#i feel like i've contemplated the templar thing before

[whetstonefires]

Unfortunately I think George Lucas did a very bad job of balancing his twin introductions of 'the Jedi being a monastic order' and 'the Jedi recruiting typically below the age of nine.'

Both of these are interesting additions to the narrative, that work interestingly with the material already present!

But together they serve to introduce conflict in a way that Lucas was not at all prepared to resolve, because his storytelling goal with them was in fact to create conflict, because the prequel trilogy was a tragic narrative of decline and fall.

If the worldbuilding were done more thoughtfully, there would maybe have been an existing off-ramp from the Order, where you chose at each level of 'promotion' to padawan knight etc whether to take on the more serious vows and bind yourself further to the Order or step back, or stay still, or something like that; some point where a choice is actually presented that isn't 'burn down your entire life and all your relationships, or keep going on the path selected for you as a small child, due to an accident of biology.'

(Generally religious orders either make it very easy to back out up until the last minute, or kind of tacitly accept with varying levels of awareness that they are going to be corrupt as fuck due to all the people in them who don't really want to be there, and don't really care about their religion, and intend to get away with as much as they can, but were in a position where making any other choice was more difficult than going ahead with being monks. Usually some combination of these tbh depending on the contingencies of the historical moment.

No real order afaik has had the issue of controlling people with superpowers in the balance ofc.)

More thoughtful worldbuilding that made the 'monks' element easier to compass would also have put a little more effort into conveying the underlying tenets of their religion. Clearly they're more about practice than doctrine, but they do have dogmas, and with millennia as an organized religion, a full millennium in its current form, they must have quite an elaborate discourse wrt theology and cosmology, which have been made up incoherently in all directions by various writers due to their near total absence from the films.

But if the worldbuilding were done more elegantly, it would not be Star Wars lmao.

And there was no obvious reason, going in, from Lucas' perspective, to expend valuable screen time on blunting the force of these monastic strictures and their inherent injustice, and the way they seem to fall like an inexorable hammer. Because the goal of this element of the Jedi was specifically to get Anakin, as dramatically as possible, into a position where he felt his only two choices were to 1) burn his own life down or 2) keep on as he had been, and then squish him between the situation at hand and his traumas until he felt he couldn't go on this way, and opted for the burning.

Which results in the Jedi system coming off on casual viewing as coercive and inflexible, because Anakin needed to experience it that way to make his arc work. So then you leave the viewers feeling they have to either lower their opinion of the Jedi, for having institutions that could fail a person this badly and persistently, or be unable to engage with Anakin's downfall as genuinely tragic.

And because this is a frustrating choice, it's easier and more satisfying to swing really hard to the side you choose.

Lucas simply did not think things through on this one. If you as a writer focus entirely on building up as many elements as possible to tilt things in the direction you're aiming at, you can get smacked real hard by the second-order implications of the scenario you set up. Always ask the next question, if only to know what it is.

...also ngl Lucas was trying to have his cake and eat it too by mashing allllll the kinds of sects and monastic orders from asian film and tv up with the Jesuits and Templars and Hospitallers and all those other catholic knightly orders, and putting it in space attached to an also rather vague space government, and mostly not committing to a side on any of the resulting thematic and structural conflicts.

This was so much more complex a scenario than anything in the original films. It was not going to go flawlessly.

Oh man now I want to draft out a sort of Templar AU where the Jedi Order was collectively the Republic's most prominent bank, and the Chancellor framed them for heresy and treason and killed them all, not for Sith reasons but so he could take the money.

Anyway. My thoughts on why this discourse springs eternal.

I feel like a solid 75% of discourse around the Jedi wouldn’t exist if people just factored in that they’re monks.

It feels like half of y’all don’t consider that maybe being a Jedi really is just incompatible with a lot of things that are a normal part of other people’s lives… Because they are monks.

We had a whole trilogy showing how Anakin wanting to have his cake and eat it too led to disaster and people really came out thinking, “the Jedi should’ve just let Anakin be married,” not, “Anakin was a selfish moron who ruined literally everyone’s lives because he couldn’t accept that he had to make a choice.”