X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
@Clement Rage – You misunderstand my first premise COMPLETELY, but you ARE 100% correct on the second one.
(Just saw @Obsidian Fire 's post as I'm posting this one, but mine is a VERY much more Star Wars-centric version of what you're talking about, but focusing on the properties other than the prequels, so there's not too much overlap luckily).
tl;dr – The Jedi Order’s dogma of embracing the Light and rejecting the Dark was as responsible for their own destruction as the machinations of Palpatine and the Sith were. They BOTH needed to be destroyed for the Force to be able to be brought into balance, and for the Jedi to go back to being what they were meant to again – becoming the guardians of peace and justice, and maintaining the balance of the Force.
X
(Just saw @Obsidian Fire 's post as I'm posting this one, but mine is a VERY much more Star Wars-centric version of what you're talking about, but focusing on the properties other than the prequels, so there's not too much overlap luckily).
Anakin was failed by the Jedi first, and he was ALSO lured in by Palpatine’s manipulations. BOTH parties are deeply at fault. Anakin is a warrior of the Light and then he’s a warrior of the Dark. In his time as both, he’s central to exposing the flaws of each, and also bringing about the downfall of both because the Sith AND the Jedi were flawed and corrupt. His legacy is about bringing balance to the Force, and that legacy is still present.
We know from Obi-Wan that, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic, before the dark times. Before the Empire.“ We also know that when the Jedi Order was initially founded at the Temple on Ahch-To by the Prime Jedi about 6,000 years before A New Hope takes place where Luke learns that. The Prime Jedi were ORIGINALLY about maintaining a balance in the Force within themselves. It wasn’t about the Light against the Dark at all. They were always about being the guardians of peace and justice, but they were also maintaining that balance.
But that CHANGED.
The Jedi Order that we’re introduced to during the Prequel Era are already LONG split off from what the Prime Jedi had originally founded. They’re so far removed that the Sith are a completely separate order, and have been for centuries. It’s not the Jedi embracing both Light and Dark any more, it’s the Jedi against the Sith. Their teachings of the Jedi have shifted in order to become a representation of the Light AGAINST the Dark, and conflict between them instead of balance. The Jedi Order very rigidly adhering to their dogma of eschewing the Dark means that it’s also still ACTIVELY pitting each side against the other. The Jedi are no longer seeking out ways of maintaining a harmony between both sides of the Force. Those practices have been perpetuating that conflict and keeping both sides split apart, which we see in the Daughter & Son. The rise of conflict and fall of the Jedi and Sith occurs in the same way that we see events transpire in Mortis, because of its nature as an amplifier and magnet for the Force itself, which Qui-Gon explains it to Obi-Wan there. The Father even addresses the concepts of the Balance with his children when speaking to Anakin and saying, “too much Dark OR Light would be the undoing of life as you understand it”
We know that this split between the Light vs. the Dark has been the case since long, LONG before the era of the Clone Wars as well. Darth Plagueis was a Sith Lord present before Sidious. We also know that there were multiple wars between the Jedi and the Sith that had gone on since even before Darth Bane was the sole survivor who created the Sith as a lineage instead of a massive Order like the Jedi with the Rule of Two. These were both explained when Yoda visits Moraband:
https://youtu.be/TjQH8a5jdMY[/MEDIA]
This conflict between Light and Dark is ANCIENT, and has been stuck shifting over potentially thousands of years, and continually breaking the Jedi and Sith into more and more entrenched and extreme versions of each side. That finally comes to a head when building up to what takes place in the Prequels when the Chosen One is born, and he destroys them both. While the Jedi Order were unquestionably being manipulated by the machinations of Darth Sidious, the position of the Jedi even during The Phantom Menace made it clear that this sterilized view of the Force was obviously already a long-entrenched dogma. They didn’t want to train Anakin because he’d grown old enough to have attachments, which make one susceptible to the Dark Side. We see Qui-Gon needing to defy the will of the Jedi Council, and are constantly shown that Qui-Gon knew more about the true nature of the Force than anyone – even being the touchpoint for Yoda & Obi-Wan at the end of Episode III. Ahsoka ends up outright rejecting the Jedi Order over what they’ve continued to become, and she continues to grow into a powerful Force Wielder who’s on the side of good, and decidedly NOT at Jedi – showing that leaving that path still leads to good. In the Mace Windu comic, we see Prosset Dibs’ insistence that the Jedi should be peacekeepers and not generals in war result in him being put on trial & subject to rehabilitation – that action by the Council turns his love and passions for what the Jedi should ACTUALLY be into darkness and he eventually becomes the Tenth Brother among the Inquisitors as a result.
