#obi has to bail him out of jail every time he is on coruscant

[obes-kenobes-benos]

Cody: Do you think he's the one for me?

Fox: Kenobi? Oh, yeah. He's tons of fun and you're no fun at all. He completes you.

[gffa]

IF YOU STRIP CONTEXT OF THE REST OF THE SHOW--HELL, EVEN OF THE REST OF THIS EPISODE--FROM THIS SCENE, I can see how we should be siding entirely with Ahsoka, especially on the heels of the walkabout arc and her conflict with being drawn back towards the Jedi and the Jedi Order. Her points aren’t wrong, in the sense that she’s right that Obi-Wan is playing politics with this, but she’s stripping context and consequence out from the choice he faces and that’s specifically why he says, “That’s not fair.” and even Ahsoka herself says, “I’m not trying to be.” Her accusation is not fair. Because, let’s say that Obi-Wan did exactly what Ahsoka said--that he prioritized the people of Mandalore over saving the Chancellor.  We’re setting aside that this was a manipulation on Palpatine’s part and that Mandalore is a trap, only what we can see from Obi-Wan’s point of view and his motivations, his good faith assumptions on why rescuing the Chancellor is important. If they chose Mandalore over Coruscant, what would happen is: - They would be drawn into yet another war because they had broken a treaty, when they’re already stretched to the breaking point for this first war. - The Chancellor may be the one in trouble, but what does Ahsoka think will happen if the Chancellor dies or is ransomed back?  The Republic would be in chaos, the war effort is already balanced precariously, and none of them know that the Separatists aren’t the real threat.  Whatever good reasons many of the Separatists may have, they murder, enslave, and oppress the worlds they attack.  If the Republic loses the war, that’s what happens to every world in the Republic. - The Jedi might be more popular with people if they saved Mandalore, but would it really benefit the galaxy as a whole, given a good faith assumption on what these characters would know?  (There is no right answer to this question, of course.) Ahsoka is very nearly arguing for popularity over doing the more important thing, because this isn’t a situation where there aren’t consequences.  Mandalore needs their help, but so too does Coruscant and it’s not just about the Chancellor, it’s about the Republic as a whole.  And it even comes down to--why are politics bad?  I get that Ahsoka means that choosing your actions based on politics is a calculated sort of thing, but why is that bad?  Because Star Wars: Propaganda basically posited that that was the problem, that the Jedi didn’t play enough politics, that’s why their image was so bad. Ahsoka’s case for Mandalore could be argued to be the same thing--you want to win back the public’s faith, then you have to take this path.  That right there is politics, too. EVERYTHING IN THIS WAR IS POLITICS.  NOTHING CAN ESCAPE IT.  BECAUSE POLITICS IS EVERYTHING LIKE WE ARE LIVING IN A WORLD THAT HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT TO US VERY CLEARLY.  AND WE SHOULD ALL LEAN INTO POLITICS, RATHER THAN SEPARATING OURSELVES FROM THEM. If politics were inherently bad, we wouldn’t see characters like Padme Amidala, Bail Organa, and Mon Mothma--or, hell, even Leia Organa herself--as heroes.  Because politics are important!  You don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) a full-time politician for politics to still be important.  That working within a system to help better it and be able to reach more people is a good thing. Further, this doesn’t come without context of earlier in the episode, Obi-Wan is specifically shown to be incredibly desiring of helping people--he basically caves to Anakin’s strategy based on Anakin’s argument that they can help people sooner:

That is right there in this very same episode.  Obi-Wan agrees to a reckless strategy specifically when Anakin points out that it can help people sooner. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not someone who doesn’t want to help people, that’s his whole thing! Further context, which isn’t specifically related to this particular issue, but does give context to Obi-Wan Kenobi as a character is everything with Bo-Katan seething over whether Satine even meant anything to him.  She did.  And she still does.  But he cannot allow his feelings to cloud his judgement--and that is something that is key to being a Jedi.

