Comics A/V Sequel Trilogy/ Dark Empire parallels

I actually would qualify this, at least for a lot of the Bantam era and perhaps early (pre-Clone Wars) Del Rey. There are a lot of works from that period that differ a lot from the movies, but their reception (especially at the time) was mixed. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. DE was Luke going to the dark side; Crystal Star was Star Trek; Courtship was a romance novel; even Zahn (especially TTT) and the X-wing series owed a lot more to the late 80s/early 90s military sci-fi genre than the OT tropes. And even NJO was an attempt to completely upend both the movie legacy and the earlier EU.

I think it's only when we start getting deeper into the PT that we start to see a lot more simple copying of the movies, with LOTF being the pinnacle.

 

For Luke's comments about the Jedi in TLJ, I direct you to my previous statement of how once fans got the chance to write Star Wars works, they made their fan interpretations canon.

You could certainly make those arguments about the Prequel Jedi, but I really don't think it was the intent of the film. The films make a big deal about how the Republic is corrupt (almost to the point where it's too in your face). But there is no big message moment for the Jedi where a corrupt Republic Senator has them ignore/cause injustice or anything like that. I've heard the arguments that the Jedi shouldn't be on Coruscant and should make their temple in the middle of nowhere, but to me that just sounds like "The best way to help the Republic, and to help people, is to go far away from the Republic, and far away from anyone who needs us". I've heard that the Jedi should have stayed out of the Clone Wars. But if the Jedi stayed out of it while droid armies rolled over helpless planets, then Palpatine's purge would just have even more support.

I'll believe that "the Prequel Jedi have gone astray from their path" was an intentional message the day someone gives me a clear answer as to what exactly the correct path was, and paints a clear picture of what exactly the Jedi should have done instead.

 

And to build off this, one of the most prominent sources of "the Jedi were flat-out wrong" was explicitly not a fan of Star Wars who then used her hiring by Lucasfilm to canonize her real-world hatred of the Jedi specifically and dislike of the series in general.

 

Something I find interesting is how both the ST and Dark Emprie go into the Legacy of Vader how one goes into the "Legacy of Vader" with just the OT as contents while the ST has both OT and PT in mind, which definitely changes one's perspective of Vader/Anakin

 

But RJ is not saying the Jedi are wrong. He's actually saying Luke is wrong for thinking the Jedi are wrong, and that despite their flaws, they should continue. He's actually shooting down the Travis argument that the Jedi are wrong and terrible.

As for the Jedi being fled in the PT - TCW, and therefore Lucas, makes clear that the Jedi are flawed in those films. They are inadvertently serving the darkness by serving in the war.

 

How about something straight from the horse's mouth?

And to elaborate on that we have the stories of the Clone Wars that Lucas helped to conceptualize where the Jedi do increasingly alarming acts in the name of protecting the Republic, like considering assassination, bowing to the whim of the Senate with Ahsoka, etc. and these things go against their code. It's why Anakin always runs around screaming, "this isn't the Jedi way, it goes against the code!". The Jedi went astray. That's what has always been intended. Granted, they were forced, but that just goes back to the idea that they were too attached to the Republic to begin with since they felt they had no choice but to fight for it. To protect it.

A very good observation. Not only does Luke cross over to the Dark Side to try to connect with his father's legacy in some way in the first Dark Empire, but there's the fight at Vjun in Vader's castle in Empire's End where the icon of the dark side is toppled onto the Dark Jedi. Reminds me of how Snoke and Kylo really prop up (and worship) Darth Vader and his image.

 

They rather explicitly state it in Revenge of the Sith

"The Jedi Council would have to take control of the Senate in order to secure a peaceful transition."
"To a dark place this line of thought will carry us. Hmmmmm. . . . great care we must take."

 

Don't wanna diverge TOO much from the original topic but this video just popped up today that adds to our conversation



Although I guess this ties into the original post because again Dark Empire, if you read with context, is essentially made without the Prequels in mind...So a lot of interesting things are said such as Palpatine considering himself a "Master of all Jedi" and the ST I think is built itself more with Prequel Ideas and Concepts in mind.

 

DE does I think foreshadow the prequels in more ways than one.

@Dr. Steve Brule-interesting, I remember reading that story about during revenge of the Sith, she stood up and clapped during the order 66 montage.

 

Obi-Wan: His abilities have made him, well, arrogant.

Yoda: Yes. Yes. A flaw more and more common among Jedi. Hmmm. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones.
-------
Palpatine: Your arrogance blinds you, Master Yoda.

 

I doubt we will get any conclusive details on Snoke's backstory, and episode 9 will focus on the conflict between Rey and Kylo.

 

Essentially...Yes...Though I agree that Ep 9 is going to be Rey v Kylo as it should because that is the focal point of the entire trilogy. Don't want it to get too bogged down.

