out here stealing padawans from DIFFERENT FUCKING FANDOMS

[padawanlost]

Jedi don't steal children. Ok. Anakin was a slave won in a rigged dice game but hey the Jedi can't be ethically held to getting Shmi out of slavery. Anakin grows up knowing his mother rots in slavery, but told to get over his constant, prophetic dreams of her death. The Tusken Massacre is all Anakin being Evil and the old Jedi are perfect (none of them know their mother's names).

Wow...there’s a lot to unpack here LOL

“Jedi don't steal children.”

To be fair, I don’t believe the Jedi steal children and, to be *really* honest, I’ve never seen anyone claim they did. I mean, there’s an actual ethical discussion about the Order’s recruitment procedures but this idea that the jedi are somewhat evil baby snatchers only exists in two places:

Canon: Some in-universe characters/cultures actually believe the Jedi Order steal babies.

Jedi hardcore fans claiming tumblr is overrun with Jedi haters who think the jedi are as evil as Palpatine. No middle ground. You either die a jedi stan or you live long enough to see yourself become a Jedi hater :P

When talking about the whole ‘baby snatcher’ thing, the discussion I’m interested in is the one about ethics and procedures. That’s what interests me. And when it comes to the jedi Order, it’s impossible to deny some of their procedures suffer from certain ethical shortcomings.

Look at it this way: imagine if your government passed a law that said a non-governmental, secretive, private funded organization had the legal right to access your newborn child and test them. In a world where parents throw actual tantrums at the suggestion of vaccinating their babies, can you imagine the shitshow that would happen if a similar law were even suggested right now? That’s what I’m talking about. If you look at the situation from a different perspective, considering the ethical and even cultural fallout of such procedures, it’s impossible not to think ‘hey, maybe there’s something wrong here’. that’s the nuance some people fail to grasp: it’s not about the jedi being evil, it’s about noticing some of their procedures needed improvement.

Tbh, I’m kind of tired of discussing the jedi because part of the fandom tends to completely mischaracterize the whole discussion. I’m too old to be constantly explaining that though I firmly believe shmi or the clones enslavement were unforgivable, I don’t hate everything and everyone connected to them. I’m tired of this fucked up tumblr mentality where you either love everything or hate everything, where you must be an anti or a stan.

Anyway, speaking of slavery:

“Anakin was a slave won in a rigged dice game but hey the Jedi can't be ethically held to getting Shmi out of slavery.”

Fuck yeah! It kills me how people are still trying to defend Shmi’s enslavement by claiming that trying to save her would’ve been unethical. I’m like…REALLY? It’s unethical for a sworn protector of the weak and abused to save a slave? this fucking fandom ¯\_(ツ)_/¯You know what else is unethical and an actual crime: child endangerment, like when you let a poor 9 years old kid subscribe to a known deadly race to save the *SHIP* of your wealthy, ADULT companions.

“Anakin grows up knowing his mother rots in slavery, but told to get over his constant, prophetic dreams of her death.”

Anakin is a whiny baby, I mean, who wouldn’t be okay with their only family being abused, enslaved, forced to work under two suns for a greedy, disgusting being on a desert planet? Anakin should just get over it. you know, let it go, man. Worrying about your mom is a pathway to evil and leaving people to rot in poverty, crime and slavery is how world peace is achieved. That’s why our real world is such a lovely, peaceful place filled with happy, healthy people…oh wait! Nevermind… -___-

The Tusken Massacre is all Anakin being Evil and the old Jedi are perfect (none of them know their mother's names).

The tusken massacre was an inexcusable, cruel action that no one should ever consider right. I mean, there’s a difference between understanding why Anakin acted that way and believing Anakin’s actions were righteous. I don’t believe the Jedi should be considered responsible for any of Anakin’s actions that night but I think we can look at the event as a symptom of a larger problem.

Responsibility is tricky, especially when your political/social duty is so ingrained in your own identity. I don’t blame the Jedi Order for *Anakin’s* actions because they were not directly responsible for those particular actions. However, they were responsible for Anakin himself, especially considering he was still a padawan. I mean, if the kid you taking care of kills someone on your watch you’re at least partly responsible. To put it simply, if a cop slaughters someone the entire Police Force should be put under a microscope. Not because they are ‘evil’ but because these kinds of events are usually a symptom of a systemic problem, especially when we are talking about recurring events (like padawans and jedi masters going dark side).