It reminds me of George Lucas’ commentary on attachment: “But [Anakin] has become attached to his mother and he will become attached to Padme and these things are, for a Jedi, who needs to have a clear mind and not be influenced by threats to their attachments, a dangerous situation. And it feeds into fear of losing things, which feeds into greed, wanting to keep things, wanting to keep his possessions and things that he should be letting go of. His fear of losing her turns to anger at losing her, which ultimately turns to revenge in wiping out the village.“  –George Lucas, Attack of the Clones commentary “He turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things.”  –George Lucas, Time Magazine interview (2002) The thing about Obi-Wan/Satine is that it was pretty clearly created to be a foil to Anakin/Padme (and, boyyyyyyyyy, is that abundantly clear in the scene with Bo-Katan where Anakin is STARING at Obi-Wan as he says this, as we all know Revenge of the Sith is looming riiiiiiiiight over our heads), where Obi-Wan and Satine do make the right choices about the vows they’ve taken to other aspects of their lives.  That they are balanced in a way that Anakin and Padme are not. Dave Filoni says it himself in the commentary for the Bad Batch arc, in this very season: “I mean, even Obi-Wan was in love with someone.  That’s not abnormal.  It’s very normal.  What you choose to do and how you choose to have a relationship, what you sacrifice, then that becomes a bigger deal when he’s made an oath to the Jedi Order to be selfless, to put everyone else ahead of himself.”  --Dave Filoni Obi-Wan’s feelings for Satine are very much a parallel and contrast for Anakin’s feelings for Padme, and we know exactly how that’s going to turn out for Anakin, because Revenge of the Sith looms incredibly large over this entire episode and this entire arc. ”He’s made an oath to put everyone else ahead of himself.” is something Obi-Wan has done and continues to uphold, so accusing him of politics is like--what does Obi-Wan gain by playing politics then?  He’s putting other people ahead of himself, so playing politics must be for that reason, too. Furthering this context, especially in tying it to what it means to be a Jedi, is commentary from “The Lawless”:

”And in that moment, that critical moment, he cannot seize on his anger and his hatred for Maul.  Though that’s probably there, deep within, he can’t seize on it or Maul will win, he knows that.  I think we learned a lot about Obi-Wan and what it means to be a true Jedi, which is what I see Obi-Wan as.“ –Dave Filoni, on “The Lawless” All of this is important to understand that, when Obi-Wan Kenobi talks about the choices one makes, about not letting his feelings cloud his judgement, he’s coming from a place of established narrative reliability. We want to side with Ahsoka, because her hurt is so genuine and valid.  Because she sees a problem with the way the galaxy views the Jedi and we know that the Jedi’s doom is soon upon them.  (And this is where I get wary of the show’s narrative potentially trying to say, “Well, they’re kind of responsible for their own genocide because they just weren’t nice enough to people and only helped so many people, that they should have done more and more and more.” because, no, fuck that idea for real, the Jedi are not responsible for their own genocide, certainly not based on anything in the canon!)  She wants to fix this problem and she’s coming at it with a choice that she thinks would restore faith in them. The problem is that the Jedi are being asked to make choices between what’s popular and what they see as doing more good for more people.  And there’s a great line from the Age of Republic - Padme Amidala comic that ties into these themes as well:

“But trying to serve the greater good doesn’t exactly make you popular.”  (Oh, hey, look!  More politics!) On first blush, the idea of helping the people of Mandalore over saving the Chancellor seems like the right thing to do because we know Palpatine is Sidious, we know that it leads to ROTS, we know that ROTS leads to the Empire, especially when Ahsoka ties it to the Jedi Order becoming unpopular with the galaxy.  But Obi-Wan points out that she’s not being fair.  He points out that the Republic is on the line.  I’m pointing out that everything is politics, one decision over the other isn’t less political just because it’s more intimate.  And it doesn’t come without context.  It’s not just the Chancellor, it’s bigger than that. And serving that greater good--as Obi-Wan genuinely sees it--doesn’t always make them popular. And still even further, this isn’t entirely about the Jedi Order’s politics, but it’s about Ahsoka’s own hurt at how the Jedi had to play politics with her, too.  She’s still hurt that they expelled her--though, as always, context shows that she gave them absolutely nothing to work with, she immediately distrusted them before they even heard anything, she refused to even send them a message, she attacked clones on her way out, she was seen colluding with a known Separatist war criminal, she was found with incredibly damning evidence, and still wouldn’t actually talk to them or ask them directly to trust her, and ultimately none of her own actions saved her, it was a Jedi who saved her--that this doesn’t negate that they made mistakes as well, they should have visited her in the jail, they were playing politics and it doesn’t matter to Ahsoka that their hands were forced--and that’s driving her conversation with Obi-Wan, especially as someone who is part of the Council that she feels betrayed her. And Obi-Wan’s coming at this from the point of view that she let her emotions cloud her judgement over what happened, that she reacted blindly rather than trusting them in the critical moment (and the theme of trust was allll over that arc), and she’s still coming from this from a place of emotion, but that he respects her choices in the end and he obviously still cares very much about her.

