The Mandalorian and the lack of force/jedi/sith knowledge (spoilers)

I apologize if this is an all too well beaten dead horse, but I didn't see any topic about this with the Mandalorian tag in front of it.

So, can someone tell me why:
- an ugnaught, that served the empire for "3 human life times" as he so eloquently put it
-a Mandalorian, whose people were slaughtered by imperials, jedi and sith alike over the centuries
- Cara Dune, who served a force that had a jedi for a high ranking leader
- An old bounty hunter guild leader that knows all about the galaxy and what not

are all shocked by the force's existence and flummoxed by Baby Yoda's mad force skills? It's really immersion breaking for the show IMO.

PS: How do i add a "The Mandalorian" tag to the front of the topic title in the forum?

 

1. It's a child.
2. Most people don't know or care about the force. Do you really think an Ugnaught worker would ever be in contact with someone like Vader? Or that a soldier would particularly care what rumors there are about a general she isn't under?

 

Are you saying that people wouldn't have spoken of sith and jedi being in their ranks, or that a massive great war featuring sith and Jedi and order 66 wouldn't have been well known? Vader was choking out leadership, certainly, long before we saw it in the trilogy lol. Bail Organa knew what was going on as well, for sure. The rumor of the Emperor being a sith lord and being the former chancellor would have spread like wildfire to every non primitive planet in Empire controlled space, and probably beyond. Even if they didn't believe the rumors or know what a sith lord was, they'd likely inquire. But that ugnaught in 300 years of service, surely would have known about sith and jedi. He saw order 66. He saw the clone wars. He saw 250 years of service BEFORE the clone wars as well. The Old Republic's ( I don't mean the game or non canon stuff) history would have been known throughout the galaxy too, at least to an extent. Jedi and Sith existed long before Palpatine was born. And Yoda didn't just learn the force at 840 years old. History existed.

I did word the Baby Yoda part poorly. It's not that I dont understand why theyd be shocked that a child could do "sorcery", but it would have been obvious it was the force and should have been obvious.

Lastly, The Clone Wars is canon. All kinds of nobodies and people from far away places and relatively primitive places knew what jedi and sith were, in that series.

I also thought it was non sense Han didn't really know about the force too. Even as a little kid in the 80s i thought that was weird lol.

 

Yup. Because, as Star Wars fans, we're incredibly used to Jedi and Sith and the Force. But we're talking about people on the fringes of a huge galaxy with lots of different religions. Palpatine kept a tight lock on the whole "I AM A SITH LORD" thing as we can see in some of the comics, and while bo doubt high ranking officials might know something, we're talking about grunts. Grunts who have never seen a lightsaber or a Jedi or a Sith, who have only ever heard stories or maybe holovids from the Clone Wars.

 

There were hardly very many Jedi in the galaxy even during the prequel era. I don't think it's unreasonable for some people to be somewhat unfamiliar with the Jedi or the Force considering they haven't been relevant for 30 years.

 

They were few but they were also important. They were Generals in the war. They were the saboteurs who scarred dear leader Palpatine. Luke was the one who blew up the Death Star. Force wielders were rare but they were instrumental in galactic events. Kings, revolutionary leaders, Popes, dictators- these people don’t represent the majority of the population of the Earth at any one time but you sure as heck learn about them in history because they are instrumental to its understanding. Growing up in the GFFA as a Mandalorian without knowing who the Jedi and Sith were would be like growing up in Medieval Europe without knowing who Jesus and Satan were. It was a long time ago and maybe you don’t believe in them but it’s such an instrumental part of your culture that knowing about them is unavoidable.

 

You're talking about a guy who grew up in the middle of a war, then had basically his entire adopted culture wiped out and was forced into hiding on the very edge of society. And even then, assuming he was taught something about the Jedi, would it really extend enough to, when seeing a literal infant doing some weird stuff, he could go "Yeah this is the force that those jedi guys use"? Not to mention that most of his life was spent under the reign of the Empire, who very specifically tried to stomp out knowledge of the Jedi's very existence.

