#i won't make any qualfiers unless someone misunderstands something

[rainintheevening]

I guess a really big thing that I want folks to remember when criticizing the Jedi about anything to do with the war, whether it's about the clones, or whatever, is that Palpatine set everything up. Literally everything.

Palpatine is really the one writing the narrative. He's doing it long before Anakin comes into the picture, he is planning everything. He wants to destabilize the Republic till they beg for one person to run everything and save them. And at the centre of that is tearing down the Jedi.

Everything that notably goes wrong in the Republic from before Episode 1, is being engineered by Palpatine.

The corruption in the Senate, the Trade Federation, Naboo Crisis, Dooku’s fall and the birth of the separatist movement, the clone army, ALL OF IT WAS SET UP BY PALPATINE.

None of it was happening naturally. Palpatine was putting people where he wanted them, was setting this and that and the other thing up, and he had back up plans for everything. Even his back-ups had back-ups! That man was playing out the culmination of the longest long game in history, and he was not about to mess it up.

The Jedi had already seen a decline in the numbers of Force-sensitives coming to the Temple, even in those being born I think. Gotta wonder if the Sith had something to do with that too.

Rising crime and chaos across the galaxy, keep the Jedi busy, and worn down, and then that hits a whole other level after Dooku’s Raxus Address and the start of the seperatist crisis. They're always on the move then, hardly ever home.

And they're Jedi, they can see the big picture enough to know that the Republic is splintering apart, and there is only so much that can be done to save it.

The Jedi did not make the clones, Palpatine and Dooku did under Sifo-Dyas's name. You wanna talk about who 'owns' the clones? Palpatine and Dooku, probably more Dooku, he's the one with the money. And of course Palpatine made them human. Because he knew it would hurt the Jedi on a whole other level.

Palpatine was also hard at work twisting public perception of the Jedi, and that culminated in the war.

Palpatine set up the war so that there would be NO perfect morally correct choice for the Jedi.

This is an enormous part of the tragedy of the Prequels. How do good people make choices when there are no good choices? How do you choose when it seems you have no choice?

Palpatine set it up so that no matter what choice the Jedi made, they could be dragged and vilified for it, because that was what he wanted.

Breaking the Order apart as one person's 'least of the evils' clashed with another's, and every choice cost someone's life.

Physically scattering them across the galaxy so they're often alone to process the pain and horrors of war.

He was playing one-man chess with the Jedi and the clones vs Dooku and the droids. They were ALL pawns in his game.

Did the individual choices of the Jedi, and the senators, and the Republic citizens matter? Yes. Yes, they did. Our choices always matter.

Because it was a near thing at the climax! Palpatine was mortal and there were absolutely moments when his plan hung in the balance of another's choice. There were close calls, there were near misses. He had his weaknesses. It's those close calls that make the tragedy even more desperate, isn't it? Those are the moments that grab us by the scruff and make us write fix-it fics, yeah? Because we all want him to fail. We all want the bad guy to lose. We all want to see that our choices can make a difference.

(In the end it was those choices of people trying their best in the face of a conspiracy so vast I doubt anyone other than Palpatine and whoever he chose to brag about it to grasped it, it was individual choices that took him down in the end.)

(Because sometimes evil wins, but it never wins forever. The Jedi were not destroyed because they were morally corrupt, Palpatine created a morally corrupt environment, and crushed them in it. But their spark lived on, and it lit a brand new fire decades later.)

Anyway, all this to say, I absolutely do want to hear about what exactly the Jedi 'should' have done, particularly to help me write different perspectives into my stories. (And I'll only debate directly with an individual if I am invited.) But when it comes to 'how' they were supposed to have done those things, I really hope people will stop and consider whether or not Palpatine would have allowed it.

I'm not saying you have to like the Jedi, but I do hope y'all have at least some sympathy, and acknowledgement of the impossible situation they are put in. (Not unlike the situations more and more of us are being put into in this world.)