I don’t know believe we should go ‘oh tusken massacre was the jedi’s fault’ but we do have to recognize that Anakin’s ability to slaughter an entire community and get away it without any real repercussion shows their system was flawed. If we remember they had suspicions something had gone terribly wrong on Tatooine the situation becomes even more dire.

They suspected a member of their order had done *something* he shouldn’t have but somehow there was no investigation, no reports, no repercussions. That’s unethical and probably illegal behavior. People try to excuse it as the jedi being busy with the war but that’s like saying we shouldn’t investigate cops killing innocents because there’s a pandemic going on. It’s cruel. Not only it dehumanizes the victims and diminishes their suffering, it’s a behavior unbecoming of a group who exists to protect people from these very crimes.

Again, this is not about blaming everything on the jedi or ‘hating’ them. It’s about recognizing the situations where they could’ve done better.

[reydjarinkenobi]

I think that there’s something that people tend to forget about the Jedi: there are only 10,000 of them and that’s at the start of the war.

I agree with the sentiment that the Jedi have stagnated (the low numbers) and that the war has forced them to undermine what they were originally intended to do. However, that is the whole tragedy of the situation. The Jedi are conscripted as generals in a war that they didn’t want to happen and both the people and the Jedi are suffering for it.

The people on the republic and the fandom unreasonably expect the Jedi to be able to fix every problem in the galaxy. However, there are thousands of worlds in the republic (probably more) and the fact of the matter is that there are only so many Jedi. By season 7 of the clone wars, the Jedi numbers are at an all time low, the fact of the matter is that they physically cannot help everyone. Content that shows Jedi before CW shows that they did have people in the slave rings, in Coruscant on corrupt planets, trying to fix the galaxy, but they only have so much power.

People expect the Jedi to be able to do everything, call them power hungry and child snatchers and stuck up. (Although, I will conced that there are some Jedi who are stuck up and too removed from the people to be able to truly relate to them, which is, I think, one of the two main issues with the Jedi Order we see in the CW).

However, the Jedi we see are at their most powerless. The corruption in the senate and the political machinations of palpatine mean that they are more enslaved to the senate than ever. Though some people may view them as such, the Jedi are not gods, they cannot perform miracles. In fact; how can you call the Jedi power hungry when it is their inherent lack of power and influence within the senate that had them in this situation. We see how much power they have lost between TPM and CW, where Qui-Gon could be sent on a mission with just a personal request from a politician (the chancellor at the time was the one that asked them to go to the aide Naboo because the Senate would not vote to help them. And at the time, the chancellor didn’t have nearly as much power as palpatine does. The republic was at piece and the chancellor mostly acted as a mediator for the senate rather than the almost absolute ruler palps is by CW). Now the Jedi are forced to do what the senate says, and because of this position that they were sourced into, even their own internal matters are often brought before the senate.

This isn’t even counting the fact that Sidious is literally clouding the Force. It is stated multiple times in the movies and in the shows as well as having been outright told to us by Lucas the Palps is using a very powerful force technique which basically fucks up the Jedi’s ability to use the Force to sense deception and find the truth. (See the million times Yoda or some other master says the Force is clouded.)

I agree that the Jedi Order should have taken the threat of the Sith far more seriously than they did after TPM. However, there also hadn’t been a Sith on their radar for one thousand years. Yoda, the oldest Jedi, had never seen a Sith. It is understandable that the Jedi would try and deny their resurgence, since it’s natural that they would not want that to happen. This is a failure of the Jedi Order. In this case, they react out of fear which definitely contributes to their later downfall.

However, Palps gives no indication to people that he is anything other than a (possibly corrupt) politician. The Jedi can’t sense him and they would have no reason to think he’s a Sith Lord. They can sense that Dooku is a Sith, they could sense that Maul is a darksider. There is no reason that the Jedi should think that there is a Sith that can completely mask his darkness because they have never encountered someone like that before.