That conflict is, at its core, a result of the fact that the Light and Dark are continually pitted against one another, and that the Jedi Order maintained that by rejecting anything that might draw on the Dark Side of the Force. That’s what lead to their teachings about forbidding attachment, because the Light Side at its core is to always do what is selfless, and the Dark is to do what is selfish (something directly reiterated by Daughter on Mortis). Those teachings of the Jedi are ACTIVELY REJECTING the Dark Side of the Force, not attempting to maintain a Balance. Instead, the Jedi SHOULD have been teaching their students how to Balance both the Selfish and the Selfless, and not become consumed with the pulls of either side.
The issue is that if the version of the Jedi that remains once the Sith were destroyed were the ones already entrenched in the dogmatic views of the Light against the Dark, rather than the Light and the Dark together in oneself – when the Balance comes back, if the Force isn’t embraced as singular a whole, it’ll be redirected back against itself again.
That’s exactly what we see has happened in The Last Jedi.
It’s Luke’s moment of instinct to destroy the rising darkness in Ben ultimately creates Kylo Ren, and pushes the Light and Dark against each other. He says ”Snoke had already turned his heart.” but also, “Leia blamed Snoke, but it was me.” when talking about Ben. This is yet again acknowledging that the Dark Side is also a factor in its influence, but it’s the Light looking at destruction as the option to stop the Dark from rising that’s the tipping point that ignites the conflict between the two directly – EXACTLY like in Mortis.
This is all because Luke’s entire upbringing as a Jedi was always that you can be rescued FROM the Darkness, not that you can maintain a balance of both. As a Jedi Master, Luke ultimately still fears the Dark Side of the Force. Even when he succumbs to moments of it and recovers – they aren’t moments of control in him. THIS is why he came to the first Jedi Temple to isolate himself from the Force and why his teachings to Rey are built from what the Prime Jedi established there, and are different than what the Jedi Order taught and he initially learned from Obi-Wan & Yoda. At the same time, he’s still utterly TERRIFIED of the Dark Side, and can’t openly embrace it the way that Rey does. He’s a product of a flawed ideology, and Rey learns from that failure.
She is Ben’s counterpart in the Force. Darkness rises and Light to meet it. The difference is that she’s also learned that turning Ben to the Light with her isn’t the answer, and he learned the same when trying to bring her to the Dark. They fundamentally CANNOT leave their own paths for the other’s while also keeping the Force in balance. The whole point of The Last Jedi is looking at how to stop this cycle that brought war and destruction throughout the Galaxy over and over and over again. It’s about learning from the mistakes going back to the very ideas of the Jedi and the Sith once they’d split from the Prime Jedi, and learning from their failures – because they BOTH failed and brought about their own destruction. They have to learn the lessons that the Jedi & Sith didn’t – which is that Balance doesn’t mean Light & Dark being equal and opposite. They have to understand and accept the Dark and Light together if that balance is to be maintained AND the cycle is to be broken. The Jedi have to become BOTH again.
In essence: to win, you have to save what you love, not destroy what you hate. In the context of Ben & Rey that answer couldn’t be more clear.
If Ben TRULY wants to fulfill his goal of finishing what Anakin started like he stated in The Force Awakens, he ACTUALLY wants to strike down the Dark Lord who’s manipulating him, become the ruler who can bring peace to the Galaxy, and restore Balance in the Force – he can. Rey wants a place to belong, she wants to save Ben, and also keep all of her friends safe – she can. THEY need to become the Jedi TOGETHER to understand that the Light doesn’t make you weak, and the Dark doesn’t make you evil.