 

You're leaving out the most obvious reasons that it's ridiculous. It's not that people would remember because of their personal memories of encountering Jedi in the flesh (although that is a valid point). It's that holograms and video streams and books and pictures and computer memory and droid memory all exist. Jedi weren't a novelty. They were literally the peace keepers of the Galaxy. There would have been irrefutable proof of the force in every history book, footage in every news archive, holograms in thousands of documentaries, etc.

It's just a glaring plot hole. It's a mistake. There is no rationalization that can be done to make it believable.

Which is fine. Star Wars isn't about sensible plots. There are glaring plot holes throughout the movies, tv shows, books, and comics. If you want to enjoy Star Wars, you get used to just letting go and ignoring it, or changing what happens on screen in you mind for your own personal head canon.

But this is not something you can come up with tortured, twisting, implausible yet still possible explanations for. It is just in no conceivable way a possible outcome, given the established, canon facts.

 

1. Do they?

2. If so, is it something an average Joe would seek out?

The Empire literally did everything in their power to burn any trace of the Jedi from the galaxy, and had a solid chunk of time in which to do so. Even if people do still maintain old recordings of them, why would they risk keeping them when, at any time, the local Imperial governor can come in and send your entire family to a work camp for spreading knowledge of the heretical Jedi?

You're also, I think, greatly overestimating how many Jedi there were and how prevalent they were throughout the galaxy. At most, before The Clone Wars, there were less than 15,000 Jedi total. 15,000... spread across an entire galaxy. That is a LOT of ground to cover, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of people just hadn't heard or cared about them. That's part of why Palpatine whole plot worked. The Jedi were this relatively small order that people didn't really know a lot about, and what they did know was easily manipulated by Palpatine.

Tbh, I just kind of absolutely hate this mentality. Like, who just rolls in to a thread and says "NO! THERE IS NO EXPLANATION AND THERE CAN NEVER BE AN EXPLANATION!"

 

A lot of ground to cover actually understates just how rare Jedi actually were. The Star Wars galaxy has millions of inhabited star systems (how many depends on continuity). Even using the most conservative figures, there's over 150 habitable star systems per Jedi. It is quite likely that an absolute majority of the planets in the galaxy had not been so much as visited by a Jedi - even for something as brief as a refueling stop - in over a century.

When you combine this with the very deliberate effort by the Emperor to erase/obscure/muddle all understanding of who and what the Jedi were, it becomes quite reasonable to understand that many people have only extremely vague ideas about them. This sort of thing is supported by other sources as well. for instance, in the recent Clone Wars arc where Ahsoka spends some time in the Coruscant Underworld, no one recognizes her, not either of the Martez sisters, not any random bystander, not even major crime lord Marg Krim. Ahsoka is, by this point, one of the most famous Jedi in the galaxy, simply because she's standing next to Anakin a lot if nothing else, and yet people don't realize who she is with nothing more than a modest change of clothes. This makes it clear that Palpatine was doing a very substantial job manipulating the public portrayal of the Jedi throughout the Clone Wars, well before actual imperial purges of data. And authoritarian regimes can enact startlingly complete purges of data, something we have direct historical evidence of.

Now the terms 'Jedi' and 'Sith' should be in fairly common usage, and there's evidence that they are, the disconnect is that people don't understand what those terms actually mean - the Armorer refers to the Jedi as 'sorcerers' for one - and may struggle to properly place them. Visual iconography also may play a role here. Insofar as many people in the galaxy know anything about the Jedi at all, it's as 'people who use lightsabers,' which accounts for some of the failure to make a connection between the Child and the Jedi, since he most certainly does not have a lightsaber.

There's actually an example of this directly in ROTJ. When Luke marches into Jabba's palace, Bib Fortuna clearly has some idea of what a Jedi is, but he clearly misunderstands rather seriously when he whispers 'he's no Jedi' to Jabba.

 

This could be discussed in pre-existing threads instead of a new one.

Locked.