Saga The Morality of Star Wars

I don't believe Filoni is biased against the Jedi at all. The show just deals with morally gray areas to a greater extent than the movies do. It challenges us to see things from different points of view and makes it glaringly obvious that noone is flawless.

That's probably one of the reasons why Lucas wanted to make TCW in the first place.

 

And the Jedi really exist!

 

And yet it was Lucas who saw the rough cut and put his stamp of approval on the thing.

 

How much of what we "knew" in the OT was telling, rather than showing, though?

 

You mean the OT in which the PT era is described as a more civilized time and the Jedi as noble knights? I am afraid that train left the station in the Prequels. As sad as it is, no one of us can turn back the wheel of time.

 

I'm all for future portrayals painting the Jedi in a more positive light, but at the same time we can hardly ignore everything bad and stupid they did during the prequel era. Unless the PT is retconned, in the story those events simply happened.

If anything, TCW made the Jedi more palatable to me because we were shown that they did have regrets and doubts.

 

To deliberately highlight the flaws of a movie character is not necessarily a sign of bias. In this case, it was done to drive the point home that noone is above flaws. They wanted to show that fighting a war will bring out the worst in all kinds of people, no matter how good our intentions are. That doesn't mean that Jedi are bad people. All it means is that they actually are people.

 

Isn't that what Obi-Wan does in ANH though?

 

True, but as Obi-wan said that this was before the dark times and the Empire. The dark times weren't just when the Empire took over, but the Clone Wars itself.

Just as he does in AOTC with Zam. Note also that Luke doesn't walk into Jabba's palace with his Lightsaber and say, "I am here to chew bubblegum and kick some ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." He came to negotiate and kept trying to negotiate until he was left with no choice but to fight. The Jedi in AOTC abandon that principle when they go to war.

Heroes can do things that are questionable without it ruining things. That's the point. So they can learn from their mistakes and do better in the future.

 

And even then you've got people complaining about Luke's actions - saying Luke "tried to murder Jabba the moment he didn't get what he wanted" and criticising the blowing up of the sail barge:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/defending-anakin-and-the-tusken.50022232/page-16#post-52125387

Different people will have different standards for 'acceptable violence'.

 

He said that? Gosh. I doubt there was as much "highlighting" going on as "creating non-existent flaws" to make Order 66 a cause for celebration. I would believe his assertion if he didn't make every Jedi appear malicious (look at Pong Krell and Barriss and Mace), with the exception of his favourites (Anakin, Plo Koon, and Tano), who are shining paragons of virtues that lie, threaten and manipulate their way into universal praise. I would hardly call that a balanced point of view, frankly.

Actually the argument that most baffled me is the uproar behind Obi-Wan faking his death to go undercover. To me, the motive and logic behind it seemed sound - it was necessary to go undercover, and he was successful. Shouldn't preventing an assassination matter more than hurting the feelings of a grown man?

 

The word "noble" was never used in the OT anywhere.

A fallen Jedi isn't a good example of anything. There are plenty of counterexamples to the above statement, such as Yoda.

 

My feeling about the Jedi going to war is that they felt backed into a corner. As Mace quite rightly said "We're keepers of the peace, not soldiers". I think the choice they felt they had after Geonisis was to either:

(a) Take up arms as generals (which I think they were aware would take them away from their principles and make them something they were not, and never wanted to be)

or

(b) To fail to help the Republic when it most needed their help because of their principles.

In many ways this choice was a no-win situation - they either let down the Republic whom they served or they allowed themselves to become something they're not in order to help, as best they can, those whom they served. I think it's important to remember that this situation was not something that just happened - it was engineered and planned by Palpatine. He deliberately put them in this no-win situation and his ultimate purpose was to undermine them so that he could keep the people of the galaxy on-side while he exterminated the Order.

Their choice was to choose to sacrifice their ways and so still serve the Republic as well as they could in a bad situation. They chose to sacrifice something of themselves and not others, not the Republic. Yes it did undermine them and their principles but I think they had no other option. They chose the best path they could in situation where all ways led to loss.

 

I disagree. Many here seem to think it's better to sacrifice personal morality rather than relationships, I don't. They *claim* not to be warriors yet that's basically all we ever see the Jedi as. They lie.

 

I see a lot of Jedi flaws even in the OT. Or at least I do when I watch it without completely turning my brain off and simply letting the Good Guy/Bad guy dynamic wash over me.

 

I don't think the Jedi had a "clean" option. Either they back out of the war, and be labelled traitors and cowards - they had the best combat/diplomatic skills, without them, I guarantee Palpatine would have put conscription in place, and when those young people started dying, the resentment would have been directed toward the Jedi for their abandonment anyway (Why let my child die when the Jedi are supposed to be "protectors"). Fight, and the Jedi become the symbol of war and people blame them for not winning the war quickly enough.

Palpatine was waaaay too much of a mastermind to let the Jedi escape from this unscathed.

Exactly. Can't blame Obi Wan for being a little suspicious there. It's probably what he told himself to get over his guilt, and he's already been betrayed by one Skywalker. I hate it when people use that lie as the be-all-and-end-all of "Obi wan is a Sithly jerk!" Dude has some major emotional issues to sort through, poor guy. Luke's not exactly well-adjusted either.

 

If they had sacrificed all of their personal morailty then I might agree (they might as well have become Sith), but I think they simply sought to maintain more of their morality by attempting to protect the billions of people in the Republic through their service as generals, than by refusing to give their protection in that way and therefore maintaining their pacifism.

With the choice they made they put the good of the galaxy first, and in doing so, maintained a huge part of who they were morally as the guardians and protectors of people.

If they'd taken the other choice they may have maintained their pacifism but would have lost that bigger part of their morality I think, in failing to guard and protect folk.

They were forced by the situation, which Palpatine engineered, to choose. He didn't give them the option of retaining all of their principles - that's what makes his plan so wicked - wicked, but very very clever. He didn't just destroy them, he discredited and destroyed them which is quite astonishing really.

 

And for me it's not about perfection, but it is about the morality of heroes. And at several points in the OT I think the Jedi presentation of morality is problematic in ways that go beyond the "point of view" fib. Now that doesn't mean I think the story is negatively impacted, as I quite like the idea of Luke striving to be better than the Jedi that came before him, but it does mean that I personally have no issues with material that presents the Jedi as problematic. I wouldn't like Star Wars as much if the entire cycle presented the Jedi as unquestionably noble knights who at worst tell a white lie every now and then.