There’s a reason that they each represent one half of the legacy of the Chosen One. Anakin’s lightsaber bypassed Ben and went to Rey in TFA. They both used it and fought together with each others’ weapons to overcome Snoke, but after they fought side-by-side, the conflict against each other involved breaking it apart. Anakin’s legacy is still constantly present and pushing both Rey and Ben.
We know from Obi-Wan that, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic, before the dark times. Before the Empire.“ We also know that when the Jedi Order was initially founded at the Temple on Ahch-To by the Prime Jedi about 6,000 years before A New Hope takes place where Luke learns that. The Prime Jedi were ORIGINALLY about maintaining a balance in the Force within themselves. It wasn’t about the Light against the Dark at all. They were always about being the guardians of peace and justice, but they were also maintaining that balance.
But that CHANGED.
The Jedi Order that we’re introduced to during the Prequel Era are already LONG split off from what the Prime Jedi had originally founded. They’re so far removed that the Sith are a completely separate order, and have been for centuries. It’s not the Jedi embracing both Light and Dark any more, it’s the Jedi against the Sith. Their teachings of the Jedi have shifted in order to become a representation of the Light AGAINST the Dark, and conflict between them instead of balance. The Jedi Order very rigidly adhering to their dogma of eschewing the Dark means that it’s also still ACTIVELY pitting each side against the other. The Jedi are no longer seeking out ways of maintaining a harmony between both sides of the Force. Those practices have been perpetuating that conflict and keeping both sides split apart, which we see in the Daughter & Son. The rise of conflict and fall of the Jedi and Sith occurs in the same way that we see events transpire in Mortis, because of its nature as an amplifier and magnet for the Force itself, which Qui-Gon explains it to Obi-Wan there. The Father even addresses the concepts of the Balance with his children when speaking to Anakin and saying, “too much Dark OR Light would be the undoing of life as you understand it”
We know that this split between the Light vs. the Dark has been the case since long, LONG before the era of the Clone Wars as well. Darth Plagueis was a Sith Lord present before Sidious. We also know that there were multiple wars between the Jedi and the Sith that had gone on since even before Darth Bane was the sole survivor who created the Sith as a lineage instead of a massive Order like the Jedi with the Rule of Two. These were both explained when Yoda visits Moraband:
https://youtu.be/TjQH8a5jdMY[/MEDIA]
This conflict between Light and Dark is ANCIENT, and has been stuck shifting over potentially thousands of years, and continually breaking the Jedi and Sith into more and more entrenched and extreme versions of each side. That finally comes to a head when building up to what takes place in the Prequels when the Chosen One is born, and he destroys them both. While the Jedi Order were unquestionably being manipulated by the machinations of Darth Sidious, the position of the Jedi even during The Phantom Menace made it clear that this sterilized view of the Force was obviously already a long-entrenched dogma. They didn’t want to train Anakin because he’d grown old enough to have attachments, which make one susceptible to the Dark Side. We see Qui-Gon needing to defy the will of the Jedi Council, and are constantly shown that Qui-Gon knew more about the true nature of the Force than anyone – even being the touchpoint for Yoda & Obi-Wan at the end of Episode III. Ahsoka ends up outright rejecting the Jedi Order over what they’ve continued to become, and she continues to grow into a powerful Force Wielder who’s on the side of good, and decidedly NOT at Jedi – showing that leaving that path still leads to good. In the Mace Windu comic, we see Prosset Dibs’ insistence that the Jedi should be peacekeepers and not generals in war result in him being put on trial & subject to rehabilitation – that action by the Council turns his love and passions for what the Jedi should ACTUALLY be into darkness and he eventually becomes the Tenth Brother among the Inquisitors as a result.