As for the baby snatchers, I mean come on, seriously? In the CW, there is literally an episode which shows that the Jedi do encourage people to hand their children over, but by no reason force them. Anakin was an unprecedented event and the Council would actually have preferred that Anakin grow up with his mother (although they did address the whole Shmi situation incredibly wrong, they should have freed her. However, that then feeds into the fact that they would then be morally obligated to free all the slaves on Tattooine which would mean taking on the Hutts, which the Jedi did not have the resources to do.) if the Jedi were baby snatchers, there would not only be 10,000 of them. They would steal any child that had any semblance of force power, as we know that with enough dedication and training even someone who has average raw power can become very skilled and powerful (Obi-Wan being the best example).

Again I want to emphasise how few Jedi there were. That is 10,000 total. Not 10,000 knights and masters , 10,000 including all the Padawans and younglings and masters so old they can’t fight anymore. (I don’t know if this includes the corps workers in this but we can assume their number isn’t that much larger). That’s 10,000 across the entire galaxy. To put that into perspective, the Rebellion at the end of the OT had 1 billion people across the galaxy, and they were still reported as a relatively small movement. The Jedi would be a small organisation even if they operated just on modern day Earth. And by this point in the CW, the Jedi have even lower numbers.

Ahsoka’s anger in the latest episode is entirely justified. She was scapegoated for a crime she did not commit. Yes all evidence pointed to her and objectively she could have been charged, but she had sacrificed so much for the Order by that point, she rightfully believes she should have early their trust. (Although, I do think both Plo Koon and Obi-Wan argued for her, but in the absence of evidence were only able to vouch for her from her strength of character, which really doesn’t cut it in that sort of investigation).

Her frustration at the order’s inability to help the people like it had been before the war is reasonable. The Jedi should be helping people like Trace and Rafa, and before the war they would have. Now the Jedi are caught up in trying to stop the Separatists invading and enslaving entire worlds. That whole situation is for another post because this one is way too long already and I haven’t even gotten to my point.

I think Ahsoka’s accusation that the Jedi are too involved in politics (even though her attack at Obi-Wan is also personal because of her thinking that he didn’t try and help her before, which is correct from her perspective. Obi-Wan was obligated to go with the Council’s decision and was powerless to fight i and uggfgh that scene hurts me because my two favourite characters are fighting) is ironic since it was the Jedi’s separation from politics which got them into that situation in the first place. If the Jedi had had a representative in the Senate, or hell, even more people dedicated to monitoring the politics of the Senste, they may have been able to circumvent the war before it even started or at least give themselves a little more agency in this war.

Ahsoka’s argument is ultimately unfair in my opinion even though she is making a very relevant point. The Jedi have, at this stage, stopped functioning in the capacity that they were originally supposed to. However, there is nothing they can do to stop it at this stage.

I think people are forgetting the absolute genius of TCW and that PT in that it is one of the hugest examples of dramatic irony in modern day narratives. Yes, from an outside perspective, I can say that the Jedi were too removed from the people and were failing to uphold their values. I can see that palpatine is manipulating everything and that he is the Sith Lord. However, the thing is the characters can’t. If I was a Jedi, I would be too blinded by this war and keeping my men alive whilst also trying to stop the Separatists to pay attention to the intricacies of the Senate, if I was a citizen, I would see this war and the Jedi leading it and demonise them because they are the most visible people for me to hoist my resentment on. Padmé states that the war is affecting the people. The republic are in debt and their support network for their people is suffering because of it.

Yes, the Jedi should have done a lot of things differently. Yes there are Jedi (particularly some on the council) who are up themselves. But the Order as a whole is not to blame. Jedi as a people are largely just trying to do the right thing. They lead their men because if they don’t the Seperatists will continue to take over worlds and enslave them. They are forced to make impossible decisions and it is destroying them. We see this in Ahsoka’s resentment, we see it in the way Anakin is so desperately trying to hold on to both Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, we see it in the absolute defeat that we can see in Obi-Wan in this episode.

Let’s not forget that Sidious is the real bad guy here and that he is a genius at manipulation. By this stage in the CW, the Jedi are powerless to save themselves and the galaxy. We can blame anyone else all we want but ultimately this is a terrible tragedy and the Jedi do not deserve what is about to happen to them.