So it's more Legacy of the Force driving concept with Dark Empire's geopolitical conflict with just a sprinkle of Fate but probably not too much.

 

I've said it before, and I think it's still true-the ST is very much a watered down legacy of the force.

 

Well one mans wattering down is another mans trimming of unnecessary fat I suppose .

But this is not a debate threat so....

 

I can't imagine how movie audiences and casual fans would react to seeing the actual Legacy of the force on screen. I think it would be interesting for sure.

Jacen's seduction of Tahiri
The torture scenes
14 year old Ben participating in secret police raids
Chess master Luke
The political scheming
Orbital bombardment
The Tahiri and Ben scene
The violent descriptions and injuries sustained in duels.

A legacy of the force adaptation would certainly generate a reaction, to say the least.

 

Oh, I have no doubt, my friend, that any of these concepts directly adapted into a film would have been controversial. Even Dark Empire itself directly adapted would have gotten many eyebrows raised ... and I love Dark Empire but even I know that.

 

Yeah, a lot of the EU would be controversial for general audiences.

Can you imagine a faithful adaptation of the new Jedi order? How many eyebrows that would raise?

Yeah DE and even some bantam EU would certainly generate controversy if they ever saw the big(or small) screen.

 

I mean, there was that time that the Jedi led a bunch of genetically modified child soldiers in a useless war at the behest of a Sith Lord. That's a time that PT Jedi got it wrong. Keeping themselves more open to the natural currents of the Force and far enough back from the Republic to confront its corruption would have been better than where they ended up.

As for your earlier claim that Anakin should not have gotten married: the problem he had was less about him being married and more about him having to keep it a secret. Rejecting the concept of love - in the personal, rather than general sense - is exactly the kind of dogmatic nonsense that looks great on paper and horrific on application. Luke proved them wrong by loving his father.

To tie this back to DE: the central mechanic of that story was the love between the Skywalker twins. We only got the barest on-screen meeting of them in TLJ, but Leia is still Luke's entire motivation for the second half of the film. TLJ put look at the mover, rather than Leia, but that made sense when this was going to be Luke's last living adventure.

 

That's one of the great things about the ST. Luke begins to change his mind about his disposition when he senses the teouble that Leia is in. For a few moments he is once again Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. But Rey's "betrayal" makes him falter again.

 

I was thinking about this the other day. The Jedi's closeness to the Republic aside, a safe guess is that one of the reasons the Jedi saw it as their duty to protect the Republic (however morally compromised) is that they "knew" that the Separatists were just a stalking horse - that no matter what they claimed their cause to be about, in reality the people in control of the movement were the Sith. I'm not saying they necessarily would've stayed away from the Clone Wars or been less supportive of the Republic if it hadn't been for that, but adding the Sith into the mix more or less guarantees that they can't do that - from their point of view, the prospect of a galaxy ruled by the Sith is still the biggest threat to be averted, even if they have to make real devil's bargains (like leading a slave army) for that.

Now assume that Palpatine realizes this, which, being a genius, he probably does... That would explain why he didn't trouble himself to keep the return of the Sith quiet. On the face of it, sending Darth Maul after the Queen back in Episode I makes very little sense - what does it matter if she gets to Coruscant and tells the truth, especially since once she gets there all she does is help him into the Chancellorship that much faster? Unless you figure that it wasn't about the Queen at all, but that having Darth Maul fight a Jedi was the ends in itself. Because he knows that once the Jedi know the Sith are in the mix, that'll override all other considerations and that pretty much everything they do will be done with the goal of "stop the Sith" first and foremost in their minds. (Which, unknowingly, will just tie them that much closer to the real Sith).

 

I don't think the separatists were believed be under Sith control under after the war had begun and Obi wan told Yoda and Windu that Dooku told him a Sith Lord was in charge in the shadows.

Even with that not being the case-the CIS was comprised in bulk of various amoral conglomerates whose sole objective seemed to be forcing the republic into basically giving them free reign to rule the Galaxy as the corporate sector writ large, so it makes sense the Jedi would mostly not have a very good opinion of the CIS.

 

So still right at the beginning of the war. Though admittedly the decision to use the clones would already have been made.

Oh, totally. But when you're looking at things like political corruption in the CIS, it's easy to look at the Republic too and make an equivalence. It doesn't have the urgency, the existential threat, from the Jedi point of view, that "they're a front for the Sith" does.

 

I don't want to derail this thread anymore than I already have, so I'll just close out by saying that although I think some of the criticisms brought up against the prequel Jedi are overblown (or at least debatable), it now seems like at least some of it was intentional.

 

I don't think Lucas ever intended that the prequel jedi were to be perceived uniformly positively, and throughout the PT the Jedi's flaws and hang ups I think are expressed pretty clearly.