That conflict is, at its core, a result of the fact that the Light and Dark are continually pitted against one another, and that the Jedi Order maintained that by rejecting anything that might draw on the Dark Side of the Force. That’s what lead to their teachings about forbidding attachment, because the Light Side at its core is to always do what is selfless, and the Dark is to do what is selfish (something directly reiterated by Daughter on Mortis). Those teachings of the Jedi are ACTIVELY REJECTING the Dark Side of the Force, not attempting to maintain a Balance. Instead, the Jedi SHOULD have been teaching their students how to Balance both the Selfish and the Selfless, and not become consumed with the pulls of either side.
The issue is that if the version of the Jedi that remains once the Sith were destroyed were the ones already entrenched in the dogmatic views of the Light against the Dark, rather than the Light and the Dark together in oneself – when the Balance comes back, if the Force isn’t embraced as singular a whole, it’ll be redirected back against itself again.
That’s exactly what we see has happened in The Last Jedi.
It’s Luke’s moment of instinct to destroy the rising darkness in Ben ultimately creates Kylo Ren, and pushes the Light and Dark against each other. He says ”Snoke had already turned his heart.” but also, “Leia blamed Snoke, but it was me.” when talking about Ben. This is yet again acknowledging that the Dark Side is also a factor in its influence, but it’s the Light looking at destruction as the option to stop the Dark from rising that’s the tipping point that ignites the conflict between the two directly – EXACTLY like in Mortis.
This is all because Luke’s entire upbringing as a Jedi was always that you can be rescued FROM the Darkness, not that you can maintain a balance of both. As a Jedi Master, Luke ultimately still fears the Dark Side of the Force. Even when he succumbs to moments of it and recovers – they aren’t moments of control in him. THIS is why he came to the first Jedi Temple to isolate himself from the Force and why his teachings to Rey are built from what the Prime Jedi established there, and are different than what the Jedi Order taught and he initially learned from Obi-Wan & Yoda. At the same time, he’s still utterly TERRIFIED of the Dark Side, and can’t openly embrace it the way that Rey does. He’s a product of a flawed ideology, and Rey learns from that failure.
She is Ben’s counterpart in the Force. Darkness rises and Light to meet it. The difference is that she’s also learned that turning Ben to the Light with her isn’t the answer, and he learned the same when trying to bring her to the Dark. They fundamentally CANNOT leave their own paths for the other’s while also keeping the Force in balance. The whole point of The Last Jedi is looking at how to stop this cycle that brought war and destruction throughout the Galaxy over and over and over again. It’s about learning from the mistakes going back to the very ideas of the Jedi and the Sith once they’d split from the Prime Jedi, and learning from their failures – because they BOTH failed and brought about their own destruction. They have to learn the lessons that the Jedi & Sith didn’t – which is that Balance doesn’t mean Light & Dark being equal and opposite. They have to understand and accept the Dark and Light together if that balance is to be maintained AND the cycle is to be broken. The Jedi have to become BOTH again.
In essence: to win, you have to save what you love, not destroy what you hate. In the context of Ben & Rey that answer couldn’t be more clear.
If Ben TRULY wants to fulfill his goal of finishing what Anakin started like he stated in The Force Awakens, he ACTUALLY wants to strike down the Dark Lord who’s manipulating him, become the ruler who can bring peace to the Galaxy, and restore Balance in the Force – he can. Rey wants a place to belong, she wants to save Ben, and also keep all of her friends safe – she can. THEY need to become the Jedi TOGETHER to understand that the Light doesn’t make you weak, and the Dark doesn’t make you evil.
There’s a reason that they each represent one half of the legacy of the Chosen One. Anakin’s lightsaber bypassed Ben and went to Rey in TFA. They both used it and fought together with each others’ weapons to overcome Snoke, but after they fought side-by-side, the conflict against each other involved breaking it apart. Anakin’s legacy is still constantly present and pushing both Rey and Ben.
tl;dr – The Jedi Order’s dogma of embracing the Light and rejecting the Dark was as responsible for their own destruction as the machinations of Palpatine and the Sith were. They BOTH needed to be destroyed for the Force to be able to be brought into balance, and for the Jedi to go back to being what they were meant to again – becoming the guardians of peace and justice, and maintaining the balance of the Force.
X