#can you tell ive been hanging around gffa too much

[narkinafive]

thots on the responses to this post but i wanted to start fresh

the best thing about fiction is how carefully you can control it. every detail has a greater meaning, including death, and if you can assign a meaning to a death, which is so often meaningless, then all the better. sw is really good about assigning meaning to deaths, usually, building up to them and then dealing with the fallout. sw generally follows a specific pattern--most often the hero’s journey as laid out by joseph campbell--and one of the steps in that pattern is the death of the mentor (obi wan for luke, ahsoka or kanan for ezra, luke for rey). in sw, that Death pushes the protag into a character breaking moment, which tests the strength of their heroic resolve

with regard to the prequels, the pt is patterned off of greek tragedy, which has its own set of steps. literary tragedies are built on characters being destroyed by their own mistakes. in this sense, Death is a sentence passed onto the “guilty” (please note that i am NOT arguing the jedi deserved to be wiped out). it’s not a total downer ending, however, because we the audience can watch luke and leia be adopted by their families and know that, eventually, all of this horror will be ended. padme, the jedi, the republic and separatists, and everyone victimized by the sith will eventually have justice when luke inspires anakin to kill the emperor.

so where does that leave us with order 66 survivors?* you can explain away various absences from the ot with “oh they were hiding” or “oh they were just doing somethign else that day,” but as @gffa points out, if you present yourself as a jedi under the reign of the empire, you are literally painting a giant, flashing target on your back, and while the empire may be incompetent, the Single most efficient branch of the empire is apparently their secret psychic police (which... that’s a whole other post right there) as they can find cal kestis, who barely slowed prauf’s fall, within a literal day. so if the ot operates under the rules of the hero’s journey, and the pt operates under greek tragedy, then the intra-rots/anh period operates under the rules of dystopia, a set of rules which are, admittedly, much more free-ranging. 

but i think we can all agree that a dystopia needs a boogeyman. vader is that boogeyman, bar none; the guy is a nigh unstoppable one-man war machine who literally has no other purpose than fulfilling his master’s diabolical commands. you can’t reason with him, you can’t escape him, and you can’t defeat him. this is why vader is used so sparingly in swr, bc you can’t have your all powerful, fear-inducing boogeyman defeated by a scrappy group of kids every week, bc it vastly reduces his effectiveness, both in-universe as an enforcer, and out-of-universe, as someone who raises the emotional stakes through the fucking roof. so far i think sw has done a pretty good job of making sure that the heroes manage to escape only by luck or someone else’s incompetence, but... i, personally, would like to see a different outcome. 

wrt luke, the presence of order 66 survivors doesn’t have to take away from his achievements. i think someone like cere junda surviving, cut off from the force as she is, could make for a really interesting story if she ever met luke in canon (and, well, he’s gotta get that idea from somewhere, right). i’m not even that beholden to yoda’s line “when gone am i the last of the jedi you will be” (despite what it looks like). imo the mounting number of survivors, rather than detracting from luke himself, detract from the clean slate that the prequels give us. again, i am the jedi order’s number one stan, but they allowed palpatine and the empire to rise; hell, they contributed to it. the old jedi order failed, and survivors who try to live in that old framework can’t succeed against the empire, because it’s luke’s attachment to his father and his sister that give anakin the final push to turn back. 

but this doesn’t mean that that failure against the empire doesn’t have meaning. kanan’s death was so impactful partly because we have evidence of its direct consequences: the destruction of the TIE factory, the lessons he taught ezra which inspired him to take out thrawn (the only competent leader in the entire imperial navy), hera’s life (and jacen’s, by extension). obi wan’s failure, too, has a lasting impact, as it grants him a higher understanding and allows him to return to luke when he needs it most. “strike me down and i shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” indeed

(now that i’ve written this, of course, i seem to have convinced myself out of wanting cal dead... except for the fact that vader-the-boogeyman needs a win so he stay a scary motherfucker. and i want to see that beautiful boy in pain. so it seems i am at an impasse)

*none of this applies to yalls jedi ocs btw!!!!