All of that is underlining the conversation and one of the things that makes it such a hellishly complicated scene here in “Old Friends Not Forgotten” is that both of them are pretty narratively reliable. They’re both coming from a place of deep care and a desire to help people. They’re both coming from a place wanting to do what’s best for people. Which is why I love that I think Ahsoka genuinely loves the Jedi Order and why she says, “people who truly need us”.  It furthers my feeling of how I think, had Order 66 not happened, she may have come back to the Jedi eventually, if this difference could be resolved, but at the very least she certainly never hated them.  This is all coming from a place of love for the Jedi, for her family.  Even if she’s on a different path, even if ultimately she’ll say, “I’m no Jedi.” in Rebels, that’s about what she’s willing to do, what lines she's willing to cross, that a Jedi wouldn’t, and that it doesn’t mean they’re not still her family and that she wants good things for and with them. And why I love that she may not be being fair here, she may be stripping context and consequence out of the choice she wants to make, she may be letting emotion cloud her judgement, but she’s still so incredibly valuable and I do think they should have listened to her more.  The Jedi’s genocide is not on them, the murder of an entire people can never be on the victims, but I do think Obi-Wan has so much weight on his shoulders that he has trouble seeing the forest for the trees.  And that’s not a horrible thing, especially because Ahsoka’s shoving the trees aside here. But that there was no right answer here.  Mandalore is a trap.  Mandalore is going to fall to the Empire anyway.   Coruscant is a trap.  Coruscant is going to fall to the Empire anyway.   It doesn’t matter if they choose Mandalore or Coruscant.  Order 66 is already set to be triggered any minute now, nothing can stop that.  Them being more popular wouldn’t have saved them from it, not in a galaxy where the Republic general public was apathetic enough to not stand up against the Separatist themselves, instead allowed a clone army to be commissioned and the Jedi to be drafted into the war.  They wouldn’t stand up for themselves against the Separatists, they weren’t going to stand up for the genocide of a tiny religious culture, either.  It doesn’t even matter if the Jedi fought in the war or not--fight and be killed.  Don’t fight and they’ll be like Mandalore and be forced into it anyway or killed. That the Jedi were forced to make shitty choices in situations where there weren’t any right answers and get blamed for not having magical answers to problems that they cannot possible solve. What really brought that home to me was the way the scene ended--when Anakin offered an actual reasonable, viable solution (something that most people don’t offer the Jedi when saying what they should or shouldn’t do, they’re rarely given actual, workable options) where they could do both, Obi-Wan pretty readily jumped on it.

This shows that of course the Jedi want to help, whenever and wherever they can.  Not going to Mandalore isn’t that they don’t care or that they don’t want to help, but that there are two tire fires put in front of them and they didn’t see a reasonable way to do both, and Coruscant, as the capital of the Republic, which is the only body that can possibly stand between the Separatists and the enslavement/oppression/murder of thousands of worlds, must be protected. (Just look what happens when the Republic and the Jedi fall--the Empire inflicted atrocity after atrocity on the galaxy, which says to me that the Jedi were right in that the Republic had to be defended because it was all that stood between the galaxy and a lot of really evil things happening.) Ultimately, the only thing that the Jedi could really do that mattered is that they helped save people--people like Hera Syndulla--and they did do that.  And the accusation that they’re not trying to help people is not a fair one.  Even when it comes from a place of deep care.  And that’s why this scene was ouchy in such a good way, it really was an amazing episode to watch!